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In primitive times, the world was a place where the supernatural operated everywhere, including in the heavens. It was a world of magical cosmology, when human beings regarded themselves as not only unified with the cosmos and influenced by it, but as also able to have an influence on it. This primitive mentality operated towards the cosmos for thousands of years.
Although a extensive knowledge of the skies over this time was accumulated, it still didn’t explain the universe, so, as civilizations developed, they continued to create stories and myths to explain it. These were central to culture. In Egypt, for instance, mythical views on the cosmos became central to Egyptian religion and were intimately linked to daily life and thinking.
With Babylonian astronomy, things become more sophisticated in terms of record keeping. However, this was largely to facilitate predictions that would aid in fortune telling—human beings continued to regard the cosmos as intimately linked to them and able to influence daily life. Nonetheless, the data collected by the Babylonians was passed on the Ancient Greeks. They were the ones who attempted to construct a cosmological model that would correspond to observable phenomenon.
In the 4th century BC, with their love of geometry and universal laws, the Greeks arrived at the idea that the stars were fixed on a celestial sphere which rotated about Earth every 24 hours. The planets, the Sun and the Moon, moved between the Earth and the stars. It was a model improved upon in the 2nd century AD with Ptolemy’s system, based on the heavenly objects moving in circles. This would later all tie in nicely with Christian teachings on God’s plan.
Thus, as cosmological views became more sophisticated, so did self centred notions. As time went on, Christian perception of the cosmos developed into the form of a grand and integrated theory held together with a chain of being that was topped by the Almighty. First, though, Christian thinkers needed to reconcile Greek astronomy with their theological standards, as the logic and science of the Ancient Greeks was not easily dismissed.
Augustine, born in 354, is the one credited with weaving Platonic ideas into Christian theology. It continued to be accepted that the cosmos was spherical with the earth at its centre. Nor did this change once the writings of Aristotle become more widely known and the Platonic cosmological view became less popular. If Augustine is best known for absorbing Plato’s philosophy into Christianity, Thomas Aquinas is best known for absorbing Aristotle’s philosophy and physics into Christian thinking in the 13th century.
Aquinas would combine reason and faith based on the notion that logic, mathematics and science contributed to and was a part of Christian thought. With that, Aristotle’s universe of circular motion and crystalline spheres became the Christian worldview. In other words, the philosophical science begun with the Ancient Greeks became an integral part of religious belief and how life and the universe were perceived.
There is perhaps no better synthesis of all of the thought of this era than Dante’s encyclopedic Commedia, in which human beings are part of a rigidly ordered and finely tuned spiritual chain of being. It shows how finely conceived the Aristotelian world view was, how everything fit together so well. The universe was perfectly ordered just as God the architect had designed it.
No wonder the self-centred cosmos was popular. For quite some time, humans rejoiced in the idea that the Earth was at the centre of the universe and everything in it was for the benefit of human beings. It was all very cosy and self-congratulatory.
However, in the 16th century, Copernicus proposed a heliocentric system in which the Earth together with the other planets rotated about the sun. It was rather unsettling. If Copernicus’ theory were correct, all prior cosmological notions would have to be reaccessed, the scientific and the religious. Naturally, the Church opposed the preposterous idea that Earth was not the centre of the universe, as Copernicus knew it would.
Another forward thinker, Kepler, made a bolder step at the end of the 16th century and proposed that not only was the Earth orbiting around the Sun but that the heavenly bodies where travelling in ellipses and not circles. He was a devout Christian who believed that mathematical and geometric laws were a reflection of God. He really was keen to restore astronomical order.
Giordano Bruno, a supporter of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, went further to argue that the universe was infinite with an infinite number of worlds. He also proposed that these were inhabited by intelligent beings. For such impertinences and other misdemeanors the Inquisition burned him alive at the stake at the beginning of 1600.
Naturally, the Christian church had a lot to be concerned about. Any threat to the prevailing cosmological view meant a threat the religion itself. A change in how the universe was seen would have repercussions that would impact on all other modes of thought including humankind’s relationship with God. It threatened the providential importance of humankind. Upset the worldview and you upset reality.
In the early 17th century, with the aid of the newly invented telescope, Galileo discovered moons orbiting the planet Jupiter and believed that this proved that the planets orbited about the Sun. It meant the Earth could not be at the centre of the Universe. Not only that, Galileo discovered thousands of new stars invisible to the naked eye. The cosmos was a black sea of stars. Isaac Newton would later conclude that the Universe must be an infinite and eternal sea of stars, each like the Sun.
However, the Church would have none of this nonsense about a stationary sun. Sure, theories could be proposed and discussed, but no one is going to tinker with a self-centred mass delusion. Once the Inquisition got on Galileo’s case it would not let go in favour of defending the Aristotelian view of the cosmos. In the end, Galileo was forced to live out his days under house arrest.
Nonetheless, the 17th century was a time devoted as much to religion as to science. Gradually, the astronomical revolution Copernicus and Galileo contributed to eroded the foundations of earlier religious belief. In other words, as cosmological reality changed, so did the reality of what it means to exist on Earth.
Humankind had been expelled from the centre of everything into space and burdened with a reduced significance in the scheme of things. This decentralized position gave rise to decentralized thinking and an enhanced sense of relativism, which found expression in all walks of life. In fact, the discovery of a boundless space in which the Earth revolved about the sun became liberating. It allowed humankind to dust itself off and locate itself at a new centre.
What emerged during the Renaissance was a view of reality that compensated for humankind’s loss of importance. In a world that was no longer the centre of all things, the new stable measure of human life and reality would be Man himself. With the concept of the individual was on the rise, humankind was given a new dignity as the measure of all things. Happily, humans could regarded themselves as admirably as ever.
Of course, the Christian God, so difficult to dislodge, remained alive and well. Acceptance of an infinite cosmos led to a sharper examination of the infinity within and the idea that a living God was manifest in everything. His immanence could be realized through examining the world and its mathematical and astronomical truths. Once again, this led to a convenience merging of cosmological and religious realities.
Isaac Newton reconciled the two and in the process rewrote Christian theology. He was bent on proving that the machinery of the world, a veritable clockwork universe, was so perfectly contrived that it could only be the result of an intelligent and consistent plan. But the resulting worldview, helped along by philosophers like Descartes, was somewhat cold and mechanistic. Creatures became regarded as automata and cause and effect determinism ruled existence.
The 18th century brought a scientific revolution that celebrated systematic doubt, empirical and sensory verification. These changes affected every aspect of life. Now, religion was not necessary to explain anything as the universe was fundamentally rational and mechanistic. All knowledge was converted into rational systems. What this meant for the human creature was that it was subject to the same laws and composed of the same stuff as any other creature. Humankind’s place of importance was eroding.
Understanding of the cosmos expanded in the 19th century with the realization that Earth existed within a massive disk or galaxy of stars, the Milky Way. It was concluded that the sun was near the centre of this vast disk. Kant and others had proposed that our Milky Way was a lens shaped “island universe” or galaxy, and that beyond it must be other galaxies. Astronomers indeed noted fuzzy patches of light and speculated these might be distant galaxies. Vast distances were also being calculated for the nearest stars.
It was not until the 1920’s that scientists proved that the Earth and sun were nowhere near the centre of the Milky Way. And others, like the American astronomer Hubble, established that there were indeed distant galaxies comparable in size to our own Milky Way. Hubble also made the remarkable discovery that these galaxies seemed to be moving away from us, with a speed proportional to their distance.
It was soon realized with the help of Einstein’s recently discovered General Theory of Relativity that our universe was expanding. An expanding universe implied that it had been created in one instant, and the galaxies were still travelling away from that initial expansion. The British astronomer Fred Hoyle dismissively called the creation instance the “Big Bang,” and the name stuck.
Big Bang theory was still debated until 1965, when Penzias and Wilson discovered cosmic microwave background radiation, indicating that the Big Bang did happen. This is a kind of faint afterglow of the intense radiation that was given off by the Big Bang.
Finally, after luxuriating at the centre of the universe for so long, humankind has arrived at better approximating of the reality of its position. From being the centre of the universe, it now finds itself inhabiting a tiny ball of rock in the vastness of space. It finds itself insignificant and of no importance to the scheme of things. Not only does it have no influence on the cosmos, it inhabits a cosmos that completely ignores it.
Is the universe just a part of a grand fractal structure consisting of other universes? Who knows. What remains now is to come up with a grand unified theory, to finally arrive at a conclusion on the structure and shape of the universe; to get to the bottom of the string theory; to uncover what existed prior to the Big Bang and explain what dark energy and dark matter are, and, well, so the list goes on.
Whatever loss of face there was for humanity, it didn’t last long with Renaissance thinkers emphasizing the idea of humankind as the measure of all things and placing a new emphasis on the notion of the individual. So, human beings could still congratulate themselves for having a central position in scheme of things. Besides, people still believed that humanity actually mattered to God, not even a planetary shift could upset that arrangement. Humanity then could not have accepted the rug been pulled out from under that one. Its anthropocentric worldview was not fundamentally damaged, and the centuries old comforts of egocentric thinking and arrogance could continue.
The great chain of being and the lofty position humanity enjoyed on it were finally toppled with the scientific advancements of the 18th and 19th centuries. The significance of humanity diminished further, even if Newton’s mechanical world was still conveniently populated with a God. The prevailing thought was to see everything in materialistic terms, as mechanical and bound by nature’s course. Charles Darwin then dealt the great chain of being a death blow with evidence that human beings had evolutionary origins like any other animal. The artificial, somewhat pompous heirarchy of being was finally disassembled. To add to an ever declining significance in the grand scheme of things, it was found that the earth existed within a massive galaxy of stars. Although, it was still thought that the sun was at the centre of it.
