My post on Neil deGrasse Tyson laid the foundations for an “argument from cosmic indifference” that I will be considering closely in the week (or weeks) to come. It is a powerful argument (rhetorically if not logically) though it is rarely put into formal terms. I am going to evaluate it closely. But first I am going to pile up a jumbled set of claims that support it. Tyson’s was the first. We now turn to the second, a claim that the loss of an objective cosmic center to the universe presents an existential, theological challenge. I quote from Fang Li Zhi and Li Shu Xian:
“All religious models of the cosmos have centres. This is so in the West as well as in the East. There is a model of the world made of clay in front of the Hall of Mathematics (Shu Xue Dian) of the famous Buddhist temple Yong He Gong in Beijing, which shows the Buddhist’s view, namely, that the centre of the universe is Mount Xumi.
“One of the basic starting-points of modern cosmology is the notion that the universe has no centre, or, more precisely:
No points in the universe are preferential; all positions carry the same weight.” (Fang Li Zhi and Li Shu Xian, Creation of the Universe (Singapore: World Scientific, 1989), 17.)
So it is for Christianity. Jerusalem-Israel-Earth used to be the center of everything. But no more. And with the loss of a centered universe comes the loss of human significance and thus the loss of any religious/theological claims that place special value on human beings.
