ABSTRACT
One recurrent modern myth, alongside such perennials as that medieval peoples thought the earth was flat, and had views about how many angels could dance on the point of a pin, is that our ancestors lived in an enclosed and cosy universe, conformable to the human scale.1 The gradual progress of astronomy revealed – it is supposed – that we lived amid immensities beyond our imagination, that the earth was a tiny dot with no distinguishable features in a cosmos vaster and older than we imagined. Old-style religion, it is routinely argued, is now incredible: how could we be of any interest to a cosmic engineer (even if there were one)? How could we imagine that stars and galaxies far away existed for any good that they might do for us? How could this planet be the moral or metaphysical centre of the universe, when it was so far from being physically central, or this age of the world be special when it is no more than a moment? ‘Can the Earth be thus the centre of the moral and religious universe, when it has been shewn to have no claim to be the centre of the physical universe?’2
