Barry Arrington, a lawyer who practices in Colorado, has let slip that he is planning a book on the current contentions between the non-materialist and the materialist point of view on a number of topics. He has put some of his writing in this area on his Substack. Here’s a snippet from an excerpt that addresses the claim that Earth is not special after all because the universe is so big.

As he points out, these types of arguments have been made before and they follow a pattern:

In fairness, I take it that the materialists’ “big universe” objection is not a strictly logical one. Instead, it is an argument from incredulity, i.e., claiming that a proposition is false simply because someone has difficulty believing it. For instance, imagine you are transported back to 1803, a century before the Wright brothers’ first powered flight, and you find yourself in an auditorium debating someone about the future of technology. With the advantage of being a time traveler, you assert that one day, metal machines hundreds of feet long will carry dozens of passengers tens of thousands of feet in the air and transport them across oceans. Suppose your debate opponent responds, “You’re crazy. Metal can’t even float; that’s why we build ships out of wood. Now you’re saying that a metal machine will someday fly through the air like a bird. Insane.” Your opponent would be arguing from incredulity. They would, of course, be wrong, but they would nevertheless almost certainly be declared the winner of the debate because no one in the audience would believe you either. I never claimed that arguments from personal incredulity aren’t effective. They certainly are. They just aren’t logical, and they can lead us astray.

Those who assert the big universe argument are relying on a dynamic similar to your debate opponent. The argument goes like this. The ancients had no conception of the scale of the universe and the earth’s place in it. It was easy for them to imagine that the universe is kind of small and that the earth is at the center of it. But Copernicus came along and demolished the idea that the earth is special, and in the 1920s, we discovered that there are millions of other galaxies out there,[i] and that knowledge demolished the cozy little universe idea. The cold hard facts are that earth is an insignificant speck in an insignificant galaxy in a vast universe. There is no reason to believe that a God exists who cares about humans wandering around on that tiny speck. …

Let’s consider the first premise of the big universe argument – the ancients believed we live in a cozy little universe. The problem with the premise is that it is pure bunkum, as anyone with the faintest grasp of the history of cosmology knows. Ptolemy’s Almagest was, by far, the most influential book on cosmology ever written if one measures influence by time. Ptolemy published the Almagest around 150 AD, and his geocentric model remained the standard model of cosmology for nearly 1,400 years until Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was first printed in 1543.[iv] That was 482 years ago. Copernicus has over 900 years to go before his span of influence matches Ptolemy’s. While Ptolemy’s geocentric model was ultimately displaced, that doesn’t mean he was wrong about everything. For example, he knew the Earth is a sphere.[v] Another thing he knew is that the scale of the universe is mind-bogglingly vast. He wrote: “Moreover, the earth has, to the senses, the ratio of a point to the distance of the sphere of the so-called fixed stars.”[vi] Thus, according to Ptolemy, the earth has no “perceptible size in relation to the distance of the heavenly bodies.”[vii]

Ptolemy was not the only ancient who knew the universe is vast. The Psalmist was fully aware of his insignificance in relation to the cosmos. Writing circa 1,000 BC, he said:

“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

“For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.”[viii] …

The first premise of the “big universe” argument cannot hold up under scrutiny.

“Welcome to the Goldilocks Planet,” January 30, 2035

Other premises don’t hold up either and we will tackle the second one next week. We will keep you posted about the book too.