historical trajectory

Last night at K-State, Dr. Robert Kirshner - an astrophysicist from
Harvard, gave a delightful presentation of the recent history of
cosmology to a lay audience. At one point he made a comment which spurs
this further reflection for me. He said something to the effect --
science now finds any propositions perverse or distasteful which would
accord special status to us or our corner of the universe. - a kind of
Einstein's equivalency principle philosophically extended if you will.

A significant source of triumphalist feelings for scientific thinkers
over the last centuries has been the ongoing and successful dethronement
of our "special status" feelings. First the earth isn't the center,
then our sun isn't even the center, then our galaxy is but one of many,
then Einstein tells us there is no center, and so forth. This makes up
an impressive trajectory for which we should be excused if we found any
deviation from it to be scientifically (and now philosophically) jarring.

While this was at one time considered a hostile trajectory to church
doctrine, we have long accepted how misreadings were read into scripture
to support erroneous cosmologies. Now we can easily site other
passages "What is man that you are mindful of him?" that fit more
nicely with this current trajectory. But how does this assumed
philosophy shape our predictions?

One obvious way shows up in our science fiction. There is very little
interstellar science fiction which does not have our galaxy peopled with
other sentient beings - for good reasons. If we could somehow look at
the rest of the universe and observe conclusively that we are ALONE,
then this would be an extremely jarring end to this historical
trajectory. Or even if we weren't the only life - but just the only
recognizably sentient life, that would still be jarring. So our culture
seems to have a fairly firm faith that we just "can't" be alone. It
would be at odds the philosophy that now seems so familiar to us - we
are nothing special. And this assumption is conveniently safe-guarded
by the impossibility of ever proving this negation. If our abundant
'Trekian interstellar bioscape' fails to materialize, the expanding
hugeness of the universe provides a fairly plausible explanation.
Nevertheless, most theologians (I think) already feel defensive about
the last few centuries and so wisely try not to read a committal
position on this into the Bible. And I would agree that the lesson for
us was necessary and well learned. It seems absurd (especially in
hindsight) to have used scriptures thus.

What are any of your thoughts on how long this trajectory holds or if it
will ever stop? Do we hold out any well-grounded defiance of this
pattern in spiritual terms? Or is science just delivering some much
needed lessons about anthropocentric arrogance?

--merv
Received on Thu Jan 26 08:38:58 2006