If this is our natural way of viewing the world, then it should occasion no surprise that every time we make a naive judgment about our place in the Universe—one untempered by careful and skeptical scientific examination—we almost always opt for the centrality of our group and circumstance. We want to believe, moreover, that these are objective facts, and not our prejudices finding a sanctioned vent.
So it's not much fun to have a gaggle of scientists incessantly haranguing us with "You're ordinary, you're unimportant your privileges are undeserved, there's nothing special about you." Even unexcitable people might, after a while, grow annoyed at this incantation and those who insist on chanting it. It almost seems that the scientists are getting some weird satisfaction out of putting humans down. Why can't they find a way in which we're superior? Lift our spirits! Exalt us! In such debates science, with its mantra of discouragement, feels cold and remote, dispassionate, detached, unresponsive to human needs.
And, again, if we're not important, not central, not the apple of God's eye, what is implied for our theologically based moral codes? The discovery of our true bearings in the Cosmos was resisted for so long and to such a degree that many traces of the debate remain, sometimes with the motives of the geocentrists laid bare. Here, for example, is a revealing unsigned commentary in the British review The Spectator in 1892:
[I]t is certain enough that the discovery of the heliocentric motion of the planets which reduced our earth to its proper "insignificance" in the solar system, did a good deal to reduce to a similar but far from proper "insignificance" the moral principles by which the predominant races of the earth had hitherto been guided and restrained. Part of this effect was no doubt due to the evidence afforded that the physical science of various inspired writers was erroneous instead of being infallible,-a conviction which unduly shook the confidence felt even in their moral and religious teaching. But a good deal of it was due only to the mere sense of "insignificance" with which man has contemplated himself, since he has discovered that he inhabits nothing but a very obscure corner of the universe, instead of the central world round which sun, moon, and stars alike revolved. There can be no doubt that man may feel himself, and has often felt himself, a great deal too insignificant to be the object of any particular divine training or care. If the earth be regarded as a sort of ant-hill, and the life and death of human beings as the life and death of so many ants which run into and out of so many holes in search of food and sunlight, it is quite certain that no adequate importance will be attached to the duties of human life, and that a profound fatalism and hopelessness, instead of new hopefulness, will attach to human effort . . .
[F]or the present at least, our horizons are quite vast enough . . . ; till we can get used to the infinite horizons we already have, and not lose our balance so much as we usually do in contemplating them, the yearning for still wider horizons is premature.
WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such disappointments into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe—which seems truly pointless—but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science.
George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to his play St. Joan, described a sense of science preying on our credulity, forcing on us an alien worldview, intimidating belief:
In the Middle Ages, people believed that the Earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent of us could give the physical reason for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.
A more recent and very instructive example is Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man, by Bryan Appleyard, a British journalist. This book makes explicit what many people feel, all over the world, but are too embarrassed to say. Appleyard's candor is refreshing. He is a true believer and will not let us slough over the contradictions between modern science and traditional religion:
"Science has taken away our religion," he laments. And what sort of religion is it that he longs for? One in which "the human race was the point, the heart, the final cause of the whole system. It placed our selves definitively upon the universal map." . . . "We were the end, the purpose, the rational axle around which the great aetherian shells rotated." He longs for "the universe of Catholic orthodoxy" in which "the cosmos is shown to be a machine constructed around the drama of salvation"—by which Appleyard means that, despite explicit orders to the contrary, a woman and a man once ate of an apple, and that this act of insubordination transformed the Universe into a contrivance for operant-conditioning their remote descendants.
By contrast, modern science "presents us as accidents. We are caused by the cosmos, but we are not the cause of it. Modem man is not finally anything, he has no role in creation." Science is "spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions. It cannot really co-exist with anything." . . . "Science, quietly and inexplicitly, is talking us into abandoning our selves, our true selves." It reveals "the mute, alien spectacle of nature." . . . "Human beings cannot live with such a revelation. The only morality left is that of the consoling lie." Anything is better than grappling with the unbearable burden of being tiny.
In a passage reminiscent of Plus IX, Appleyard even decries the fact that "a modern democracy can be expected to include a number of contradictory religious faiths which are obliged to agree on a certain limited number of general injunctions, but no more. They must not burn each other's places of worship, but they may deny, even abuse each other's God. This is the effective, scientific way of proceeding."
But what is the alternative? Obdurately to pretend to certainty in an uncertain world? To adopt a comforting belief system, no matter how out of kilter with the facts it is? If we don't know what's real, how can we deal with reality? For practical reasons, we cannot live too much in fantasyland. Shall we censor one another's religions and burn down one another's places of worship? How can we be sure which of the thousands of human belief systems should become unchallenged, ubiquitous, mandatory?
These quotations betray a failure of nerve before the Universe its grandeur and magnificence, but especially its indifference. Science has taught us that, because we have a talent for deceiving ourselves, subjectivity may not freely reign. This is one reason Appleyard so mistrusts science: It seems too reasoned, measured, and impersonal. Its conclusions derive from the interrogation of Nature, and are not in all cases predesigned to satisfy our wants. Appleyard deplores moderation. He yearns for inerrant doctrine, release from the exercise of judgment, and an obligation to believe but not to question. He has not grasped human fallibility. He recognizes no need to institutionalize error-correcting machinery either in our social institutions or in our view of the Universe.
This is the anguished cry of the infant when the Parent does not come. But most people eventually come to grips with reality, and with the painful absence of parents who will absolutely guarantee that no harm befalls the little ones so long as they do what they are told. Eventually most people find ways to accommodate to the Universe—especially when given the tools to think straight.
"All that we pass on to our children" in the scientific age, Appleyard complains, "is the conviction that nothing is true, final or enduring, including the culture from which they sprang." How right he is about the inadequacy of our legacy. But would it be enriched by adding baseless certainties? He scorns "the pious hope that science and religion are independent realms which can easily be separated." Instead, "science, as it is now, is absolutely not compatible with religion."
But isn't Appleyard really saying that some religions now find it difficult to make unchallenged pronouncements on the nature of the world that are straight-out false? We recognize that even revered religious leaders, the products of their time as we are of ours, may have made mistakes. Religions contradict one another on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods.
Science has brought many of us to that state in which Nathaniel Hawthorne found Herman Melville: "He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief." Or Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "They had not persuaded me, but they had troubled me. Their arguments had shaken me without ever convincing me . . . It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires." As the belief systems taught by the secular and religious authorities are undennined, respect for authority in general probably does erode. The lesson is clear: Even politics] leaders must be wary of embracing false doctrine. This is not a failing of science, but one of its graces.
Of course, worldview consensus is comforting, while clashes of opinion may be unsettling, and demand more of us. But unless we insist, against all evidence, that our ancestors were perfect, the advance of knowledge requires us to unravel and then restitch the consensus they established.
In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
IF YOU LIVED two or three millennia ago, there was no shame in holding that the Universe was made for us. It was an appealing thesis consistent with everything we knew; it was what the most learned among us taught without qualification. But we have found out much since then. Defending such a position today amounts to willful disregard of the evidence, and a flight from self-knowledge.
Still, for many of us, these deprovincializations rankle. Even if they do not fully cant' the day, they erode confidence—unlike the happy anthropocentric certitudes, rippling with social utility, of an earlier age. We long to be here for a purpose, even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident. "The meaningless absurdity of life," wrote Leo Tolstoy, "is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man." Our time is burdened under the cumulative weight of successive debunkings of our conceits: We're Johnny-come-latelies. We live in the cosmic boondocks. We emerged from microbes and muck. Apes are our cousins. Our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control. There may be much smarter and very different beings elsewhere. And on top of all this, we're making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves.
The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. We are lost in a great darkness, and there's no one to send out a search party. Given so harsh a reality, of course we're tempted to shut our eyes and pretend that we're safe and snug at home, that the fall is only a bad dream.
We lack consensus about our place in the Universe. There is no generally agreed upon long-term vision of the goal of our species—other than, perhaps, simple survival. Especially when times are hard, we become desperate for encouragement, unreceptive to the litany of great demotions and dashed hopes, and much more willing to hear that we're special, never mind if the evidence is paper-thin. If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?
But if our objective is deep knowledge rather than shallow reassurance, the gains from this new perspective far outweigh the losses. Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs—in time, in space, and in potential—the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our own origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.
To our ancestors there was much in Nature to be afraid of—lightning, storms, earthquakes, volcanos, plagues, drought, long winters. Religions arose in part as attempts to propitiate and control, if not much to understand, the disorderly aspect of Nature. The scientific revolution permitted us to glimpse an underlying ordered Universe in which there was a literal harmony of the worlds (Johannes Kepler's phrase). If we understand Nature, there is a prospect of controlling it or at least mitigating the harm it may bring. In this sense, science brought hope.
Most of the great deprovincializing debates were entered into with no thought for their practical implications. Passionate and curious humans wished to understand their actual circumstances, how unique or pedestrian they and their world are, their ultimate origins and destinies, how the Universe works. Surprisingly, some of these debates have yielded the most profound practical benefits. The very method of mathematical reasoning that Isaac Newton introduced to explain the motion of the planets around the Sun has led to most of the technology Of our modern world. The Industrial Revolution, for all its shortcomings, is still the global model of how an agricultural nation can emerge from poverty. These debates have bread-and-butter consequences.
