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.
