{"id":3319,"date":"2024-01-19T08:20:10","date_gmt":"2024-01-19T13:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=3319"},"modified":"2024-01-19T08:21:14","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T13:21:14","slug":"the-center-of-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2024\/01\/19\/the-center-of-it-all\/","title":{"rendered":"The Center of It All"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,<\/em> click here<\/a>
 
It\u2019s one of those stories that inevitably comes up in the ongoing harangue between Science and Christianity. 
 
It\u2019s called the Copernican Revolution.  The story is usually told like this: 
 
Simple-minded Bible readers declared that the Earth sits at the center of the universe, proving the cosmic significance of the human race.  Polish astronomer Nicholaus Copernicus (1473-1543) flipped the script, demonstrating that the earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around.  Science now knows that our planet, far from being at the center of things, spins in the middle of nowhere, and humanity\u2019s existence has virtually no significance when viewed against the backdrop of the vastness of the universe.
 
The Copernican tale is presented as a coming-of-age story \u2013 a reminder that until religious superstition is discredited, the human race will never be able to grow up and grasp its true identity.    
 
Before materialist storytellers take a victory lap, however, it\u2019s worth taking a closer look at a few details.
 
The first is that the Bible nowhere teaches that Earth occupies a fixed position at the center of the universe. 
 
Yes, there are a few verses that imply our planet is stationary: \u201cThe world is established, and it cannot be moved\u201d (Psalm 93:1), and \u201cThe Lord laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed forever\u201d (Psalm 104:5).  And we can\u2019t forget the account where the \u201csun stood still\u201d during the Israelites\u2019 fight against the Amorites (Joshua 10:13), implying that Copernicus was badly mistaken concerning which heavenly body actually moves. 
 
But such verses are easily explained as either Hebrew poetic license (akin to the mountains singing and the trees clapping their hands in Isaiah 55:12), or the kind of \u201cphenomenological\u201d language that your local meteorologist uses every day to report the times of both sunrise and sunset.  Everyone knows that the sun does nothing of the kind, yet we still talk that way in the 21st<\/sup> century. 
 
It\u2019s true that the Catholic Church (and most of the Protestant churches that followed) favored a geocentric (Earth-centered) perspective instead of one that was heliocentric (that is, sun-centered).  But that was because of traditional biblical interpretation<\/em>, not because Scripture itself endorses such a view.   
 
A second point, often overlooked, is that church leaders were hardly the only ones saddled with a faulty cosmology.  Five hundred years ago, Europe\u2019s brightest minds almost universally taught that Earth lies at the center of reality.  That view had gone unchallenged by scientists and astronomers for the better part of two millennia \u2013 all the way back to the time of Aristotle. 
 
Copernicus himself was a deeply loyal Catholic.  While knowing that his assertion concerning the earth revolving around the sun would rankle many of the folks in Rome, he was even more aware that the real opposition would come from scientists.  He was right. 
 
Scientists of the 16th<\/sup> century fought tooth and nail to protect the traditional Aristotelian view \u2013 right up until overwhelming astronomical evidence forced them to concede that the Polish genius was right.
 
Thus the well-worn story that \u201creligious people were inevitably proved wrong, while heroic, rational scientists were inevitably proved right\u201d is seriously off the mark. 
 
But most of us could care less about esoteric academic debates in the late Middle Ages. 
 
What we care about are the implications.  Most modern scientists unhesitatingly declare that humanity\u2019s so-called privileged place at the center of God\u2019s creation \u2013 which had been the universal medieval perspective \u2013 is just a fairy tale.  We are not special.  We are not significant.  In view of the assumption that the cosmos is heading for inevitable entropic death, we have no future.  In the words of physicist Stephen Hawking, \u201cWe are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.\u201d 
 
Try putting that on a Hallmark card. 
 
This is why the Copernican Revolution is generally associated with the demotion of humanity.  In a few short centuries our identity went from the central characters of a loving God\u2019s creation to carbon-based nothings. 
 
But that depressing assessment all springs from a strange and faulty assumption:  Who ever said that human beings are important only if we are at the center of the universe?<\/em>   
 
God certainly never said that.  Scripture never makes such a statement.
 
As philosopher Jay Wesley Richards points out, \u201cWho really cares whether we\u2019re in the physical center of the galaxy?  It\u2019s irrelevant!  What really matters is being in the place that\u2019s most conducive to life.  And that\u2019s exactly where Earth finds itself.\u201d
 
Earth is indeed in a very special place.  If we were at the center of the Milky Way, we\u2019d be devoured by the enormous black hole that resides there.  If we were near any of the star clusters that are strewn throughout our galaxy\u2019s spiral arms, we would be bombarded by dangerous emissions from newborn stars. 
 
Instead, Earth is located in a safe spot.  Our solar system rests in a relatively unpopulated neighborhood between the Sagittarius and Perseus spiral arms of our galaxy.  This is what astronomers call a \u201chabitable zone\u201d \u2013 a place where conditions are ideal for life to grow and thrive for eons.   
 
Not long ago, astronomers were enthusiastically predicting that life-supporting stars and planetary systems would be found virtually everywhere we looked.
 
Now we know better.  Oh, we’ve discovered thousands of new planets.  But habitable zones \u2013 \u201cGoldilocks\u201d places that are just right for the availability of appropriate elements, liquid water, and moderate temperatures \u2013 turn out to be exceedingly rare.
 
Yet God prepared just such a special home for all of us. 
 
It\u2019s true that we\u2019re not at the center of the cosmos.  As it turns out, that\u2019s a very good thing. 
 
What matters most is that we\u2019re at the center of a loving God\u2019s never-ending intention to bless us with the grace of his own presence and love.    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here It\u2019s one of those stories that inevitably comes up in the ongoing harangue between Science and Christianity.  It\u2019s called the Copernican Revolution.  The story is usually told like this:  Simple-minded Bible readers declared that the Earth sits at the center of the universe, proving the cosmic significance of the human race.  Polish astronomer Nicholaus… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3320,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[308],"class_list":["post-3319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-astronomy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3319"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3322,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3319\/revisions\/3322"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}