How important did people think Earth was before Copernicus and Carl Sagan came along and set us straight?

The so-called Copernican revolution was a big theme of Carl Sagan's (= Copernicus showed us that we were not important after all, and Earth is just a "pale blue dot").

A friend points me to mid-twentieth century Brit R. G. Collingwood's accurate assessment of what nonsense that is!:

It is commonly said that its effect was to diminish the importance of the earth in the scheme of things and to teach man that he is only a microscopic parasite on a small speck of cool matter revolving around one of the minor stars. This is an idea both philosophically foolish and historically false. Philosophically foolish, because no philosophical problem, whether connected with the universe, or with man, or the relation between them, is at all affected by considering the relative amount of space they occupy: historically false because the littleness of man in the world has been a familiar theme of reflection. Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, which has been called the most widely read book of the Middle Ages, contains the following words:

“Thou hast learnt from the astronomical proofs that the whole earth compared with the universe is no greater than a point, that is, compared with the sphere of the heavens, it may only be thought of as having no size at all. Then, of this tiny corner, it is only one-quarter that, according to Ptolemy, is habitable to living things. Take away from this quarter the seas, marshes, and other desert places, and the space left for man hardly even deserves the name of infinitesimal” (Book ii, Prosa vii).

Every educated European for a thousand years before Copernicus knew that passage, and Copernicus had no need to risk condemnation for heresy in order to repeat its substance.

- R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, Clarendon Press, 1945

My friend writes, "For the record, “a thousand years before Copernicus” is 1500 years before Carl Sagan." Well, yes, but Boethius did not live in the age of spin, and Carl Sagan did. So Sagan's Hollywood continues the spin.

And it spins constantly. We must make a determined effort to get off.

See also: Carl Sagan and celebrity cosmology: Was he the best cosmology could do?

(Note: The image is from Library of Congress: An Illustrated Guide to European Collections. It is a manuscript of Boethius.)

Carl Sagan and celebrity cosmology: Was he the best cosmology could do?

I am reading - and reviewing - American journalist Pam Winnick's A Jealous God (Nelson, 2005). She writes, among other things, about celebrity cosmologist Carl Sagan - and it is illuminating, for reasons Sagan enthusiasts might not wish it to be:

He was a handsome man, tall and casually dressed, more poet than scientist. As he walked alongside the ocean with its crashing waves, the breeze blowing back his hair, he was very much the Romantic poet - John Keats or William Blake - contemplating the wonder of the universe.

"There is a tingling in the spine," he said, ""and a faint sensation as though falling from a great height .... ""

For his role in the thirteen-part series that ran on consecutive Sundays from September until Christmas of 1980, Carl Sagan, already wealthy beyond imagination, received a hefty $2 million advance. A collaboration between Carl Sagan Productions and Los Angeles station KCET, Cosmos was the most expensive and glitzy production in the history of public television, ... Filmed in forty locations in twelve countries, the production's $8 million budget rivaled that of many movies from that era.

Sagan's subsequent book, The Cosmos, was read by 500 million people in sixty countries and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for seventy weeks, the most popular science book ever. The video cassette and DVD versions of the series remain widely available.

A foundation operated in his name after his death [in 1996] continues to market his products.

Like Inherit the Wind before it, the Cosmos television series, which won both a Peabody and Emmy (along with many other awards), helped shape the public's perception of science - while also perpetuating the supremacy of science over religion.
But Sagan's colleagues did not think of him as his public did. He was denied tenure at Harvard and in 1992 he was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences. His colleagues may have been motivated by jealousy but the reality is that his main achievements were better recognized by Hollywood than by science. (Pp. 155-57)

After describing the way in which Sagan promoted his pet political causes, Winnick notes,

As he explains the origins of the universe in each episode, Sagan continuously - and gratuitously - sprinkles his narrative with the words "accident" and "random," descriptions that guard against any inference of the divine. To the more "naive," including the millions of Americans of faith, it might have been equally valid to ponder the beginnings of the universe and rejoice not in the "accident" of existence, but in its miracle.

While randomness is the very stalwart of neo-Darwinism, the concept of a universe created by chance alone is also a judgment call, a philosophy that wears the tenuous mask of science. Indeed, the words "accident," "chance," and "random" - all of them gratuitous - reveal far more about the narrator's own fear of God than they do about he nature of the universe.

As a friend likes to say, beware, beware, there's a God out there ...

An archive of Sagan's writings is here. It is clearly a rival religion. Behave as if in church.

See also:

So where are all Sagan's space aliens?, Guardian science writer asks

Dissing St. Carl in his own church