Actually, the rationale for regarding Earth as the center of the universe was not its relative importance, at least not to the educated. Ptolemy, who held sway, was a proponent of Aristotle's cosmology, and preferred the geocentric hypothesis on that basis. To Aristotelians, the further away one was from the sublunar sphere, the closer to perfection. The most perfect visible thing was the sphere of the fixed stars. Earth was a place of contingency and imperfection. Biblically, this is mirrored in locating Heaven above "the firmament", at the outer reaches of the cosmos. The moral center of the universe, need it be said, is where God reigns in splendor with the angels, not Earth.
Anyway, as I said, Galileo did not discover that the Earth was round, and Copernicus established the dominance of heliocentrism. Galileo got in trouble for promoting Copernicanism because it conflicted with a miracle in the Bible. (Actually, the conflict was stupid, since it was not necessary that the sun stood still, in the story, but that it appeared to). If the hierarchy had had more at stake, the reaction to Copernicanism would have been more ferocious. As it was, within a century it was established fact.
Comparatively few people believe that God created the universe "just for us". Rather, they believe that it was created for us too, that we have our place in it, whatever else might be going on. They believe not that we are the apple of some divine eye, but the object of divine mercy, which is rather a different thing. They believe that the things they love and strive for, in some ultimate accounting, matter, and will not be lost in the winds of time. I do not mean the large goals, I mean the small ones: that the time we spend hugging our kids means at least as much as the time we spend "saving the planet". They believe that human values are objective, that it is not merely a matter of taste, of "self- chosen values", that the slaughter of innocents in the extermination camps is evil, but that it is actually evil. And in the end, they believe that those who get on with the business of refining and achieving their own purposes, without reference to a standard that they must adhere to, will lead us to the abyss........ |
