Earth will govern distant worlds. Apples, planets, stars, galaxies, black holes and the explosive aftermath of the big bang are all compelled by gravity’s unifying force. The
Enterprise
can set its navigation system to any spatial coordinates precisely because the cosmological principle assures its crew that when they arrive the physics they know and trust will still be working. In contrast to biology, whose plasticity
Star Trek
writers gleefully celebrate in a myriad polymorphous modes, the laws of physics remain the same everywhere – they are the Platonic ideal at the core of an otherwise capricious cosmos. It is physics that makes ours a
uni-
rather than a
multi-verse.
To citizens of the twenty-first century the cosmological principle may seem close to tautological. For us
space
is now an arena to be measured and mapped, ‘the final frontier’ on which we have imposed a metric of parsecs and light years. Yet the idea of spatial continuity was one of the more contentious propositions of the scientific revolution and its consequences have been far reaching. I want to argue here that adopting this view set the stage for an unbearable tension between science and Christianity and has problematised the very concept of a human ‘self’. In essence, concepts of space and concepts of self are inextricably entwined so that when a cultureadopts a new conception of space, as Western culture did in the seventeenth century, it impacts our sense of not merely
where
we are but
of what
we are. While Newton’s synthesis famously united the heavens and Earth, it tore a hole in our social fabric that we are still struggling to comprehend and whose consequences continue to reverberate in the US ‘war’ between science and religion.
A S HORT H ISTORY OF S PACE
The magnitude of the transformation taking place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not lost on any of its participants. Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo and Newton all understood that what was at stake in the revolution under way was the fate of the Christian soul. Each of these men stood on the side of God and argued that the emerging cosmology supported a case for the divine. What all of them feared was a universe stripped of spirit. They believed in a Holy Spirit whose Love
in-formed
the world and in the immanent spirits of their fellow human beings; in ‘the new astronomy’ they saw the reflected glory of their Creator, whose presence in the material universe supported their faith in Christianity’s promise of the soul’s eternal salvation. As Johannes Kepler summed up the case: ‘For a long time I wanted to become a theologian … Now, however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy.’
The literally soul-destroying potential of the new cosmology hung like a cloud over the consciousness of seventeenth-century science and the source of this angst originated in concerns quite apart from its mechanistic tendencies. By the middle of the sixteenth century thoughtful minds had begun to discern that the idea of continuity between the terrestrial and celestial realms threatened the foundation of Christian faith as it had been construed for 1,500 years. By supplanting the geocentric finitude of medieval cosmology, the new science threatened to undo the metaphysical balance between body and soul on which Christian theology relied.
Contrary to accounts given in many popular science books, medieval cosmology was underpinned by a rigorous logic that attempted to encompass the totality of humans as physical, psychological and spiritual beings. Medieval scholars read the world in an iconic rather than a literalist sense; nature was a rebus in which everything visible to the eye represented multiple layers of meaning within a grand cosmic order. The physical world was the starting point for investigations that ultimately sought to comprehend a spiritual reality beyond the material plane and what is so beautiful here is that the
Enterprise
can set its navigation system to any spatial coordinates precisely because the cosmological principle assures its crew that when they arrive the physics they know and trust will still be working. In contrast to biology, whose plasticity
Star Trek
writers gleefully celebrate in a myriad polymorphous modes, the laws of physics remain the same everywhere – they are the Platonic ideal at the core of an otherwise capricious cosmos. It is physics that makes ours a
uni-
rather than a
multi-verse.
To citizens of the twenty-first century the cosmological principle may seem close to tautological. For us
space
is now an arena to be measured and mapped, ‘the final frontier’ on which we have imposed a metric of parsecs and light years. Yet the idea of spatial continuity was one of the more contentious propositions of the scientific revolution and its consequences have been far reaching. I want to argue here that adopting this view set the stage for an unbearable tension between science and Christianity and has problematised the very concept of a human ‘self’. In essence, concepts of space and concepts of self are inextricably entwined so that when a cultureadopts a new conception of space, as Western culture did in the seventeenth century, it impacts our sense of not merely
where
we are but
of what
we are. While Newton’s synthesis famously united the heavens and Earth, it tore a hole in our social fabric that we are still struggling to comprehend and whose consequences continue to reverberate in the US ‘war’ between science and religion.
A S HORT H ISTORY OF S PACE
The magnitude of the transformation taking place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not lost on any of its participants. Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo and Newton all understood that what was at stake in the revolution under way was the fate of the Christian soul. Each of these men stood on the side of God and argued that the emerging cosmology supported a case for the divine. What all of them feared was a universe stripped of spirit. They believed in a Holy Spirit whose Love
in-formed
the world and in the immanent spirits of their fellow human beings; in ‘the new astronomy’ they saw the reflected glory of their Creator, whose presence in the material universe supported their faith in Christianity’s promise of the soul’s eternal salvation. As Johannes Kepler summed up the case: ‘For a long time I wanted to become a theologian … Now, however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy.’
The literally soul-destroying potential of the new cosmology hung like a cloud over the consciousness of seventeenth-century science and the source of this angst originated in concerns quite apart from its mechanistic tendencies. By the middle of the sixteenth century thoughtful minds had begun to discern that the idea of continuity between the terrestrial and celestial realms threatened the foundation of Christian faith as it had been construed for 1,500 years. By supplanting the geocentric finitude of medieval cosmology, the new science threatened to undo the metaphysical balance between body and soul on which Christian theology relied.
Contrary to accounts given in many popular science books, medieval cosmology was underpinned by a rigorous logic that attempted to encompass the totality of humans as physical, psychological and spiritual beings. Medieval scholars read the world in an iconic rather than a literalist sense; nature was a rebus in which everything visible to the eye represented multiple layers of meaning within a grand cosmic order. The physical world was the starting point for investigations that ultimately sought to comprehend a spiritual reality beyond the material plane and what is so beautiful here is that the
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