Church fixes facts around policy

When Galileo realised that the only way to explain what he was seeing with his own eyes was that the Earth revolved around the Sun, not the reverse, it set off a religious furore, and he was eventually forced to recant (perhaps muttering under his breath 'but it does move', rather as if he was crossing his fingers behind his back while telling an untruth, a story that should be true whether it is or not), The Church had a long history of this, and what they were saying to astronomers was: we don't care about reality, we want you to fix the facts around the policy. And so there was a lot of nonsense with more and more complex models trying to explain what anyone could see (for example the apparent movements of Mars) but in ways that clearly made less and less sense. Eventually even the church realised it was nonsense, and the idea that Earth had to be in the 'centre of the universe' to be consistent with the bible was dropped. Hard to keep fixing those facts forever, no matter who you are.

But just a minute, you can't get away with that! Okay, a lot of rubbish in the bible about the sun moving (or stopping!) in the sky, and about how things got created and so on. All right, if the Earth goes around the Sun, then the Earth goes around the Sun. can't argue with that, all you can say is in this case, because it wasn't self-evident (and indeed doesn't seem to fit with every day experience) the biblical writers got it wrong. But if they got this wrong then why not all of the other rubbish based on a primitive understanding of the history of the Earth and how it works? Can't just sort of whisper, quietly, they got this bit wrong but everything else is correct, and get away with it, can you?

And it's even worse than that. The other part of theology associated with Earth being the centre of the universe is that people believed that god had created Earth for people to live on. The Sun had been put in the sky for warmth and light, the Moon for light at night, and the rest of the heavens were a kind of spectacular backdrop. Little points of light stuck to a crystalline sphere surrounding the Earth, there for our enjoyment. All made perfect sense, with us in the middle of everything, looking outwards. A god's in his heaven all's right with the world sort of thing.

But we're not. In the middle of anything. Not in the middle of our Solar System, which in turn is not in the middle of our galaxy, which in turn is not in the middle of our universe. And it gets worse. Not just thousands of stars, points of light, but each one in fact is like our Sun, some bigger, some smaller, some older, some younger. And there are billions of such suns. Many billions. And a high proportion of them will have planets going around them. So our Earth represents the tiniest proportion possible, in weight and volume, of the matter in the universe, and our position is just in an insignificant place, looking out at this massive universe, composed and functioning in much the same way our Solar System functions (although with many interesting variations).

So no, you can't just pretend that accepting, after a long delay, Galileo, represents just the most minor adjustment to our understanding of religion. Doesn't any fundie ever say to themselves - but what the hell is all the rest of the universe actually FOR? How could you possibly rationalise such a bizarre choice for the location of the world god created for humans? And why would any 'supernatural being' keep on creating all the rest of the superfluous stuff? And so much of it!

Of course nothing makes sense in the old testament. If you start with the idea of an imaginary friend who causes everything then it can't make sense. But the size of the universe, in relation to the size of the fundies, even when they build megachurches, makes absolutely no sense at all. But then, god is just what you believe in when you don't understand reality - and there is so much reality out there to understand. It is a very big universe.