Preparing for the Miraculous

eing human and the copernican principle 131It may therefore be concluded that the CopernicanPrinciple or the Principle of Mediocrity could never havebeen devised by Copernicus himself nor by one of hiscontemporaries. It is a weapon in the arsenal of Scientismforged during the decline of Western religion and the ascendancyof positivist science. Bertrand Russell, formerlythe mouthpiece of anti-religious rationalism, defined thePrinciple as follows: “The earth is one of the smaller planetsof a not particularly important star, a very minor portionof the Milky Way which is one of a very large number ofgalaxies; and altogether the idea that we who crawl abouton this little planet are really the centre of the universe isone which I don’t think would occur to anybody exceptus.” 14 Here Russell was speaking about a universe with avery large number of galaxies of which Copernicus couldnot have had an idea – and Russell himself would probablywonder at the cosmological marvels and riddles that havebeen discovered since he made his voice heard.The picture of the cosmos has changed in amazingways since Aristotle, then Ptolemy, then Copernicus, Galileoand Newton, then Einstein, and it is changing todaywith the powerful telescopes on and above earth. Anotherquestion altogether is whether all this has taken the humanbeing out of the centre of the universe. If the humans wereonly material things on planet earth, one could say yes. Butas they are mental and spiritual beings, they will alwaysperceive “the world,” including its picture as developed byScience, from the centre that they are themselves.The naked apeWas it Charles Darwin, more than Nicolaus Copernicus,who knocked man from his pedestal? In the publicmind nowadays Charles Darwin is the giant who thought14 Russell on Religion, p. 93.