Human Significance and Existential Despair, Egocentrism and Geocentrism; Fundamentalism and Skepticalism

Introduction

The following is a condensed version of a much longer article – to appear in a later issue - and can be considered as a long introduction to it. Since the longer article is somewhat technical, and so long that readers may not see the forest for the trees, reading this condensed version with a clear statement of the essential points as an introduction can be very useful.

Historical Overview of the Issue

It used to be believed by most people that the universe is small – composed basically of the Earth, the sun and a few smaller and larger lights (planets and stars), with the Earth at the center of this universe (the ‘geocentric’ hypothesis). One of the most obvious things to be seen is that the sun rises and sets every day, and so it was believed that sun (and the stars and planets) rotate about the Earth, and that the most important things in the physical universe are human beings. Some people familiar with the Bible also believed that it taught all or most of this as religious truth.

Some even believed the Earth to be flat, and some of these believed the Bible taught this as well, but even in ancient times many understood that the Earth is spherical and that the Bible does not teach that it is flat. [There is however still a ‘flat-Earth society’ and they even have a web page.]

Later on it became the belief that the universe was a little larger than it had been thought to be, and that is was the sun which is at the center rather than the Earth, and everything rotated about the sun rather than about the Earth. Some people took this to mean that humans are less significant than they had considered themselves to be, and some assumed that all this disproved the divine origin of the Bible.

A Summary of the Conclusions of the Article

In actuality, of course the size of the universe, the placement of the Earth within it, and what rotates about what all have nothing to do with human significance. And the Torah certainly did not link the significance of humanity to the placement of the Earth. And in any case the Torah does not teach that the Earth is at the center or that the sun goes about the Earth – and even the scientists who discovered that the old ideas of science were wrong believed in the Bible and did not think that it taught these incorrect ideas. The location of the Earth and the question of what rotates about what is a purely-scientific issue.

Sun eclipsed by crescent earth, courtesy of NASA

Although that really ties up the matter, we’ll continue to make some other interesting points. For example, it certainly is the case that from the Torah perspective humans are very significant and that their significance is not tied to their relative size compared to the rest of the universe, however Maimonides taught that humans are NOT the most significant intelligent entities in the universe. This is not to say that Judaism accept that indeed humans are insignificant, just that both statements – that humans are insignificant or that they are necessarily the most significant – may be untrue according to Judaism.

Also, the statement that some fact of astronomy proves that humans are insignificant is an untrue statement since science does not deal with the significance of humanity, which is a matter either for sociology, evolutionary psycho-biology, or metaphysics.

In addition, interestingly enough it turns out that based on ideas in Einstein’s general relativity one can argue that there is a ‘geocentric’ view which is not scientifically wrong, just that it is not a scientific view but rather a metaphysical one - just as the statement “God exists” is not scientifically correct or incorrect, it is simply a metaphysical statement, so too the statement ‘the Earth is the center of the universe and the sun rotates about it’ is not necessarily scientifically wrong, it is simply a metaphysical statement. This is not to say that Judaism teaches geocentrism, but rather that if someone were to believe that the Earth is the center of the universe then this belief is not false according to science, it is simply not relevant to science since it is metaphysics. What IS false is that geocentrism is a valid scientific interpretation of the universe.

What is, and what is thought to be

The Torah neither teaches geocentrism, nor hinges the significance of human life on this or that cosmological theory, but people somehow think that the Torah teaches this or that the two are inextricably linked. Therefore, though the overthrow of geocentrism is of no intrinsic relevance to the Jewish religion, since it is thought to be by many, de facto it is of relevance.

Two Types of Geocentrism

There are at least two important relative motions of the Earth and Sun, one composing the 24-hour daily cycle, and the other composing the 365-day annual cycle. Here we will deal first with geocentrism in the context of the 24-hour daily cycle.