https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PfCDoF59sGg
The Copernican Revolution is a testimony to the very, very deep change that happened at that time. We often miss what that change was about. We’re often presented with the Copernican Revolution as this notion that people used to mistakenly believe that the sun revolved around the earth and now we know technically that that is not the case, that in fact the earth revolves around the sun. But that is not really what the Copernican Revolution is about. It was really about a move away from this enchanted centered experience. It was a move away from seeing meaning as the organizing principle of the universe. Of seeing this notion of center, not only in terms of mechanical movement, but in terms of centers of meaning, centers of identity, as being the way that we look at the world and the way we calculate the world. And I know this one is, it might be difficult to grasp. I was actually expecting maybe a few people to get up and get out after I said that, but luckily that hasn’t happened yet. You see in order to even perceive right that the possibility of the earth turning around the Sun, the change had to have already happened. There had had to be a very profound change in the way we see the world for that to be even possible to be posited. Because in order to be able to calculate that, Copernicus and Galileo had to alienate themselves. They had to alienate themselves. They had to project their mind to some imaginary point out there in space and then look in their imagination at how these spheres were moving. It was a profound gesture of alienation. And it’s important to talk about the Copernican Revolution. Why is it so important? It’s so important because people keep talking about it today. People are always talking about it. It is one of the founding myths of the modern world is the Copernican Revolution. We hear materialist scientific types bring it up all the time as an example of a moment where religion was obscure and science was bright. We see it all the time. That’s how it’s presented to us. The truth is that there is absolutely nothing obvious. There is absolutely nothing obvious that that change would happen. And that might seem strange to say, but I can show it to you quite easily. Because for some reason we stopped there. For some reason we stopped at a point where we say the earth is revolving around the sun. But that’s not the end of it, is it? That’s not the end of that movement. We’ve moved quite further than that. In fact, with Einstein and general relativity, we have been told that all motion is based on points of reference. It’s not true that just that the earth is turning around the sun. The earth is turning around the sun and then the sun is turning around in the galaxy. And then the galaxy is moving away from other galaxies and then the stars are all moving away from all the other stars. Let’s try to figure that movement out in our minds now. But in order to… So we don’t go there. We don’t go there because once we get there, once we get to the point that if we’re going to calculate things only in terms of mechanical causation and mechanical movement, we should have to take up all these movements at the same time and also realize that the earth is turning around the sun relative to the sun. And the sun is moving away from the other stars relative to each other. They’re not actually moving in themselves. They’re only moving in relationship to other things. That’s Einstein’s theory. That’s general relativity. And once we get there, why not? What point can we give in the universe to calculate all these movements? What point could we possibly give? Would it maybe make sense to give as a point of reference for all those movements the one where we are making those calculations? Wouldn’t it make sense to say that we’re calculating all those movements from the earth?