We live on an insignificant planet, of a humdrum star, lost in a galaxy, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the universe.
Carl Sagan
In his early years as a stand-up comedian, Adam Sandler recounted how he lacked all confidence when trying to ask women out on dates. One particular day, a woman walked by and he lamented the crippling nervousness that stopped him from speaking to her. A friend urged him to ask her out, saying, “The worst she can say is no!” So, bolstered by this glimmer of hope, he asked the woman out on a date. She replied, “Get away from me, you loser!” “I think you broke the rules there,” a dejected Adam replied.
This humorously humiliating example is not far off from the trajectories of anti-religion (yet very religious) scientism. As the story goes, Copernicus showed us that our planet is not unique in the universe. This retelling of history is more myth than reality, but let’s stick with it for now since this is the modern person’s understanding of the scientific past. At some point in time, like Adam Sandler, the negative appraisal of the earth by Copernicus (that allegedly showed our planet was not special), turned into the harsh reality of the Copernican Principle, from the “no, there is nothing unique about earth and its solar system” response to “Life is meaningless, you losers born on an insignificant planet!”
Someone broke the rules, turning a scientific observation into a metaphysical diss track.
The Copernican Principle
The Copernican Principle is essentially the idea that the earth is not a special place, and therefore life on it must not be special either. This, of course, requires ignoring the fine-tuning arguments and just assuming—without any empirical evidence thus far—that other life simply must exist in such a vast universe. The multiverse certainly helps this blind spot remain unseen, as mentioned in Part 1 of this series.
Famed physicist Stephen Hawking perhaps best described this view in an interview with Ken Campbell.
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
Note his devaluing, even disgust, of humankind. In the atheistic and naturalistic worldview of Scientism, he should at most be able to say that we have no meaning and no value. That means no positive value, but also no negative value. We are valueless. But he calls us “chemical scum.” Why?
Most scientists who hold to this view would claim the Copernican Principle originated with the findings of Copernicus, whose heliocentric model of our galaxy displaced humanity from its elevated status in the universe. Indeed, one scientist writing about the Copernican Principle, states that Copernicus “recognized that Earth is not in any particular privileged position in the solar system.” I have written about this extensively before and will not go over the arguments here. However, Copernicus doesn’t make any explicit value judgments about “privileged” or “unprivileged” places in the universe. Moreover, Copernicus’s view of the heliocentric universe did not demote human beings but, if anything, would have elevated them, based on the Aristotelian notion of the universe that was prevalent at the time. So then, where does this misanthropic view actually come from?
It turns out, the misanthropic understanding of Copernicus’s findings didn’t arise until about a century after Copernicus’s death with the French satirist Cyrano de Bergerac. From there it was further popularized by luminaries such as Goethe during the Enlightenment. But overall, it may have been a natural outworking of the modern scientific enterprise in and of itself.
It is difficult for people to separate what they do from who they are, and to separate who they are from the nature of reality. Modern commentator Joseph Minich points this out brilliantly in his recent work, Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age (Lexham, 2023). He looked at past societal changes, especially in the workplace. In a world of increased mechanization and lessened workplace specialization—where each person became merely a cog in the machine of a system that did not value them, creating potentially meaningless frivolities for anonymous consumers—it was hard not to begin to think that they themselves were not valuable and that the world was meaningless. It turns out, early modern science faced the same quandary, visualized the world in the same way, and came to believe it, to imbibe it, and to preach it. They turned an emerging metaphor from the world they inhabited into the basis of reality. They saw the universe in their own early modern mechanical image, and their descendants have carried on the tradition.
Inherently Dehumanizing?
British author Philip Sherrard spilled much ink on this topic. He was concerned with what he saw to be an existential and spiritual crisis in humanity and sought to understand it. In a world so infused with the Christian past, how had we come to, for instance, disregard the natural world as mere meaningless and purposeless matter to be manipulated for our benefit without thought to the needs of others? Greed, yes, but there was something even deeper, even more insidious.
For Sherrard, it was modern science itself that was the problem. It was Galileo, Descartes, and Newton who gave us the mechanistic vision of reality and the notion that if an object was not something which could be defined by mathematics, then it was not a real object at all. Despite the theological beliefs of Descartes, who did think God existed, the Cartesian worldview rendered God inert.
The worldview Descartes inaugurated, Sherrard writes, “meant the expulsion from scientific thought of all considerations based on value, perfection, harmony, meaning, beauty, [and] purpose” since those things are “merely subjective” and “irrelevant to a scientific understanding of the real ‘objective’ world—the world of quantity, of reified geometry, of a nature that is dead, alien, and purely functional.”
While quantum and relativity theories have complicated matters, we still see the prevalence of materialistic understandings of our world which are, at root, mechanistic. The cell is a “chemical factory.” Ribosomes are “molecular machines.” Our brains are “meat machines.” Whatever more recent discoveries have done to expand our view of the material universe, they have not unseated the mechanistic worldview. But even if they could, the premises would still be there, for they are epistemological and are woven into the very fabric of modern science. This is why in a world of advanced technology, DNA is envisioned as the language of the human digital machine, a person’s genetic “code.”
And this is precisely the crux of the issue, for, as Sherrard explains,
These premises, these underlying assumptions [of the mechanistic universe], are the same today as they were for the scientists of the seventeenth century. And the reason why scientists, however much they may wish to, cannot humanize science is because inhumanity is built into these very premises on which modern science itself is based.
In other words, no matter how high and how far the branch goes, it cannot escape its own root system. Since a human being is neither temporal nor finite, and since science has hamstrung itself by a focus on the rational understanding of that which is temporal or finite, Sherrard explains, it cannot help but dehumanize when confronted with humanity. “To reduce man to the level of what the reason can perceive or understand about him,” Sherrard declares, “is to dehumanize him.”
Agreeing completely with Sherrard’s points is perhaps not necessary here. (Indeed, scientists like Reason To Believe’s Hugh Ross, Fazale Rana, and Jeff Zweerink, or chemist and nanotechnologist Jim Tour, plus those over at The New Atlantis who seek a “culture in which science and technology work for, not on, human beings,” show that positive changes can and must be made to science’s foundational underpinnings.) However, his reading of history makes perfect sense of the misanthropic Copernican Principle. It is the Sisyphean grasp at the absurd paradox that all proponents of Scientism must make, the last inch up that frigid hill with the boulder of nihilistic acceptance.
The Myths of Anthropology
As it turns out, others have begun to notice Scientism’s overreach in the cosmic anthropology department.
Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, points out that the alleged insignificance of human beings posited by scientists like Hawking comes from “a worldview that presupposes such insignificance,” no doubt bolstered by a devoted faith in Darwin’s theory of natural selection, by which humanity is “the meaningless product of evolutionary processes.”
Yet we know from scientific research how difficult it is for life to form and survive, let alone intelligent life, and so even in a post-Copernican world it is illogical to speak of our insignificance or lack of being “special”. Simply because a lot of other planets exist, that does not mean one of them “must” produce intelligent life. “Life on Earth may not be ordinary,” Smith writes. As far as a universe of intelligent beings goes, “We may be isolated and truly alone.” He concludes, “The Earth, even if it is not unique, is for all intents and purposes a special place.”
Beyond just an exaggeration of the case for human mediocrity, other scientists have pushed back against the misapplication and rather severe misunderstanding of the Copernican Principle, at least as Copernicus himself might have understood it.
Marcelo Gleiser, theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College, explains how much of what we know today as the “Copernican Principle” is “extended improperly” and “seems to stem more from philosophical than astronomical considerations.” In its simplest form, it has more to do with the ordinariness of Earth, not of life. He has even gone so far as to call some versions of this overextended argument used by scientists “Post-Copernican Theology.”
“There is nothing in the original [Copernican] principle,” Gleiser writes, “that justifies statements about life in the universe.” Moreover, in regard to the Earth, saying it is ordinary is “scientifically unjustified” since “[w]e currently do not know enough about exoplanets” and “we know far less about the possible existence of life in other worlds” to even make such a comparative statement.
What Copernicus discovered was not whether something was special or not. As a devout Catholic, he no doubt still considered the Earth special. He discovered that the Earth is not the center of our Solar System (as evidenced by the fact that we now use the term “Solar System”). That’s it. Some applied certain philosophical and theological meanings to this discovery, and others later changed the significance of his findings to suppose that he demoted humanity in the hierarchy of Being. As alluded to previously, and stated fully elsewhere, he had no interest in demoting humanity or the Earth, or challenging divine revelation. His main theological concern was that people would assume he was making a theological point in favor of a Catholic adjustment to the ecclesiastical calendar.
The Heart of the Matter
Taken together, from a purely scientific standpoint, the warped version of the Copernican Principle should be abandoned. And, if one were to look directly at the evidence and reject those blinding philosophical presuppositions necessary to uphold Scientism, then a scientist could conclude with Smith,
Even though the Earth is not at the center of the universe, its luxuriant environment could nonetheless make it a rare oasis. Perhaps we can appreciate that humanity, too, could be unusual, even special and not mediocre, at least as far as we are likely to know for a very long time.
Read More
The Religion of Scientism, Part 1: Creation Myths
The Religion of Scientism, Part 3: A Faith in Peril
