HISTORY MATTERS

The Copernican Principle exemplifies the intellectual folly of our modern era.  It is the idea that nothing about man is exceptional:  We are not the center of the universe, either literally or figuratively.  Just as the Earth is not physically the center of the universe, man is not biologically the culmination of life on Earth.  We are incidental to God’s creation.  It is a fallacy that under a scientific gloss smuggles in materialist, and ultimately nihilist, philosophical assumptions about our universe. 

The fallacy is not that the scientific method is objective in discerning the truth, whereas a philosophical inquiry is not.  The human condition is not explicable through science alone; science is not even the beginning of understanding man.  Indeed, philosophy precedes science in the comprehension of the truth.  It is necessary for full knowledge about man and his relationship to the universe, as Pope John Paul II explained in Fides et Ratio.  The fallacy of the Copernican Principle is its scientism, the mistaken belief that all knowledge of man and the universe is reducible to general principles.  By adopting this creed, the Copernican proclaims that the laws of physics account for the origin of man and so make nonsense of any transcendent purpose man has in the universe.

Unscientific Science

Calling it the Copernican Principle is an injustice to its namesake.  Nicolas Copernicus, the man who five centuries ago hypothesized that the Earth revolved around the Sun and sparked the revolution that gave us modern science, was a Catholic priest and no Copernican.  However, today many of his successors in science are. As the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said, man is too insignificant for the universe he inhabits and so cannot possibly be the reason why the universe exists.  The Copernican marvels at the tremendous expanse of the cosmos and then scoffs at the possibility that man, whose realm is infinitesimal in comparison, is a wonder to behold.  Scale alone is the only objective evidence for the Copernican’s disdain, if not explicitly for man, for the prospect that there is any transcendent purpose in man’s existence.

So, for all its scientific trappings, the Copernican Principle is profoundly unscientific.  It is upon faith alone that the Copernican believes that there must be an explanation for everything that appears to be exceptional about man that reduces it to the mere mechanics of a relatively common physical process.  For example, man may appear to be a uniquely rational being, but the Copernican argues man’s reason is nothing but the biological product of billions of years of undirected natural selection – thus, reason is merely an evolutionary advantage like the millions and millions of other edges living organisms developed to dominate their ecological niches on our planet.

This sounds scientific, but it actually fails to explain what appears to be exceptional, human rationality, is actually unexceptional.  Even if Darwinian evolution is the etiological account for it, man’s reason remains an incredible wonder compelling a teleological explanation.  Thus, as this one example shows, the Copernican Principle fails as science.  It is an article of faith, not objective knowledge.  Worse than that, it is a faith that embodies an inherent contradiction.

The Faith that Fails

Even as a metaphysical rather than scientific proposition, the Copernican Principle is a speculation that is both logically and empirically unfounded.  Logically, the fact that so much of the physical world is unexceptional in the Copernican sense does not lead to the conclusion that all that is physical – i.e., matter, energy, motion – is unexceptional, let alone the realm of the nonphysical – i.e., life, consciousness, human volition.  If nothing else, there is the exceptional case of the universe.  We know of only one, ours.  The point is not trivial.

Empirically we know our universe to be a place of particulars, not generalities.  Everything down to the merest subatomic bit of matter has a unique identity.  This is even true of the very foundation of the Copernican faith:  The physical laws of the universe.  They have the meaning that they do only because of the dozens of fixed values for physical phenomena, for instance Planck’s constant and the speed of light.  Moreover, these physical constants are extraordinary in their precise harmony.  Even a small deviation in any of these values, the harmony is lost and we could not exist.

Therefore, at its very foundation the Copernican Principle is at least a paradox:  The general laws of physics to which the Copernican argues that all things must submit are themselves remarkably exceptional.  To resolve this apparent contradiction, the Copernican is left with positing that either our universe must be only one among an infinitude, each with its own set of physical constants, or that the constants of our universe are themselves determined by some yet unknown general principle.  Jews and Christians might consent to the latter with the objection that “general principle” is in fact quite well known:  Yahweh the creator of the universe.  But then that is the quite exceptional truth the Copernican has twisted himself in knots to evade.

A Nihilistic Dead End

So, the Copernican Principle is a falsehood, and like all false beliefs, it is dangerous.  The danger in this case arises from mistakenly, or even falsely, denying that the existence of man in the universe is an exceptional fact and then engaging in a fallacious reduction of that fact to general principles.  Because we only know the physical – i.e., matter and energy – to be so reducible, the Copernican must constrain his concept of man to the purely physical.  Thus materialism must follow from the absence of man’s exceptionality.  Once the Copernican has reduced man to mere physicality, he has subjected man to the ironclad causality of a deterministic universe from which there can be no escape from the puppet strings of subatomic machinations.

The inconvenient facts of man’s consciousness and volition must be refuted by the Copernican as illusions, meaningless chaotic epiphenomena.  At this point, he denies what is plainly true about man’s nature.  (Granted, some Copernicans try to square this circle by arguing that the weirdness of quantum mechanics makes free will real, but doing so simply embraces another falsehood.  Whatever genuine uncertainty and randomness that may exist at the quantum scale of the universe, it disappears at the scale of atoms, molecular biology, and biochemistry.  So, there is no strictly physical account of free will available to the Copernican.)  Without consciousness or volition man would be a biochemical robot whose every action has been programmed by the remorseless dictates of matter and energy.  It is even worse than that, for man would be robot without a purpose.  He would exist simply because that’s what the universe coughed up like any other physical object.  Thus, the Copernican Principle must logically collapse into the black hole of nihilism.

So we come to the danger of the Copernican Principle.  If man is the unexceptional and incidental product of the deterministic machinations of a physical universe, there is no safe harbor for the decency and the dignity of the human condition as Copernicanism yields to reductionism, then materialism, and finally nihilism.  Once the Copernican teleologically denudes man and strips him of all transcendent purpose, any attempt to escape nihilism by refashioning for man a reason for being becomes an exercise in pure rationalism – i.e., the invention rather than the discovery of his nature.

This is direct contradiction to the empirical religions of Judaism and Christianity which teach that the human condition, the relationship of man to the universe, is transcendental and that evidence of this fact is objectively discoverable in the nature of man and the universe.  But the Copernican denies this exceptional fact, so he must invent what he says cannot be discovered.  To understand the distinction between the discovery of what is and the invention of what ought to be is to understand how Copernicanism spawned the trials, tribulations, and terrors of the modern era.

The Dehumanization of Man

The Copernican Principle leads to a nihilistic dead end.  Few can live with that conclusion.  Hence, the Copernicans turn to the rationalist invention of purpose in lieu of its empirical discovery, as in the manner of Judeo-Christian scholarship.  By eschewing empiricism for rationalism, the Copernican seeks to reduce the human condition to one big idea from which all the principles of society and politics can be deduced.  Since the rise of the modern era a half-millennium ago, this rationalistic reductionism has manifested itself in one utopian project after another.

Just as the Copernican must inescapably reduce all things to generalities to eliminate exceptionality, he must also level human nature in accord with the purpose he invents for his fellow man.  Individuality must be shorn of what the Copernican deems to be superfluous to the purpose he proposes for mankind.  The particularities that actually exist in the human condition must succumb to the generalities, real or unreal, that he idealizes and fashions into a utopia.  Thus, ideology trumps reality, and when coupled with political power the Copernican becomes a tyrant as he sterilizes society of its complexities in the always futile attempt to stop reality from overwhelming his utopian fictions.

Ironically, this utopian reductionism was unleashed by the first great revolution of the modern era, a rebellion in the name of God – the Protestant Reformation.  The great reformist John Calvin was a proto-Copernican in his reduction of man to little more than brute muscle in the execution of God’s plan.  Calvin stripped man of his free will and so deformed Augustine’s nuanced doctrine of Original Sin into a statement of man’s utter bestial depravity.  Thus, Calvin’s God was not unlike an anthropomorphization of the Copernican’s sterile deterministic universe.  Calvin published his ideology of human depravity as the Institutes in 1536, which five years later formed the utopian basis of the theocracy he established in Geneva.  In this way, a revolution to rejuvenate man’s relationship with God cut the template for later utopian projects to rid man of God.

During the next century Protestant revolutionaries attempted to shear Christianity of its Catholic accretions, culminating in the horrific bloodshed of the Thirty Years’ War.  Then the partisans of the French Revolution of the 1790’s sought to strip society altogether of the complications of religion only to lay the foundation for the proto-fascism of Napoleon and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands over the next two decades.  The Victorians and their fellow travelers throughout continental Europe enthusiastically embraced science as the new religion and gave the intellectual elbow room to the Marxists to reduce man to homo economicus and to the Darwinists to further reduce man as nothing but an evolutionary offshoot.  Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, and Copernicanism was finally in full flower.

This optimistic scientism was not a dawn, but a dusk.  A long dark night fell as the carnage of World War I shattered this hubris.  However, instead of doubting the Copernicanism that had set the stage for the most horrific war in history to date, we ran headlong forward to fully realize it.  Only by totalizing society upon one big idea, which the pre-war empires of Europe had not done, could utopia be had.  Thus, we loosed the nightmare regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and the other monsters of the twentieth century and brought the Copernican Principle to its final brutal conclusion:  The dehumanization of man.

A Bloody Lesson Unlearned

Every utopian project must result in either its disintegration or totalitarianism to hold it together.  And so the leaders of communist and fascist revolutions over the past century readily became totalitarian tyrants, slaughtered two hundred million people, and enslaved billions more as they brutally but futilely try to hammer human nature to fit into their utopian delusions.  These horrors are the inevitable consequence of rationalistic reductionism married to political power.  This is the bloody lesson of the Copernican Principle:  To strip man of his exceptionalism is to strip him of his humanity.

Yet, this bloody lesson remains unlearned.  Secularists biologically reduce man to the product of blind evolution and become ever more shrill if any explanation for man’s origins other than Darwinism enters the public square.  Feminists and multi-culturalists psychologically reduce man to a plastic construct of culture and denounce Western Civilization for inculcating the submission of women and minorities to a white patriarchal elite.  Welfare statists reduce man’s motivations to economics and demand the forced transfer of wealth to solve all of society’s ills.  Libertines reduce man’s happiness to hedonism and work to subvert any moral authority that teaches that there is more to human aspiration than the satisfaction of appetite.

They are all Copernicans who share the post-modernist frame of mind that nothing is objectively true of human nature accept that which cannot, in some way or another, be physically identified.  The success of their ideas over the past forty years has driven any transcendental concept of man out of the public square and into the ghettos of religion.  In the resulting vacuum, little wonder that the Islamic jihadists, utopians prepared to kill or enslave all who refuse to submit to the new Caliphate, have swept in to visit upon us the next totalitarian plague.

History Matters

The defense against the Copernican corruption of the mind that has repeatedly left us susceptible to the siren song of the utopians is to understand that history matters.  History matters because the etiology and the teleology of man are a single account of the exceptional fact of his existence.  The Copernican admits only to the former and constrains that to a physical belief in man’s origins and denies the latter except for the purposes men invent for themselves.  However, to do so he must reject empiricism, the validity of experience, for rationalism, flights of thought unmoored by reality, to deny the evidence of the exceptionality of man and his relationship to the universe – i.e., the human condition – such as the obvious fact that man’s consciousness and volition are real.  History as a supremely empirical enterprise is the tonic for a sound mind.

So history matters because the human condition is particular and contingent.  In other words it is dependent upon and discoverable in the exceptional sequence of events that has marked our existence and the universe that made our existence possible:  The harmonious values of the physical constants of the universe, the quantum irregularities that inflated into our clumpy cosmos of galaxies, stars, and planets, the extraordinary partnership of Earth and Moon circling the Sun in an uncommonly quiet corner of the Milky Way, the rise of man as the only creature on Earth (and in the heavens for all we know) capable of reason, the ancient Hebrews’ war against idolatry that created the political space for human rights, the Gospels’ record of God’s incarnation and universal promise of salvation, and the incubation of the modern world under the auspices of the medieval Universal Church.

It is in these things we can find objective the evidence of man’s exceptionality that lets us put our trust in God’s covenants.