Odds are good that you’ve never heard of Cyrus Teed, even by his pseudonym “Koresh.” He was a late-19th, early-20th century religious and scientific eccentric, and perhaps the battiest individual to come out of the Burned Over District.
He had some odd ideas about God and an inflated opinion of his own intellect, but he was mostly harmless. His most famous idea was a new version of the “hollow earth” theory, but in reverse: the earth is a hollow sphere, and we live in the concave inside of the sphere.
Anyway, here’s a selection from his central work:
If we accept the logical deduction of the fallacious Copernican system of astronomy, we conclude the universe to be illimitable and incomprehensible, and its cause equally so; therefore, not only would the universe be forever beyond the reach of the intellectual perspective of human aspiration and effort, but God himself would be beyond the pale of our conception, and therefore beyond our adoration.
The Koreshan Cosmogony reduces the universe to proportionate limits, and its cause within the comprehension of the human mind. It demonstrates the possibility of the attainment of man to his supreme inheritance, the ultimate domination of the universe, thus restoring him to the acme of exaltation, — the throne of the Eternal, whence he had his origin. (The Cellular Cosmogony, pp. 6-7)
Despite his delusions, or perhaps because of them, I think Teed has accurately described one of the motivations behind things like flat earth theory, geocentrism, young earth creationism.
If time and space are vast and ancient, then it follows that the creator is also vast and ancient. But such a being would be beyond our ability to comprehend, and that’s not a very comforting thing to contemplate.
While it doesn’t lessen God, it leaves us feeling relatively small and helpless. Better to imagine a small world, recently created, in which we can play a larger role.
Creationists frequently point out that “evolutionism” (basically, any worldview including belief in an old Earth or common descent of man and other animals) denigrates man, strips him of his supreme station. They insist man is only great when wielding great power and influence over the universe. Perhaps they would hold greater respect for humanism and humanity per se (rather than focusing on extrinsic details like his relation to other animals or his devotion to God) if they allowed it to be so denuded. Actually, given Creationists’ later obsession with man’s place in the universe, is ironic that Genesis’s story of creation considers a lonely naked couple to be the height of perfection.
I think your intuition on this point is right: Creationism seeks to make the universe more manageable. That said, as a Christian theologian I would say that their mistake is looking for God in the wrong place. Christianity centres around Jesus, not the size, age or character otherwise of the universe. I don’t expect this to solve a lot of problems for atheists, but maybe my perspective is interesting to some of you. Or not. I don’t know.
What problems?
Problems with the rest of the Bible being illogical, I assume. He means: “hey, don’t look at those crazy parts of the Bible, what matters is Jesus” as if all the information we have about Jesus were not in the Bible too.
It always reduces to faith anyway. God could have inspired only those bits about Jesus and lie by omission with the rest of the book.
“Christianity centres around Jesus, not the size, age or character otherwise of the universe.”
As well it might – but this ignores a major part of why I find the Bible unreliable. If the Bible is to be considered a source of truth about Jesus or anything else, it has to at least be consistent with what we know about the universe NOW, not with what may have been a reasonable view of it when the whole of Creation could be seen from a local mountain-top.
The fact that the Bible is so stunningly wrong about cosmology – and this is a document that is supposed to have been written, or at least inspired by, the creator of the Universe – gives no confidence whatsoever in its other statements of ‘fact’. We have no evidence outside of the gospels for the Resurrection – and a stunning silence where there SHOULD be evidence – so the central pillar of Christian faith rests on a book that proclaims its own infallibility yet gets the structure of the Universe so devastatingly wrong.
The Bible is either divinely inspired or it is not. If yes, why is it so wrong about so many things? If no, we have no reliable source of knowledge as to whether Jesus even lived once, never mind twice.
The perspective is an interesting one, but begs the question of why the Jesus hypothesis should be considered correct in the first place. The only data that we have on Jesus is in the Bible, and the Bible is full of demonstrable inconsistencies on other matters. Ergo, we have no reason to believe that anything in it is true.
That said, as a Christian theologian I would say that their mistake is looking for God in the wrong place.
As someone who knows fuck-all about logic, I would say that their mistake is a classic appeal to consequences.
Previous post by VorJack on the Burned Over District
”God” cannot be nullified in a day
Subjective “assurances” in religion and morality get touted as true and guiding intuitions. Instead, they are moribund cultural artifacts. These harmful artifacts say nothing about reality. Certainly the so-called “higher sentiments” say nothing about their origins. But, they don’t come from on-high.
• Dead cults of sensibility: religion and morality
Basing belief in “God” on “feelings” is an atavistic hangover. The “God” of the big-3 so-called great monotheisms and associated fictional literature no longer bears any relationship to cultural reality.
Religion and morality are paternalist prejudices called ‘good.’ They are conditioned neural artifacts parasitical on innate physiological pathways of disgust and pleasure, trained in (conditioned) by inverting cause/effect.
Early xianity appeared as an antisocial and anti-intellectual inversion of other well-established late hellenistic cults for example, the widespread worship of the goddess Isis Soter (savior).
Subjective certainty based on (indoctrinated) “feelings” forms a huge component of fundie religious ideology. Their core faith claims are founded upon class hatred which fills the so-called “gospels”(70-110 CE) and the letters of P/Saul of Tarsus (50-60 CE). He marketed an easy-to-own inverted snobbery — we stink but stinking is godly:
Not many of you were wise…; not…influential; not…of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things…to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things…and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are… 1Cor1:26-28 NIV.
Today’s nihilistic fundie know-nothings remain bound to ancient near-eastern androcentric social prejudices. They loudly proclaim their male dominated atavisms “holy”. Among their big lies: that the historically dead is eternal, that the merely cultural is universal, that inbred group aversions define a “chosen people”; that operant conditioning is the “will of God,” that political demands by god-proxies (male religious authoritarians) are “the voice of God”.
For two millenniums xians have deliberately spread STDs, socially transmitted (mental) disorders. Today US xians are intent on building a theocracy to rival Iran’s. They will destroy our open society to do so.
• subjective certainty says nothing about reality
Knowledge and subjective certainty characterize discourses totally distinct from one another.
Subjective certainty is a false proxy for truth. Listen to xians…there’s nothing to their god-talk other than an irrational defense of fable. Nevertheless, they employ subjective certainty to justify evil.
Those who alter their conditioning through self-education, can also alter their sensibilities by erasing old and building new neural pathways. They subordinate “feelings” to what Freud called ‘the reality principle’. Only then can all supernatural beings be killed.
Buddha and Confucius understood in part — the gods are inferior to any enlightened individual. “God” as a culturally eliminable concept will be left to rot.
All believers (from the big-3 monster theisms) harm their own brains by linking their disgust to truth seeking (the sciences) and by linking subjective certainty about supernaturalism to “bliss.” (Can you hear me follow-your-bliss Joe Campbell?)
There are altogether no supernatural phenomena, only supernatural interpretations of phenomena.
the anti_supernaturalist (and immoralist)
That reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft who’s gods were ancient, inscrutable beings completely unconcerned with, and indifferent to, humanity.
Boils down to: rather to be a big fish in a (imagined)little pond than an insignificant plankton in the ocean.
This theory of Cyrus Teed’s (the hollow, concave earth theory) is interesting (I’m not saying its true, I’m just more open than most to the possibility that we’re all wrong, that things might not be exactly as they appear) because it is not able to be scientifically disproved (did you hear that you lovers and truster’s of/in science?). Here’s a few fascinating (and at least one scientific) article on the topic at hand:
http://www.andrepiet.nl/holle_aarde/Abdelkader.html
http://geocosmos.tripod.com/space.htm
http://www.rolf-keppler.de/2frame.htm