The Genesis of the Modern Mind
by A. C. Grayling

     Imagine yourself walking out of doors in a clear night in the year 1600 and looking up at the heavens. What would you see? You would see these beautiful sparkling dots of light set in the ceiling of Heaven majestically revolving around the Earth, around you. You were in a kind of big Planetarium and it had all been built for your benefit. The great light of the Sun, the lesser light of the Moon, and these little diamonds twinkling in the sky, they've been put there by the Creator for your benefit. Indeed you are not only at the center of creation but at its Pinnacle, in material terms anyway. Because, of course, you're much more special than the dogs and cats, and the rats and mice, so you are at the center, and at the Pinnacle. And it all exists for you. That makes you of cosmic significance.

     One hundred years later, in the year 1700, somebody stepping out of doors in a clear night and looking up at the sky would have seen exactly the same things, the moon, and the twinkling stars, but would have interpreted them in an utterly different way. Instead of seeing these bodies embedded in the crystalline spheres and revolving around the earth, such a person would see immense vast distances, that these little twinkling dots of light are in fact Suns like our own, or even indeed collections of hundreds of millions of suns like our own, so far away, unimaginably, that it's impossible almost to imagine the distances that lie between the observing eye and the objective of that act of vision. And the consequence of this different perspective on the universe for thinking about us is, among other things, that we are not of cosmic significance. We are not at the center and the Pinnacle of things. That we occupy a very very different place in the universe and the great narrative of its history. We are a spec on a spec, in a great great abyss of space and time -- an utterly different view.

     Now imagine living through that change of perspective. Imagine thinking that as you looked up at the sky you were seeing something in your locality, this set of of Heavenly objects not very far away and existing for YOUR BENEFIT. [ The stars were put there to benefit only humans for navigation, calender, clock ] And then imagine suddenly seeing them flee into Infinities of space. Changing completely who and what you are in the universe. Well that is what happened in the 17 century. And along with it, along with this dramatic change of perspective went many other changes of perspective. Let me give you an example. In that same year, 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, in the Campo de Fiori in Rome, for having, among other things, publicly avowed his belief that the Copernican view, which puts the Sun at the center of the universe, not the Earth, was literally correct. So he was arrested and he was charged with heresy, with impiety, because in accepting the Copernican view he naturally accepted some of the consequences of it, for how we think about matters of religion, and about human beings. And so he was killed for thinking these new thoughts, for being one of the very first among those who publicly committed themselves to that new view of the universe. In 1619, in Toulouse, in France Cesare Vanini was burned at the stake for the same reason. Vanini had said, not only was Copernicus right about the structure of the universe, but that if you took seriously the implications of what he said you would see that almost everything else about the great orthodoxies of thought that people were expected to accept, principally by the church, could not possibly be right. Because if scripture was so wrong about the origin and nature of the universe, it must be wrong about a lot of other things too. He was burned at the stake. Now just a few years before he was put on trial by the Inquisition, a monk called, Foscarini, wrote to the great Cardinal Bellamine, who was the head of the Holy office, which is the name given to the Inquisition in the Vatican, and he said to him, look you know in recent years, with the invention of the telescope and the publication by Galileo of his little book The Starry Messenger, we now know that there are some serious questions to be raised about the picture of the universe given in scripture. Surely we (meaning the church) should begin to think a bit about this, and to see whether we aren't wrong in the way we ask people to view the universe. Cardinal Bellamine wrote back to him using a very chilling phrase. He said to him “in your prudence.” It's a very scary three words when you consider what it meant. In your Prudence don't forget what it says in Psalm 104, that he hath laid the foundations of the earth that they may not be moved forever. The Earth is motionless at the center of the universe. Think about Joshua, outside the walls of Jericho, who made the sun stand still for 24 hours in the heavens. Think of what the church fathers said in their writings about what we are to believe about the structure of the universe. So, in your prudence, don't try this on. Of course, in the early 1630s, Galileo was put on trial for publishing his book, "The Dialogue on the two World Systems," in which he took the side of the Copernican view. He'd been warned not to on a couple of occasions before by the Vatican. Now he had published this book. He was arrested, taken to Rome, put on trial, and he was forced, in order to save his life, to recant. He had to say the world, the Earth, doesn't move.