“How weird is our solar system?”

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150515-how-weird-is-our-solar-system

1.

One of the “scientific” arguments against religious belief that I’ve repeatedly encountered over the years is the notion that the Copernican “revolution” demoted Earth from its supposedly privileged position in the cosmos and reduced it to its real status as an ordinary, unremarkable planet in a humdrum, run-of-the-mill solar system orbiting a completely mediocre, average minor star in an undistinguished part of an unexceptional galaxy.

This claim, as I noted in my 2013 Summerhays  Lecture for BYU’s College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, is quite historically uninformed.  Pre-Copernicans didn’t think of Earth as privileged.  Quite the contrary.

As, however, illustrated by the article (brought to my notice by Kevin Taylor) to which I provide the link above — and by scores and scores of others — the assumption that our planet is an ordinary one, situated in an ordinary place, is also turning out to be dubious, at best.

2.

Some nineteenth-century Mormons speculated that the Earth was once located near Kolob, and that, with the fall of Adam and Eve, it actually literally fell to its current location.

I’ve never (to put it mildly) been much invested in that speculation.

However, maybe I’ve been too hasty.  The universe is a very odd place, not at all constrained by our common-sense ideas of how things ought to work.  And, with scientists now talking seriously about “planetary migration,” perhaps those early Latter-day Saints weren’t as far gone as I’ve assumed!