What is our importance in the universe?

A brief history of knowledge...

Are there objective and ultimate truths? Can we be certain?

How certain can we be of our knowledge and experiences? And what about those of others?

What is the meaning of life?...

AristotleAbove the earth is a series of concentric crystalline spheres carrying the moon, sun, planets and stars.

Everything on earth was made of four elements; earth, water, air and fire.

Enclosing them all was the Empyreum.

Earth’s natural position was at the centre of the universe, followed by a layer of water, then air and then, just below the moon, fire.Therefore stones fell and flames rose.

Everything made of a combination of elements

Elements kept in state of constant change by heavens

All earthly things constantly come into being, decay and disappear.

The Heavens ~ Crystalline spheres, stars etc

Composed of a different element ~ QuintessencePure and unchanging ~ incorruptibleMove constantly in perfect circlesMore powerful than anything on sublunary sphere exerting a strong influence on everything sublunary. This was the basis of astronomy.Beyond the heavens lay the Empyreum, the most powerful and completely unchanging.

Aristotle’s ideas were widely accepted until the scientific revolution of the 17th Century. Most of them appeared to make sense.

However it was the persistent anomalies that eventually caused the overthrow of the system.The Planets did not move in smooth circles, but kept interrupting their orbits with backward movements.

The Second Century Greek astronomer Ptolemy managed to make this make sense while keeping Aristotle’s fundamental idea that it was in the nature of heavenly bodies to move in circles.

His system still gave good predictions of the positions of the planets in the future.

Ptolemy’s success helped to entrench the Aristotelian view of the cosmos.

Aristotle’s model became further entrenched when it was married with Christian theology. This gave a moral and theological dimension to the concentric spheres.

This was especially so in the work of the mediaeval writers Dante and Aquinas.

In Dante’s Inferno, Hell was literally underground at the centre of the universe. The nine circles of hell reflected deeper and deeper states of immorality.

Above the earth rose the spheres of the heavens, of increasing power and purity. Finally beyond them all, lay the throne of God on the Empyreum.

Mankind was in the middle, the only being that combined heavenly and earthly natures.

Human beings consisted of immaterial souls, whose substances was that of the heavens, and material earthly bodies.

The souls strived to reach their natural position among heavenly things, their earthly bodies were bent on pulling them down to hell.

This was a model of the universe in which the moral dimension matched the physical dimension.

It was this clear sense of the position of humanity between damnation and salvation and between the spiritual and mundane (worldly) that seemed to make so much sense to people.

Most educated people agreed about the basics of this system, but were aware of problems in the details. It was attempts to solve these that led to a revolution in thought.

Astronomical ProblemsSolid crystalline spheres did not allow for planets to move in epicycles.

How could souls move up through these solid spheres?

There were persistent discrepancies with the geometrical models used to predict movements

These led Copernicus to look for a more radical solution; that the earth was itself a planet circling the sun.

The 16th Century Astronomer Copernicus solved many of the problems of astronomy with his radical idea. However in many ways he was still thinking in a very conservative way.

He still accepted much of the Aristotelian system and was trying to explain the movement of heavenly bodies in terms of perfect circles. If the earth was moving why was there not a ferocious gale, and why we didn’t just fly off?

Galilleo, another Italian astronomer made the first telescope and realised that there were changes and imperfections in the supposed perfect and unchanging heavens.

He observed phases of Venus, craters on the moon and sun spots on the sun.

He was forced to retract his ideas and condemned to life imprisonment by the Roman Catholic Church.

Isaac Newton’s (17th C) theory of universal gravity replaced the idea that the different parts of the universe contained radically different sorts of stuff.

Matter was the same everywhere and subject to the same laws.

His law of motion, that things remained in rest or continued in a straight line unless acted upon by other forces replaced the Aristotelian idea that force was needed to keep things moving.

It explained why planets moved in ellipses, why we were not blown off the surface of the earth and removed the need for a force to keep the earth moving.

What difference did this make?One reason people might have been disturbed by the Copernican revolution was that it made the earth one planet among others and they lost their place of privilege at the centre of things.

This misses the point. The earth was at the centre of Aristotle’s universe, but people were not, they were on its surface. Anyway the earth was less pure and powerful than anything in the heavens. The worst thing (hell) was at the centre. The good things were above.

The big change was that the orderly layered cosmos disappeared. Everything had had its place. The moral and theological order corresponded with the physical.

With the Newtonian revolution the universe suddenly became infinite and without any centre at all.

Most importantly the laws of nature were the same everywhere. The heavenly bodies were no longer radically different. Newton had broken down the distinctions between the heavens and the earth.

The End of Astrology (not astronomy)One immediate effect of this was the rapid and complete abandonment of astrology as a respectable science.

Because the heavens had been thought to be very different in kind from the earth and to have an effect on it, enquiring people had taken to observing the planets with a view to predicting their movements and influences.

All the reasons for thinking astrology plausible had vanished.

Spinning round in an infinite universe is a less comforting notion than being enclosed by spheres and angels and God.

If there was no Empyreum, where was God’s throne?

Where was hell?

What if there were other inhabited places in the universe? Did Jesus have to be resurrected there, for them to be saved too?

What if other parts of the Bible also turned out not to be literally true?

Some things were not threatened…

The material and spiritual still seemed to be the essential aspects of human beings.

God still put immaterial souls into human bodies.

Almost everyone still regarded God as the creator of all. Some kind of intelligence must lie at the root of things. Inanimate matter could not initiate motion and change.

Mind FirstGod was still needed to explain things…

Matter had no intelligence at all, let alone the kind required to design an astonishingly complex universe and the life within it.

It seemed obvious that a mind of great intelligence was needed. The idea that ‘mind’ itself could emerge from bare unthinking matter seemed impossible.

Dualism So dualism, the idea that mind and matter were two distinct things, and that mind had the real power, was left unaffected.

Heaven and hell had lost their exact addresses, and humans no longer combined heavenly and earthly substances in quite the same way.

Yet humans still had a duty to develop a spiritual side of their nature, even though they were no longer literally trying to rise upwards.

The most deeply rooted ideas about people and their place in the universe remained unaffected.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species which argued that humans were descended from apes.

Some people stopped believing that we are different from animals and special creations of God.

DarwinismDarwin’s theory of evolution could finally break down the distinction between the heavens and the earth…

It could show how it was possible for ‘bare, unthinking matter’ to lie at the root of all complexity and consciousness.

This would replace traditional dualism (the idea that there are two distinct substances, spirit and matter) with materialism (the idea that there was only matter).

In the 19th Century, geologists realised that the world must have been much older than 6,500 years old and people started to question the belief that God made the world in six days.

Scientists now believe that the Universe is 15,000,000,000 years old and began with the Big Bang.

There are 100,000 million stars in our galaxy and 100,000 million galaxies in the universe. Our individual lives occupy the tiniest amounts of space and time in the universe.

So how does / should this legacy affect the way we think

about things today? Particularly in what we claim to know….