Sympathy For The Atheist

The inhabitants of the Earth: Lost in space

Barry Arrington, supremo of the de facto intelligent design web-site Uncommon Descent, has recently criticised science populariser Bill Nye for underestimating the ancient's view of the size of the cosmos. Let me quote the first part of Arrington's article (see here):

As long-time readers know, we at UD often disparage Wikipedia for its left-wing bias. Still, you have to give it its due. For a quick lookup of non-controversial facts, it has its uses.

Uses to which, apparently, Bill Nye has not put it. If he had looked up Wiki’s entry on Ptolemy’s Almagest (published in around 150 AD), he would have known that the ancients understood very well that the universe is incomprehensibly vast. Here is the Summary of Ptolemy’s Cosmos from that article:

"The cosmology of the Syntaxis includes five main points, each of which is the subject of a chapter in Book I. What follows is a close paraphrase of Ptolemy’s own words from Toomer’s translation.

The celestial realm is spherical, and moves as a sphere.

The Earth is a sphere.

The Earth is at the center of the cosmos.

The Earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point.

The Earth does not move."

The “the ancients thought the universe was tiny” myth and the “the ancients thought the earth was flat” myth are both refuted by the Almagest.  The persistence of these myths is difficult to explain given that it takes about 30 seconds on Google to find the Wiki article.

But apparently Bill Nye is so busy spouting his anti-Christian propaganda, he does not have 30 seconds to spare.

At the risk of being accused of a left-wing bias......

Ideas that the Earth is a sphere first appear in historical records around 600 BC (See Greek history and possibly also the Book of Job, a book thought to be dated circa 6th century BC). It is of course possible that the concept of the Earth as a sphere goes even further back, but the historical references we possess, as far as I am aware, don't go further back. As Christianity effectively came out of the classical world, belief in a spherical Earth was widespread among Christians from the start although not fully comprehensively so. But Ptolemaic theory swept the academic board after the crusades when the Western Scholastics had rediscovered classical learning from the Arabs. 

The trouble with Arrington's use of the quotation from Ptolemy is that in natural language usage of words like "tiny", "big" and "immense" are relative to perspective and context. When I'm driving around the small country of England, my car in relation to even a small country has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point. Even if one appreciates the relative insignificance of the size of a car in comparison with England or the Earth itself that doesn't mean to say one has a full appreciation of the size of the cosmic context in which the Earth is set. And so it is with Ptolemy: In spite of his comment about the relative size of the Earth we cannot conclude that Ptolemy really had a perspective on the extensiveness of the cosmos in the sense that we understand it today.

The fact that the stars and even the planets show no appreciable parallax probably tipped off many an intelligent ancient observer that those stars were very far away relative to Earthly dimensions. But although they might have an inkling that the "fixed sphere of stars" (See Ptolemy in Arrington's quote) was very distant, naturally enough given the perspective of their times Ptolemy and the Scholastics of the middle ages believed the Earth to be stationary at the centre of things as Arrington's quote confirms. It is this latter fact which really betrays the understandably limited perspective of their time.

There is "big", there is "very big", there is"immense" and there is "incomprehensibly large". I suggest that as time and science have progressed regarding the size of the cosmos we have moved from very big (Ptolemy) through immense (pre-Hubble) to incomprehensibly large (post-Hubble). Since Hubble's discoveries we take it for granted that the size of the cosmos makes even an immense object like our galaxy look small, very small. It is difficult to believe that less than one hundred years (i.e. a long human life time) have gone by since Hubble showed us that the starry universe goes way beyond our galaxy.

In the second half of the sixteenth century Thomas Digges unequivocally advanced the idea of the stars being spread across an infinite cosmos (as opposed to the stars being fixed on a distant sphere of quintessence). Not long after Digges, came the Italian Giordano Bruno who also proposed an infinite cosmos with an infinite number of worlds. On top of these huge increases in scale the centre stage status of the Earth in the Ptolemaic and medieval  cosmologies was in the process of being lost.  At the time these were revolutionary ideas and a complete departure from a finite, symmetrical and enclosed cosmos. The loss of the Earth's center-stage status, if anything, was probably a bigger blow to Western humanity's sense of special-ness than revelations of the ever increasing dimensions of that stage. The take home lesson is that human perceptions on the cosmic context and the status of the Earth have changed considerably over time whatever Arrington is trying to tell us. 

I'm a Christian but I have sympathy with many reasonable and friendly atheists who have difficulty perceiving a Christian God in the modern world view, quite apart from the perennial questions surrounding existence of suffering and evil. Through science God has progressively revealed to humanity a challenging post-enlightenment perspective on a cosmos that has immense depths in space & time and an Earth with no significant central position in terms of its space-time context, Moreover, the folk view of evolution is that it is an informationless process needing no special conditions in order to work (But see here).  All in all the popular impression is that the Earth is an incidental and accidental side show. This apparent loss of Terrestrial centrality and gain in banality has seated itself deeply in the Western psyche. Compounding the apparent loss in the sacredness and sanctity of life is the irony that even in these days of quantum theory the obsolete idea of an underlying insentient  "billiard ball" reality, independent of perception, as the primary reality is still a concept in many people's minds including, surprisingly,  Christians like Justin Brierley who are tempted to solve their consequent philosophical problems with a quasi-gnostic dualist world view.

These understandable but not always correct perceptions and reactions must be factored in when considering the rampant unbelief in the West. Consequently, I find I can hardly blame atheists for their lack of belief, many of whom are perfectly reasonable people whatever many right-wing Christians may think. True, there are some really nasty militant atheists out there who want their ideas to rule the world and would not balk at a Marxist dictatorship in order to impose their will. But then this is all part of flawed human nature and so not surprisingly we also find many really nasty authoritarian Christians out there who are just as domineering and whose toy-town cosmology and theology only further encourages unbelief and polarisation. The return to young earthism, geocentricism,  flat earthism and crackpot conspiracy theories among right-wing Christians and new-agers is evidence that many Westernised people are neither mature enough nor ready for the modern perspective and are unwilling to rise to the challenge it presents.


 I will leave the last words to Sir Kenneth Clarke.

Note: I think that this short sequence of film was taken at Osterley house

Relevant Link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yed05ld0xhcGJwaDQ/view

ADDENDUM 4/2/19

Note on the “Axis of Evil”

Using a combination of the cosmological principle and relativity theory it is possible to trivially proclaim that the Earth is just as much at the centre of the cosmos as any other point. This “many centres” cosmos is, of course, contains nothing like the connotations implicit in the medieval use and interpretation of the Ptolemaic universe, a universe which only tolerated one centre, one axis of symmetry, not many centres and many axes of symmetry....any more than it tolerated Bruno’s “many worlds” concept. To the medieval mind the Earth and its cosmic context was like a stage set, with the Earth at centre stage, the focus of the great cloud of witnesses of Hebrews 12:1. The medieval universe did not have a democracy of centres any more than its concept of government was democratic. The Earth was the centre of creation not a centre. Democracy, whether social or cosmological, was an unnatural idea in a feudal context. 

However, things could change and so I must mention here the so called “Axis of Evil”: Some of the latest high tolerance measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background have discovered asymmetries which give a hint that we may yet be able to conclude that the Earth occupies a special position in the cosmos  - See Wikipedia for a brief account of the “axis of evil”.  The Axis of Evil suggests that the Earth is at an exclusive axis of cosmic symmetry.  It would be nice to find that the Earth’s position and orientation is somehow special after all and that its centrality is not just a case of trivial coordinate system levelling allowing any observer to claim to be at “a centre”. Quoting Wiki:

Data from the Planck Telescope published in 2013 has since found stronger evidence for the anisotropy. "For a long time, part of the community was hoping that this would go away, but it hasn’t," says Dominik Schwarz of the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

But let’s not hold our breath because these results may still prove to be an artefact of measurement:

There is no consensus on the nature of this and other observed anomalies and their statistical significance is unclear. For example, a study that includes the Planck mission results shows how masking techniques could introduce errors that when taken into account can render several anomalies, including the Axis of Evil, not statistically significant. A 2016 study compared isotropic and anisotropic cosmological models against WMAP and Planck data and found no evidence for anisotropy.

Although at this stage it is clearly unwise for theists to laud these observations as restoring the special cosmic status of the Earth in human eyes, what the furore over the “Axis of Evil” reveals is just how far in the minds of (wo)men the status of the Earth’s place in the cosmic scheme of things has fallen since the medieval period and this is at least in part down to the revelations of astrophysics and generalisations of Copernicanism. Evidence of this fall is implicit in the reception among scientist of the so-called "Axis of Evil": For whether the apparent CMB large scale asymmetries are actually there or not, the mere hint of it is clearly a big shock to many scientists and in fact an unpleasant surprise to at least some of them for whom the whole affair sticks in the gullet; it’s not called the Axis of Evil for nothing!  The "Axis of Evil" affair shows us that restoring the Earth to some kind of "preferred" frame of reference would be a huge turn around in the thinking of Western scientific cosmology. Such has the cosmic insignificance of the Earth’s position gripped many a Western mind since Copernicus!

As Kenneth Clarke says; We have long rough voyage ahead of us and we can't say how it will end because it isn't over yet. We are still the offspring of the Romantic movement.