I will only occasionally add extra threads to this blog, if I discover of think of something interesting that I want to share with you. I am currently reading the book mentioned in the title of this post and this paragraph stood out to me in light of the Karen Armstrong reading. Feel free to incorporate it into your response to the Introduction from A Case for God.
"When we think of science and the spark of modernity, we tend to think of astronomy: Galileo crafting his telescopes and peering into the skies above central Italy; locating sunspots, moons around Jupiter, craters on the earth's moon, and other irregularities in a universe that the church had taught was perfect; amassing data that corroborated the theory that the earth revolves around the sun; encountering the systematic wrath of the Inquisition. In our perennial effort to understand who we are and what it means that we are 'modern,' we choose astronomy as a starting point in part because it provides a sturdy metaphorical peg for thinking of the massive change that humanity underwent in the seventeenth century, when we--seemingly--left our mythical, biblical selves behind and reoriented ourselves in the cosmos. In 1957--the year of Sputnik and the dawning of the space age, a time when people had a simpler, clearer sense of 'modern' than they do today and felt ready to embrace what they thought the word meant--a best selling book expressed this idea in its title: the change was 'From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe'" (4-5).
For the record, I want to add that I think that all of those irregularities that Galileo found are precisely what makes the universe beautiful and "perfect." I also wanted to add this excerpt because we spend a lot of time thinking about cosmologies / understandings of the universe in this class. This quotation helped me understand why I have been inclined to organize the course in this way. I think it will help enlighten our discussion in class tomorrow.
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