Re: historical trajectory

The simple answer is what I recall from C.S.Lewis's trilogy: we live on
the visited planet. Are we unique? We currently have no evidence either
way. All that is currently evident is that we are isolated.
Dave

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 07:32:27 -0600 Mervin Bitikofer <mrb22667@kansas.net>
writes:
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.
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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.
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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 18:08:33 2006