During my early adolescence, I attended a strict Christian school where the science textbooks said on the first page that the Bible was the infallible word of God. No alternative theories to creationism were allowed to even be considered.
When I became agnostic, the universe unfolded into something bigger and more uncertain than I had ever imagined, and, when I read historical accounts of the Renaissance or Enlightenment, I could personally relate to the rocky transition from a medieval model of an earth-centered universe to a sun-centered solar system. My personal perspective had been similarly flipped on its head.
In my imagination the principal of my Christian school was the face of a medieval pope, and Galileo was the heroic maverick who – if he had gone to my school – could have seen through its religious propaganda.
When I read about how Galileo was accused of heresy by the Catholic Church for his observations, the injustice felt personal. I imagined my principal, My Bagwell, pointing a sharp finger at Galileo and ordering him to “get right with God and believe and make sure to always wear socks and a belt” as he did with boy the students in chapel.
I could see how most of the Christians I grew up with me clung to the world view I had abandoned, and I saw that mirrored in the historical resistance to the idea that the earth was not the center of all things.
Even after the sun-centered model of the solar system was widely accepted, many people took the findings as a strike against their sense of worth, calling for either cynical resignation or abject humility. I had to find my own way to deal with the discovery that – even next to the sun and Jupiter — I was a speck of dust inhabiting a slightly larger speck of dust called earth.
The more I thought about it, the more I noticed that there was a tacit value connected to the earth-centered cosmology: the arbitrary, childish and absurd assumption that bigness and centrality confer importance.
Even after the earth-centered model of the universe went away, many still assumed that being big and in the center were what made things and people matter. Scientific documentaries commented about how terribly humbling it was to discover that we were not central, and that the universe is incomprehensibly vast compared to us.
But favoring big over small is subjective. Value does not exist in nature. It is imposed by people. It says little about the universe. It says a lot about us. I wonder where the idea of “big and central” as the yardstick of importance came from.
Whatever the case, it depends on a limited perspective. Maybe I would seem unimportant from the perspective of a non-terrestrial being existing thousands of light years from earth.
But again, the evaluation depends on a point of view. From my own limited perspective, my dad matters more to me than a lifeless star light years away from me, no matter how big the star is. I wonder: Why are bigness and centrality things that historically humankind has valued so highly?
The “bigness” value can be seen in everyday human behavior. If someone gets rich, the first thing they usually do is move into a giant house with more space than any one person can possibly ever use. Why?
Apparently they have never played the game “Treasure Hunt,” a game show that came on T.V. when I was little. For fun, my eleven year old brother would set up treasure hunt conditions in his bedroom. He would array a scattered collection of cardboard boxes, all different sizes, on his bed.
As his contestant I had only one chance to select a box out of many boxes in the hope of walking away with a prize. Each box either contained a treasure or something not especially valuable. As a toddler, I would always go straight for the biggest and most colorful box.
But my brother was sneaky. He would sometimes put the most worthless objects in the biggest boxes – a sheet of wadded paper or a single stick of gum. Often he would put the most enticing treasures in the smallest boxes: a 10 dollar bill, for example, or a bag of my favorite candy.
I quickly learned to go for the smallest boxes until my brother realized I had caught on. Then he made it so that the size of the boxes provided no hint at all. Still, the lesson stayed with me. Size could be deceptive. Sometimes all a big box contained was a lot of empty space.
Even in purely economic terms, most people would agree that a diamond is worth more than an empty refrigerator box, maybe more valuable than the refrigerator itself. Yet, for some reason, when it comes to cosmic things, the idea persists that space-hogging objects are automatically superior. Is a star more important than a single atom? Who says? Apparently, we do.
But a good case could be made for an atom being more important than a star. Atoms were here first. A star could not exist without the innumerable individual atoms that compose it. Even if that were not the case, atoms and stars just exist. They are really not in competition with each other, until someone capable of making comparisons says so.
But making comparisons is a natural human tendency. Thus, the expected response when we look at a night sky full of stars is for us to feel puny and reflect on our insignificance.
But why? While legions of stars inspire wonder, they do nothing to diminish how I see myself and those I love, because the belief that centrality and bigness determine worth is childish and silly. It is like saying that that the loudest music is the best music. Not to mention that the universe – as far as we can tell — has no center at all. The universe has apparently not conferred honor on anything by making it the center of everything.
Knowing that there is a vast and mysterious universe beyond ourselves cannot help but dramatically change our perspective. But how we view ourselves as a result is a choice. It is okay for us to like ourselves and each other, even if we are, relatively speaking, specks of dust on a spinning rock called earth.
After all, the universe has never said, “Hor hor hor, puny humans, you are worthless, I will crush you.” It was people who decided that the very large was superior to the very small; that a galaxy mattered more than a single atom; that a mountain was more important than a cat.
While the belief in the earth being center has – mostly – gone away, the idea that being big and central is what determines worth has not, an idea invented by the same people who assumed everything in the cosmos revolved around them, and who turned the night sky into a kind of cosmic Rorschach test which revealed human fears, concerns, and ambitions. But the stars remain a kind of values clarification test. As objective entities, stars are silent about what is good or bad.
But inside their silence is a choice: to look at them and feel small or to learn about and wonder about them and feel a part of the grandeur of the cosmos they represent. However many there are, stars do not think, talk, plan, compare, or care about anything.
They do not determine our response to them. We do.