The Case for a Creator (27 page)

“This was the start of a long march of science that continued to demote us. Scientists later determined the sun isn’t at the center of the universe; that we aren’t at the center of the galaxy; and that the universe ultimately had no center, because scientists came to believe in the nineteenth century that it was infinite and eternal. You can see how this trend helped us to see ourselves as less and less significant, less and less at the center of things.

“So the Copernican Revolution came to represent the conflict between science and religion. Religious superstition maintained the Earth and humankind are the center of the universe, both physically and metaphysically, but modern science has disproved that.

“Humans have been stripped of their false sense of uniqueness and importance. While religious folk continued to insist there is something unique, special, intentional, and purposeful about our existence, scientists maintain that the material world is all there is, and that chance and impersonal natural law alone explain its existence.”

I was following along in full agreement. Richards’s assessment was entirely consistent with what I had been taught in school. But then he added the clincher.

“The problem,” he said, a slight smile playing at the corner of his mouth, “is that this historical description is simply false.”

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

Richards’s claim startled me. “False?” I declared. “What do you mean? In what way?”

“Read Ptolemy, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler. Read Dante,” he said. “In Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, the surface of the Earth is an intermediate place. This was true in Aristotelian cosmology, which was Christianized in the Middle Ages. For Aristotle, the world was made of air, earth, fire, and water. Earth is heaviest, so it naturally falls to the bottom.

“So the Earth was not so much at the
center
as it was at the
bottom
of the universe. It was sort of the cosmic sump. It was the place where things decay and die. Everything above the moon was made of a different type of matter—quintessence—and God dwelled in the heavenly sphere outside the celestial sphere of the stars. Man was in an intermediate place.”

Gonzalez spoke up. “Dante then inverted these levels as you go the other way, down to hell,” he said.

“Exactly,” continued Richards. “You had nine levels going up toward God and getting closer to perfection, and then there were nine levels getting closer to absolute depravity, down to hell. Thus, in medieval cosmology, what we would call the center of the universe is Satan’s throne. That’s a very important point. If you imagine the center of the universe is Satan’s throne and that the Earth itself is the cosmic sump, then clearly this is not the stereotype that we’ve been given that the center of the universe prior to Copernicus was the preeminent spot.”

Gonzalez added: “The Enlightenment later retold the story by saying the church, because of its arrogance, put humans in the center.”

Richards nodded. “That’s the irony,” he said. “It was the Enlightenment that made man the measure of all things. When you really think about it, Christian theology never actually put man literally in the center. We have a very important role to play in this cosmic drama, so much so that God even becomes incarnate. But it was never the case that everything was literally created solely for us.

“Many centuries ago, Augustine said God didn’t create the world ‘for man’ or because of some sort of compulsion, but ‘because he wanted to.’
²⁶
In
The
Divine Comedy
, the reader learns that the actual sense of us being in the center was merely a bias. We discover, in fact, that everything was arranged so that God is at the metaphysical center—that is, the place of supreme importance.

“Instead of denigrating Earth, actually Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler saw their new scheme as exalting it. For instance, Galileo waxes poetic about how the Earth, like the other planets, reflects the glory of the sun and is no longer just a cosmic sump.
²⁷
So in the transformation from medieval cosmology to the Renaissance view, this new perspective elevated man in some ways.”

Other historical researchers have come to the same conclusion. Said one: “The Copernican system, far from demoting man, destroyed Aristotle’s vision of the earth as a kind of cosmic sink, and if it did anything, it elevated humanity. In making the earth a planet, a heavenly body, Copernicus infinitely
ennobled
its status.”
²⁸

But something didn’t add up to me. “Didn’t the church persecute Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno for their view that the Earth revolved around the sun?” I asked.

“First of all,” Richards said, “some claim Copernicus was persecuted, but history shows he wasn’t; in fact, he died of natural causes the same year his ideas were published. As for Galileo, his case can’t be reduced to a simple conflict between scientific truth and religious superstition. He insisted the church immediately endorse his views rather than allow them to gradually gain acceptance, he mocked the Pope, and so forth. Yes, he was censured, but the church kept giving him his pension for the rest of his life.”

Indeed, historian William R. Shea said, “Galileo’s condemnation was the result of the complex interplay of untoward political circumstances, political ambitions, and wounded prides.”
²⁹
Historical researcher Philip J. Sampson noted that Galileo himself was convinced that the “major cause” of his troubles was that he had made “fun of his Holiness”—that is, Pope Urban VIII—in a 1632 treatise.
³⁰
As for his punishment, Alfred North Whitehead put it this way: “Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”
³¹

“Bruno’s case was very sad,” Richards continued. “He was executed in Rome in 1600. Certainly this is a stain on church history. But again, this was a complicated case. His Copernican views were incidental. He defended pantheism and was actually executed for his heretical views on the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other doctrines that had nothing to do with Copernicanism.

“Now, here’s the point I want to make: it’s very important if you’re going to advance the Copernican Principle that you make it look like it’s grounded in the historical march of science. But when you actually look at the data, it’s just not true. Writers of astronomy textbooks just keep recycling the myth, sort of like the flat-Earth myth, which was the idea that Columbus was told the Earth was flat and he thought it was round. That’s just wrong too.”

“Scholars at the time knew it was a sphere,” added Gonzalez. “Even the ancient Greeks knew it was a sphere.”

“They’d known it for a thousand years or more,” said Richards.

I knew they were right about that. David Lindberg, former professor of the history of science and currently director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, said in a recent interview:

One obvious [myth] is that before Columbus, Europeans believed nearly unanimously in a flat Earth—a belief allegedly drawn from certain biblical statements and enforced by the medieval church. This myth seems to have had an eighteenth century origin, elaborated and popularized by Washington Irving, who flagrantly fabricated evidence for it in his four-volume history of Columbus. . . . The truth is that it’s almost impossible to find an educated person after Aristotle who doubts that the Earth is a sphere. In the Middle Ages, you couldn’t emerge from any kind of education, cathedral school or university, without being perfectly clear about the Earth’s sphericity and even its approximate circumference.
³²

Now in addition to the flat-Earth myth being exploded, here were Richards and Gonzalez asserting that the Copernican Principle was based on faulty history as well.

“So,” continued Richards, “Guillermo and I embarked on a project to document whether there are important ways in which Earth is special or exceptional. To do this we had to show that there’s not this long historical march of science showing how unimportant we are. We had to point out that the history is wrong and that what we’re doing stands in the good tradition of science, which says, ‘Let’s find out what the world is like to the best of our ability.’ ”

“And,” I said, “what did you find?”

Richards and Gonzalez exchanged glances. “Well, scientists have generally followed the Copernican Principle by saying that our planet is ordinary and that therefore life undoubtedly abounds in the universe,” Richards began. “We believe, however, the evidence is quite to the contrary.” He gestured toward his colleague to continue.

“We’ve found that our location in the universe, in our galaxy, in our solar system, as well as such things as the size and rotation of the Earth, the mass of the moon and sun and so forth—a whole range of factors—conspire together in an amazing way to make Earth a habitable planet,” Gonzalez said. “And even beyond that, we’ve found that the very same conditions that allow for intelligent life on Earth also make it strangely well-suited for viewing and analyzing the universe.”

“And we suspect this is not an accident,” Richards added. “In fact, we raise the question of whether the universe has been literally designed for discovery.”

THE INGREDIENTS FOR LIFE

With that framework set, I moved ahead to discuss one of the main attitudes of scientists who embrace the Copernican Principle. “They believe if you can just find a place anywhere in the universe where water stays liquid for a long enough period of time, then life will develop, just as it did on Earth,” I said. “I assume you don’t agree with that.”

“No, I don’t,” Gonzalez said. “It’s true that in order to have life you need water—which is the universal solvent—for reactions to take place, as well as carbon, which serves as the core atom of the information-carrying structural molecules of life. But you also need a lot more. Humans require twenty-six essential elements; a bacterium about sixteen. Intermediate life forms are between those two numbers. The problem is that not just any planetary body will be the source of all those chemical ingredients in the necessary forms and amounts.”

I interrupted to point out that science fiction writers have managed to speculate about extra-terrestrial life that’s built in a radically different form—for instance, creatures based on silicon instead of carbon.

Gonzalez was shaking his head before I had even finished my question. “That just won’t work,” he insisted. “Chemistry is one of the better understood areas of science. We know that you just can’t get certain atoms to stick together in sufficient number and complexity to give you large molecules like carbon can. You can’t get around it. And you just can’t get other types of liquids to dissolve as many different kinds of chemicals as you can with water. There’s something like half a dozen different properties of both water and carbon that are optimal for life. Nothing else comes close. Silicon falls far short of carbon.

“Unfortunately, people see life as being easy to create. They think it’s enough merely to have liquid water, because they see life as an epiphenomenon—just a piece of slime mold growing on an inert piece of granite. Actually, the Earth’s geology and biology interact very tightly with each other. You can’t think of life as being independent of the geophysical and meteorological processes of the planet. They interact in a very intimate way. So you need not only the right chemicals for life but also a planetary environment that’s tuned to life.”

That sparked a related issue. Scientists have dreamed of terra-forming a planet like Mars, essentially making over its environment to create a planet that’s more conducive to settlement by humans. “Would that be very difficult?” I asked.

“Absolutely. From the magnetic field to plate tectonics to the carbon dioxide cycle—ongoing life depends on a variety of very complicated interactions with the planet,” he said.

Richards jumped in. “People generally think that because they plant a seed and it grows that it’s easy to create the right environment for life, but that’s misleading,” he said. “A good example is the hermetically sealed biosphere that some people constructed in Arizona several years ago. They thought it would be relatively easy to create a self-contained environment conducive to life, but they had a devil of a time trying to make it work.”

“But life can also exist in some terribly harsh conditions,” I pointed out. “For instance, there are life forms that live off of deep-sea thermal vents. They don’t seem to need oxygen or any particular support from the broader environment.”

“On the contrary,” Gonzalez said, “the only things down there that don’t need oxygen are some microorganisms that breathe methane. But larger organisms, which need to regulate their metabolism, are invariably oxygen-breathers. The oxygen comes from surface life and marine algae. The oxygen gets mixed in with the ocean and transported into deep waters. So those organisms are very directly tied to the surface and the overall ecosystem of the planet.”

Astounded by the Earth’s fine-tuned physical, chemical, and biological interrelationships, some writers have gone so far as to liken our biosphere to a “superorganism” that is quite literally alive. In fact, James Lovelock’s pantheistic Gaia Hypothesis even seeks to deify our planet. However, Gonzalez and Richards said it’s unnecessary to go that far.

“Despite these admittedly incredible interrelationships, there’s nothing that requires anyone to see the Earth itself as being an organism, especially a god or goddess,” Richards said.

Then he turned to an image quite familiar to those who see the earmarks of design in Earth’s complex and interconnected machinery. “That’s sort of like deifying a watch because of its amazing properties,” he said, “rather than looking beyond the watch to the one who made it.”