When it comes to Earth, science never showed prideful Christians that the size of our planet mattered and so changed our theology. Christians used to believe the Earth was in the center of the cosmos, but nobody much took pride in the fact. Why do conservative Christians (to attack Catholics) and atheists (to make Christians look stupid) keep repeating these hopeless errors?
It isn’t as if this is a complicated question. Some errors cannot be corrected because there are serious arguments on both sides: I am not talking about those disagreements. Some errors are about how to interpret the facts: I am not talking about those mistakes.
Sometimes I meet people who build entire arguments on assertions that are false and where there is little contention about the falsity of the fact of the matter. The fact is a simple one, not subject to interpretation or bias. One common example is the widespread assertion that Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. I have read this in Christian school textbooks and atheist discussion groups, but it is false. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire or Theodosius (who did do it) would have nothing left to do. Constantine favored Christianity, but he did not make it the state cult. This would not matter if people did not then proceed to take other facts from Constantine’s life, combine it with the falsehood and spin the mess into theories about Christianity.
Thomas Jefferson was culturally influenced by Christianity, but was a deist. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong. Christians should stop supporting such wrong-headedness.**
And yet these errors are as nothing compared to the widespread belief that once Christians thought Earth was super-important due to the centrality of its position in the cosmos or size and then were deflated by science. This is a bit more complex than the claims about Constantine and Jefferson since it is a claim about many people. Some Christian someplace may have made these mistakes, but most Christians did not because Christians could not.
Why?
A chief theme of the Bible is the relative unimportance of the reader compared to God. Atheists complain about this feature when they wish to promote the cult of self-esteem. Take the “chosen people.” If a man reads the Bible and believes that being the chosen people was based on their size or prominence, he is a very bad reader. One plain example of an endless number of texts (Deuteronomy 7):
6“For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. 7It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, 8but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
Science did not have to tell Israel that they were not the “biggest and best” because God told them at the start.
Humanity is not important Biblically because of our importance, smarts, powers, or cosmic position, but because God loves us and made us in His image.
For example, I have read Christians discussing humans being “little lower than the angels” as if this passage from Hebrews 2 exalted humanity. Go read the context in a modern translation. The writer of Hebrews is making the point that Jesus was not an angel but became less than an angel and died so Jesus could be exalted. The present low place of humanity in the cosmological hierarchy is emphasized. It takes the God-Man Jesus Christ to make us “greater than angels.” We are not in ourselves smarter, stronger, more spiritual, or closer to Heaven than angels.
That takes the Incarnation which is about God becoming nothing to exalt humanity.
Of course, scientifically it is also false that being at the “center” made ancient peoples feel they were important. On Platonic cosmology (dominant in the West in the Middle Ages) being in the center was bad since it was where all the base or heavy stuff fell. The Heavens were up and out and housed the “fine” elements. Moving the Earth from the center of the cosmos (as theorists did at times) would have been to exalt humanity by putting them “out there” and to debase the Central Fire (as some Pythagoreans did).
Nor did the ancients (including Christians) think the Earth was huge relative to the rest of the cosmos. It was commonplace to talk about the smallness of the Earth compared to the vast extent of Heaven. Read Dante . . . not just the part about Hell but Paradise and you will see the mainstream Medieval view. The Earth was tiny compared to the Heavens. After all, it takes a certain kind of stupidity or a permanent childishness to assert “big” is better. The human brain is smaller than a star by many orders of magnitude. Which is more interesting? Which is more important? Are whales better than dogs because they are bigger?
But any Christian must know this in his heart because Christianity loves to humble the great and send the lesser forward. Science did not lessen our place in the cosmos by moving the Earth from the center. In fact, some Christians in some places (particularly Victorian England) had problems with deep time and a picture of nature “red in tooth and claw” but that is a different story altogether.
One thing is true: you can promptly ignore any fundamentalist Christian text or atheist diatribe that makes the argument that science “humbled” humanity in this particular way.
**If you do not read Warren Throckmorton: you should.
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