Tom Bethell; Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington, D.C. 2005.
Review by Carl Grant
Tom Bethell has some criticisms of the way science is currently done. The dominant points of view in various disciplines have become almost immune from criticism. This is disturbing because, of all disciplines, science should be most open to new evidence and subject to revision. A number of factors can be cited as contributing to bureaucratic tendencies in science. First, science has increasingly become dependent on government funding, and those who control the purse-strings determine what projects are pursued and what results are acceptable. Second, increasing specialization means that within each specialization there are fewer “experts.” Scientists tend to be reluctant to make criticisms outside their own areas of expertise and may not be taken seriously if they do. Third, there is an increased emphasis on consensus within the scientific community. The phrase, “most reputable scientist agree ....” is heard often enough. For political reasons those who control the funding are more interested in results than research, so they seek the consensus view. But in the historical view it is easy to find innumerable scientific consensuses that have been overturned.
Science depends on the unfettered search for knowledge, and if Bethell is right, consensus is the enemy of science. The bulk of his book is devoted to criticizing a number of consensus views, most of which have a left-ward bias. Some of the more prominent scientific myths are, according to Bethell: global warming is caused by humans; human cloning and embryonic stem cell research are the keys to health and happiness; Darwinian evolution is supported by overwhelming evidence; religion is the enemy of science; and AIDS is an equal opportunity epidemic on which we need to spend a great deal more money. My own views tend to be in agreement with Bethell's. I think science has become a sacred cow and that scientists are often treated as if they are the final authority on nearly everything. Scientists, like other groups, have biases, conflicts of interest, hidden agendas, and are not always completely truthful. Their credentials in no way guarantee their expertise or even their competence. As among other specialists, some of the practitioners are incompetent, and most of the rest fall on a continuum between semi-competent and reasonably good at what they do. At most about ten percent are really top-not, but, even the scientific superstars should be evaluated by their work and their arguments not by their status. This is doubly important when they are opining about matters outside their field.
So I find myself agreeing with Bethell’s views regarding the problems of how science is conducted, and I am mostly in agreement with his thinking about the interface between religion and science. For example, I think he is correct that the evidence for naturalistic evolution is under-whelming. Much of what passes for evolutionary theory is only a series of ad-hoc explanations to cover the poor fit between the facts and Darwin’s theory. In spite of my general agreement, I am troubled by Bethell’s methods. His use of references is unsatisfactory. While using references in some places, in others he fails to provide them even where context requires them. For instance, while arguing that AIDS is not a heterosexual epidemic, he says, “careful U.S. studies have already shown that at least a thousand sexual contacts are needed to achieve heterosexual transmission of the virus.” [p.113] No reference are given for these, presumably, important studies, or any discussion of the quality of the studies or their conclusions. In attempting to establish that the Catholic church was open to the possibility of the Copernican view, he quotes Galileo as follows, “He soon found that his Jesuit friends in Rome had already verified the actual existence of the new planets, meaning the moons of Jupiter, and had constantly been observing them for two months: we compared notes, and I found they agreed exactly with my own.” No reference. He might have let us in on the source of this information. A letter? Book? A reported conversation? It would be impossible to prove or disprove that Galileo ever said this, or for that matter anything else, from the information Bethell provides. When he goes on record without any reference to his sources, he impairs his credibility.
Another problem with Bethell's style is his tendency to overstate his case. On page 212, where he attacks evolution, he says “molecular biologists don't have any idea how the mechanisms they study came into existence.” This is clearly an overstatement. Talking with molecular biologists, I've learned that they have many ideas on how the mechanisms they study came into existence. Their ideas may be right or wrong, but they certainly have them. Overstatements like this, found throughout the book, dilute its credibility. At other times Bethell concedes too much. On page 202 he introduces the following argument against intelligent design: “If the advocates of intelligent design can invoke an invisible designer, or God, who can prevail over all difficulties any time He wants, then we are more in the realm of magic than science.” He counters this by saying that a comparable criticism can also be leveled at Darwinism. The criticism itself, he lets stand. Why? A strength of intelligent design is that the designer is not identified. That’s a player-to-be-named-later approach that only tries to show the improbability that organisms evolve by chance. Richard Dawkins comments that “invoking God as a designer just pushes the problem back and we still have to explain God's existence.” But, acknowledging the evidence of design in nature does not have to enter into the separate theological questions about the designer. A person who knows nothing about airplanes and has never seen one, who then sees an airplane land, and examines it, will probably conclude that it was designed. The fact that he doesn't know how it works, who designed it, or anything about the designer, is of little importance to his conclusion that it is not the product of chance. Working on one problem at a time is perfectly legitimate in science.
Bethell is also too glib in his dismissal theistic evolution. Here he simply quotes approvingly a number of people from both sides who say that theistic evolution is inherently atheistic and has little to commend it. So a whole continuum of views is not admitted for discussion; we are told that all views along this line are inconsistent theism. Why? G. K. Chesterton says that an atheist must embrace A to Z evolution, while the theist is free to follow the evidence and believe in any amount of evolution or none. This is too similar to the people who arrogantly claim to know precisely how God operates and condemn anyone who doesn't go along with their explanations. Young earth creationists sometimes insist that anyone who disagrees with them is not a Christian. The atheists have got to love these guys. They are such an easy target; their version of the argument and is the end of any intellectual engagement with the evidence that the earth is millions of years old. People who have been instructed in on-all-or-nothing doctrines, at some point, often find they no longer believe doctrines C, F, and Q, and drift into reluctant agnosticism. To summarize, Bethell has written a moderately useful book. If one ignores its frequent shrillness, it provides an introduction to a number of important issues from a conservative point of view.
This piece was originally published in The New Oxford Review.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Monday, April 03, 2006
Enigma in Human Form
by Carl Grant
Standard evolutionary theory, by which I mean naturalistic Darwinism (ND),faces an enigma in human form. ND works mostly through a random search for improved reproductive performance, where slight modifications that produce improved fitness are preserved through natural selection. The human in a state of nature has no tools, clothing, or mechanical weapons. In looking at him, one wonders what lucky modifications produced the following attributes:
1. Children, produced mostly one at a time, with the longest, highly vulnerable infancy, followed by the longest childhood of any mammal.
2. No organic weapons such as antlers or claws, The teeth being uniquely small and even, with no muzzle are not much of a weapon, except in the hands of a true expert such as Mike Tyson.
3. His bipedal locomotion makes him much slower than any predator over a short distance, while making him particularly vulnerable to injury after a fall. Comparing him to his closest relative, the chimp, his climbing ability is pathetic. The chimp has been variously estimated to be from four to seven times as strong. The chimps bones are thicker, the skin is thicker and stronger, and the chimp has a coat of fur to insulate and protect.
The converse is also enigmatic. Humans have many capabilities which would seem to be of little value in the survival reproduction race. There are numerous examples of this. I'll give two of them in some depth. The first is the way some of us are able to go beyond speech in the use of the voice. When I first took a singing lesson the instructor told me to match a pitch from the piano. I was very surprised when I found I could do this the first time, pedestrian example, but I was impressed. I am far from a great singer(although I think my voice is much better then it sounds), but when I have attempted to imitate professionals, such as Bing Crosby, it does sound somewhat like him, and is certainly better quality then my normal voice. I'm not sure how incremental improvements in this arena would be of much aid in survival, except perhaps in front of a live audience. I've noticed that some performers are able to imitate an incredible variety of sounds. Here is a partial list of some I have heard. All of the following were somewhere between adequate and astounding. A few of them required amplification. People can imitate most musical instruments including the flute, trumpet, sax, clarinet, French horn(the French call it a German horn), banjo, bass, harp, violin, and various drums. I've also heard good imitations of hot rods, Mercedes, gunfire, bottles being opened, bird songs, whale songs, running and dripping water, helicopters, creaking floors and doors, various alarms, packages being opened etc. My second set of examples involves the use of that most incredible all purpose tool, the human hand.
As a high school student I took beginning typing. Every Friday we took a test. We typed furiously and at the end counted the number of words. We then counted our mistakes and subtracted 5 words for each mistake, a very unfair ratio, I thought. On a bad day I would owe them words. Inept as I was, I did have flashes of mediocrity. I could rattle along pretty well; I just made too many mistakes. Still the speed and dexterity, with each finger working independently and hitting the right key over 50% of the time is an achievement beyond the reach of even a highly motivated chimp. There was one girl in our class who could type a disturbing seventy three words per minute. She was no beginner. I'm sure her parents started teaching her to type when she was a fetus. Our teacher told us that a top professional typist could type about 200 words per minute. Where did this ability come from? A somewhat similar skill is required of a pianist. What a skilled pianist can do requires speed, dexterity, touch, flexibility, and hand and eye coordination that seems magical. We usually take the hands for granted. Since there were few pianos around 50 million years ago what caused this latent capability to be developed? The materialist calls this a pre-adaptation, but details are not forthcoming. Impressive in a different way are the skilled use of the hands by a sleight of hand magician. To make playing cards appear or disappear she will use a back palm. To do this yourself take a number of cards, grasp one corner of the short edges with the 2nd and 3rd fingers, curl them around the backs of the third and 4th fingers to grasp the other corner holding your hand naturally so that from the front the hand looks empty. Next you simply rotate one of the cards around grasping it with the thumb and index finger so it blocks the audience's view of the remaining cards. Next you throw away the newly produced card, while simultaneously rotating the rest of the cards back behind your hand. Sounds easy enough doesn't it? Continue in this fashion until all the cards have been produced. To make the cards vanish just reverse the process. There are many more moves involving equal amazing but different skills in manipulating cards. Then there are slights with ropes, balls, coins and innumerable other objects. Perhaps our distant ancestor could increase her chance of survival by making her companions bananas disappear, if she didn't get caught.
Mechanics, surgeons, painters and a host of others make extraordinary use of their hands. The enigma then results from a combination of facts. We aren't strong, swift, or well protected. We do not reproduce rapidly, and when we do our young are extremely vulnerable for an exceptionally long period of time. However, none of this matters once we have civilization going for us. Our infants have little to fear from predators once they are safely ensconced in their cribs inside the house and mom and dad have weapons at their disposal. So did nature know this was going to happen? If so, she would not have to waste time on these seeming weaknesses, but could busy herself pre-adapting us for the above mentioned skills. It seems we had anatomical structures and developmental tendencies in place long before the abilities became operative. Many of the apparent weaknesses resulted in structures that later came together harmoniously to allow our latent abilities to flourish.
Bipedal locomotion frees the forelimbs for tool use. It also allows us to carry things without using the mouth, which in turn is freed up for the development of speech. It is also more efficient in in terms of respiration. Most mammal's breathing is tied to locomotion. This is in part caused by having to support the head in front of the body, adding to energy expenditure. Since the human head is lined up over the center of gravity of the whole body, which in turn is directly over the feet our breathing is decoupled from standing, walking, or running, This is a big aid to speech. Our relative hairlessness also aids in speech. Most mammals have to pant to cool down. Humans' lack of fur combined with their uniquely efficient sweat glands allow them to forego panting. We can also take a cold shower. The reason our teeth are not good weapons is that they are small, all of about the same height, very close together, and we have no muzzle. The mouth is relatively small, which makes the voice more resonant. The structure and positioning of the dentition allows clear enunciation. Our long infancy allows language to develop. We have time to become educated. It allows time for closer ties to develop between family and community. It also allows time for the continued growth of the brain. Humans are the only creature in which the brain grows significantly after birth.
All this suggests some sort of purposive or directive factor. What that factor is cannot be inferred from this type of evidence. Whether it involves a deistic, pantheistic, or theistic God, or perhaps an elan vital or vital force, or super aliens, or something totally novel must be adjudicated in other arenas. The objection might be raised that this solves nothing. It just pushes the problem back to another entity or force that must be explained. That is true, but realizing the nature of the problem, and discarding unproductive approaches, e.g. materialistic naturalism, is well worth the effort. If we landed on some distant planet and found structures clearly evidencing purpose, we shouldn't spend all our resources looking for "natural" causes. If an aborigine found a Geiger counter she would infer that it wasn't a product of random forces, even though she might have no idea what created it or explain how that entity came to be.
A series of experiments over the last 120 years demonstrate some remarkable human visual abilities which present difficulties for neodarwinian theory. I'll consider only one series of experiments (published in Psychological Issues, Vol. III, no.4 monograph 12. The Formation and Transformation of the Perceptual World by Ivo Kohler International University Press, New York, N.Y. 1964.) Ivo Kohler Phd., is head of the Department of Psychology, Institute for Experimental Psychology, Innsbruck Austria. In 1962-1963 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Using specially designed spectacles or goggles to invert the image sent to the subject eyes The world appeared upside down, but this changed over the next few days and more and more images appeared rightside up. The subject was able to function normally and was tested for motor coordination. He was able to ride a bicycle and engage in fencing and was able to parry an opponents blows. When the goggles were removed after nine days the world appeared upside down for a few days and then his vision returned to normal. These experiments have been replicated by at least two other qualified researchers. Trying to imagine how this capacity arose through a series of fortuitous mutations, preserved through natural selection is not easy. However I know that Darwinism is an incredibly flexible theory, whose advocates will surely rise to the challenge. I will submit my own thoughts on how it might have occurred. If it has some trifling defects at least it might provide food for thought. I picture our hominid ancestors wandering around in the forest primeval wearing inversion goggles.
One can easily imagine one of these hominids having been born with a mutation causing his field of vision to be rotated 75 degrees from the norm. This would enable him to view things in about their normal (pre-goggle) form by tilting his neck 105 degrees around his shoulder. Thank God for those yoga classes. Now he would be able to realize that that yellow blob hanging down from the ground is a tiger. This would allow him to rush off in the general direction of someplace else. This would place his unmutated companions at a disadvantage in the survival sweepstakes. First to attain the equivalent view they would need to do a handstand. Second they would either have to right themselves, or make their get-away walking on their hands. Their only hope would be that the tiger was so bemused by their antics that he would forget to give chase. Some might argue that hominids not wearing goggles would have a big edge over our hero. This is nonsense, since we can presume that like current teenagers, the hominids would all affect the same look.
Standard evolutionary theory, by which I mean naturalistic Darwinism (ND),faces an enigma in human form. ND works mostly through a random search for improved reproductive performance, where slight modifications that produce improved fitness are preserved through natural selection. The human in a state of nature has no tools, clothing, or mechanical weapons. In looking at him, one wonders what lucky modifications produced the following attributes:
1. Children, produced mostly one at a time, with the longest, highly vulnerable infancy, followed by the longest childhood of any mammal.
2. No organic weapons such as antlers or claws, The teeth being uniquely small and even, with no muzzle are not much of a weapon, except in the hands of a true expert such as Mike Tyson.
3. His bipedal locomotion makes him much slower than any predator over a short distance, while making him particularly vulnerable to injury after a fall. Comparing him to his closest relative, the chimp, his climbing ability is pathetic. The chimp has been variously estimated to be from four to seven times as strong. The chimps bones are thicker, the skin is thicker and stronger, and the chimp has a coat of fur to insulate and protect.
The converse is also enigmatic. Humans have many capabilities which would seem to be of little value in the survival reproduction race. There are numerous examples of this. I'll give two of them in some depth. The first is the way some of us are able to go beyond speech in the use of the voice. When I first took a singing lesson the instructor told me to match a pitch from the piano. I was very surprised when I found I could do this the first time, pedestrian example, but I was impressed. I am far from a great singer(although I think my voice is much better then it sounds), but when I have attempted to imitate professionals, such as Bing Crosby, it does sound somewhat like him, and is certainly better quality then my normal voice. I'm not sure how incremental improvements in this arena would be of much aid in survival, except perhaps in front of a live audience. I've noticed that some performers are able to imitate an incredible variety of sounds. Here is a partial list of some I have heard. All of the following were somewhere between adequate and astounding. A few of them required amplification. People can imitate most musical instruments including the flute, trumpet, sax, clarinet, French horn(the French call it a German horn), banjo, bass, harp, violin, and various drums. I've also heard good imitations of hot rods, Mercedes, gunfire, bottles being opened, bird songs, whale songs, running and dripping water, helicopters, creaking floors and doors, various alarms, packages being opened etc. My second set of examples involves the use of that most incredible all purpose tool, the human hand.
As a high school student I took beginning typing. Every Friday we took a test. We typed furiously and at the end counted the number of words. We then counted our mistakes and subtracted 5 words for each mistake, a very unfair ratio, I thought. On a bad day I would owe them words. Inept as I was, I did have flashes of mediocrity. I could rattle along pretty well; I just made too many mistakes. Still the speed and dexterity, with each finger working independently and hitting the right key over 50% of the time is an achievement beyond the reach of even a highly motivated chimp. There was one girl in our class who could type a disturbing seventy three words per minute. She was no beginner. I'm sure her parents started teaching her to type when she was a fetus. Our teacher told us that a top professional typist could type about 200 words per minute. Where did this ability come from? A somewhat similar skill is required of a pianist. What a skilled pianist can do requires speed, dexterity, touch, flexibility, and hand and eye coordination that seems magical. We usually take the hands for granted. Since there were few pianos around 50 million years ago what caused this latent capability to be developed? The materialist calls this a pre-adaptation, but details are not forthcoming. Impressive in a different way are the skilled use of the hands by a sleight of hand magician. To make playing cards appear or disappear she will use a back palm. To do this yourself take a number of cards, grasp one corner of the short edges with the 2nd and 3rd fingers, curl them around the backs of the third and 4th fingers to grasp the other corner holding your hand naturally so that from the front the hand looks empty. Next you simply rotate one of the cards around grasping it with the thumb and index finger so it blocks the audience's view of the remaining cards. Next you throw away the newly produced card, while simultaneously rotating the rest of the cards back behind your hand. Sounds easy enough doesn't it? Continue in this fashion until all the cards have been produced. To make the cards vanish just reverse the process. There are many more moves involving equal amazing but different skills in manipulating cards. Then there are slights with ropes, balls, coins and innumerable other objects. Perhaps our distant ancestor could increase her chance of survival by making her companions bananas disappear, if she didn't get caught.
Mechanics, surgeons, painters and a host of others make extraordinary use of their hands. The enigma then results from a combination of facts. We aren't strong, swift, or well protected. We do not reproduce rapidly, and when we do our young are extremely vulnerable for an exceptionally long period of time. However, none of this matters once we have civilization going for us. Our infants have little to fear from predators once they are safely ensconced in their cribs inside the house and mom and dad have weapons at their disposal. So did nature know this was going to happen? If so, she would not have to waste time on these seeming weaknesses, but could busy herself pre-adapting us for the above mentioned skills. It seems we had anatomical structures and developmental tendencies in place long before the abilities became operative. Many of the apparent weaknesses resulted in structures that later came together harmoniously to allow our latent abilities to flourish.
Bipedal locomotion frees the forelimbs for tool use. It also allows us to carry things without using the mouth, which in turn is freed up for the development of speech. It is also more efficient in in terms of respiration. Most mammal's breathing is tied to locomotion. This is in part caused by having to support the head in front of the body, adding to energy expenditure. Since the human head is lined up over the center of gravity of the whole body, which in turn is directly over the feet our breathing is decoupled from standing, walking, or running, This is a big aid to speech. Our relative hairlessness also aids in speech. Most mammals have to pant to cool down. Humans' lack of fur combined with their uniquely efficient sweat glands allow them to forego panting. We can also take a cold shower. The reason our teeth are not good weapons is that they are small, all of about the same height, very close together, and we have no muzzle. The mouth is relatively small, which makes the voice more resonant. The structure and positioning of the dentition allows clear enunciation. Our long infancy allows language to develop. We have time to become educated. It allows time for closer ties to develop between family and community. It also allows time for the continued growth of the brain. Humans are the only creature in which the brain grows significantly after birth.
All this suggests some sort of purposive or directive factor. What that factor is cannot be inferred from this type of evidence. Whether it involves a deistic, pantheistic, or theistic God, or perhaps an elan vital or vital force, or super aliens, or something totally novel must be adjudicated in other arenas. The objection might be raised that this solves nothing. It just pushes the problem back to another entity or force that must be explained. That is true, but realizing the nature of the problem, and discarding unproductive approaches, e.g. materialistic naturalism, is well worth the effort. If we landed on some distant planet and found structures clearly evidencing purpose, we shouldn't spend all our resources looking for "natural" causes. If an aborigine found a Geiger counter she would infer that it wasn't a product of random forces, even though she might have no idea what created it or explain how that entity came to be.
A series of experiments over the last 120 years demonstrate some remarkable human visual abilities which present difficulties for neodarwinian theory. I'll consider only one series of experiments (published in Psychological Issues, Vol. III, no.4 monograph 12. The Formation and Transformation of the Perceptual World by Ivo Kohler International University Press, New York, N.Y. 1964.) Ivo Kohler Phd., is head of the Department of Psychology, Institute for Experimental Psychology, Innsbruck Austria. In 1962-1963 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Using specially designed spectacles or goggles to invert the image sent to the subject eyes The world appeared upside down, but this changed over the next few days and more and more images appeared rightside up. The subject was able to function normally and was tested for motor coordination. He was able to ride a bicycle and engage in fencing and was able to parry an opponents blows. When the goggles were removed after nine days the world appeared upside down for a few days and then his vision returned to normal. These experiments have been replicated by at least two other qualified researchers. Trying to imagine how this capacity arose through a series of fortuitous mutations, preserved through natural selection is not easy. However I know that Darwinism is an incredibly flexible theory, whose advocates will surely rise to the challenge. I will submit my own thoughts on how it might have occurred. If it has some trifling defects at least it might provide food for thought. I picture our hominid ancestors wandering around in the forest primeval wearing inversion goggles.
One can easily imagine one of these hominids having been born with a mutation causing his field of vision to be rotated 75 degrees from the norm. This would enable him to view things in about their normal (pre-goggle) form by tilting his neck 105 degrees around his shoulder. Thank God for those yoga classes. Now he would be able to realize that that yellow blob hanging down from the ground is a tiger. This would allow him to rush off in the general direction of someplace else. This would place his unmutated companions at a disadvantage in the survival sweepstakes. First to attain the equivalent view they would need to do a handstand. Second they would either have to right themselves, or make their get-away walking on their hands. Their only hope would be that the tiger was so bemused by their antics that he would forget to give chase. Some might argue that hominids not wearing goggles would have a big edge over our hero. This is nonsense, since we can presume that like current teenagers, the hominids would all affect the same look.
Friday, January 13, 2006
The Copernican Principle
by Carl Grant
The Copernican Principle (CP) is frequently encountered in science writing and TV commentary. It is the view that humans with their inherent tendency to self aggrandizement, with the aid of religion, overstate their own significance to an incredible degree. The prime example of this is the belief that the earth is the center of the universe, and man has dominion over it. Science, it is said, has destroyed this cozy self-centered picture. The earth has been shown to be a smallish planet, circling a star located on the out skirts of a galaxy containing a hundred billion such stars. The galaxy itself is just one of hundreds of millions galaxies in the known universe. Science has shown, further, that humans, far from being at the apex of creation, are just one more life form out of the several million on this particular planet. Cats are as good at being cats as humans are of being human. Even our "special abilities" are far from unique. Our much vaunted use of tools is achieved by numerous other species. Chimps, for example, break branches off trees, pull off the leaves, and use them to dig in crevasses for ants, termites, etc. Religion (especially Judaism and Christianity) are seen as supporting and pandering to this self indulgent human tendency. In fact the CP is usually brought up in connection with a direct or indirect critique of religion. While the CP may have its uses, the history and psychology behind it are nonsense.
The reason Christians during the medieval period, the Greeks, and just about everyone prior to Galileo thought the earth was at the center are pretty straight forward and from their perspective quite reasonable. A sun centered earth would have to be rotating at around 1,000 mph, and moving about the sun much faster. Yet they felt no sense of movement. No wind, no centrifugal force, if something was dropped from a height it landed straight down, as opposed to landing behind the direction of motion as Aristotelian physics said it should. Most conclusive was that no parallax (change in apparent position of an object due to change in position of the observer) for any of the fixed stars in summer and winter. Even in Kepler and Galileo's time instruments were not sophisticated enough to measure a stellar parallax. While being at the center of attention or power may be valued by some, it doesn't automatically mean better or favored. In both the Greek and early Christian view the earth was a place of decay and death. It was the heavens that were perfect, timeless and the dwelling place of God or the gods. For Christians the real center was the location of hell. In a similar way the elevation of humans above animals was fairly reasonable. We do have a kind of dominion over the earth. We go to the zoo, we don't reside there. Creatures as large and diverse as horses, camels and elephants do our work. To take an extremely general term, such as communication, and apply it to both humans and animals can be misleading. Eagles and dogs both have the ability to lift themselves off the ground unaided and land someplace else, but dogs jump and eagles fly. Some animals use tools just as do people, but there's a notable difference between grubbing for insects with a stick and laser-beam ophthalmology. Humans and animals both play, but if you need a fourth for bridge don't pick a chimpanzee. Their declarer play is terrible, and they tend to hog the bidding. My point is that the ancients, when they put humanity in a separate category, were not being totally unreasonable. Another point to be noted is that Christians did not put themselves at the apex of the chain of being; that was reserved for God. There were also other beings who were believed to be higher on the scale than humans, such as archangels, angels, fairies Cherubim etc. When you add concepts like original sin you might conclude that humans have a tendency for self-abasement rather then self aggrandizement.
The Copernican Principle (CP) is frequently encountered in science writing and TV commentary. It is the view that humans with their inherent tendency to self aggrandizement, with the aid of religion, overstate their own significance to an incredible degree. The prime example of this is the belief that the earth is the center of the universe, and man has dominion over it. Science, it is said, has destroyed this cozy self-centered picture. The earth has been shown to be a smallish planet, circling a star located on the out skirts of a galaxy containing a hundred billion such stars. The galaxy itself is just one of hundreds of millions galaxies in the known universe. Science has shown, further, that humans, far from being at the apex of creation, are just one more life form out of the several million on this particular planet. Cats are as good at being cats as humans are of being human. Even our "special abilities" are far from unique. Our much vaunted use of tools is achieved by numerous other species. Chimps, for example, break branches off trees, pull off the leaves, and use them to dig in crevasses for ants, termites, etc. Religion (especially Judaism and Christianity) are seen as supporting and pandering to this self indulgent human tendency. In fact the CP is usually brought up in connection with a direct or indirect critique of religion. While the CP may have its uses, the history and psychology behind it are nonsense.
The reason Christians during the medieval period, the Greeks, and just about everyone prior to Galileo thought the earth was at the center are pretty straight forward and from their perspective quite reasonable. A sun centered earth would have to be rotating at around 1,000 mph, and moving about the sun much faster. Yet they felt no sense of movement. No wind, no centrifugal force, if something was dropped from a height it landed straight down, as opposed to landing behind the direction of motion as Aristotelian physics said it should. Most conclusive was that no parallax (change in apparent position of an object due to change in position of the observer) for any of the fixed stars in summer and winter. Even in Kepler and Galileo's time instruments were not sophisticated enough to measure a stellar parallax. While being at the center of attention or power may be valued by some, it doesn't automatically mean better or favored. In both the Greek and early Christian view the earth was a place of decay and death. It was the heavens that were perfect, timeless and the dwelling place of God or the gods. For Christians the real center was the location of hell. In a similar way the elevation of humans above animals was fairly reasonable. We do have a kind of dominion over the earth. We go to the zoo, we don't reside there. Creatures as large and diverse as horses, camels and elephants do our work. To take an extremely general term, such as communication, and apply it to both humans and animals can be misleading. Eagles and dogs both have the ability to lift themselves off the ground unaided and land someplace else, but dogs jump and eagles fly. Some animals use tools just as do people, but there's a notable difference between grubbing for insects with a stick and laser-beam ophthalmology. Humans and animals both play, but if you need a fourth for bridge don't pick a chimpanzee. Their declarer play is terrible, and they tend to hog the bidding. My point is that the ancients, when they put humanity in a separate category, were not being totally unreasonable. Another point to be noted is that Christians did not put themselves at the apex of the chain of being; that was reserved for God. There were also other beings who were believed to be higher on the scale than humans, such as archangels, angels, fairies Cherubim etc. When you add concepts like original sin you might conclude that humans have a tendency for self-abasement rather then self aggrandizement.
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