When I listend to his AMA, I noticed this line as well. It’s a really clever “tool for thinking” that deserves to be noticed.
There’s an interview with Dawkins somewhere where he mentions an anecdote about Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is supposed to have said “Why did people ever believe that the sun revolves around the earth?”, and his interlocutor supposedly answered: “Well, obviously it’s because it looks like the sun is revolving around the earth.” Then Wittgenstein whips out the counterfactual: “Well, what would it have looked like if it looked like the earth revolves around the sun?”.
And the answer is obviously: exactly the same, lol!
So what was the wrong idea “geocentrism” about, then?
Some tribal lore tells us that it had to do with the centrality of humanity in God’s plan; or the qualitative difference between earthly and celestial things: the sun, moon, and stars belong to the heavens; the earth is below them; and hell is under the earth.
But maybe it’s more to do with a wrong idea of “revolving” instead. The ancients had no concept of freefall. When they imagined an object revolving around another, they may have imagined a sling-stone being swung in a sling. “If the earth were swinging around the sun, surely we would fall off!” The earth has discernible features such as oceans, trees, and people which might “fall off” under motion, but the sun doesn’t, being a seemingly featureless body of light: so the evidence of ordinary terrestrial experience favors the stability of the earth and the motion of the sun.
Even after heliocentric cosmology, it took more than a century to come up with the unification of celestial and terrestrial gravity: that the same rules govern the motion of the planets and moons that also govern cannonballs.
When I listend to his AMA, I noticed this line as well. It’s a really clever “tool for thinking” that deserves to be noticed.
There’s an interview with Dawkins somewhere where he mentions an anecdote about Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is supposed to have said “Why did people ever believe that the sun revolves around the earth?”, and his interlocutor supposedly answered: “Well, obviously it’s because it looks like the sun is revolving around the earth.” Then Wittgenstein whips out the counterfactual: “Well, what would it have looked like if it looked like the earth revolves around the sun?”.
And the answer is obviously: exactly the same, lol!
So what was the wrong idea “geocentrism” about, then?
Some tribal lore tells us that it had to do with the centrality of humanity in God’s plan; or the qualitative difference between earthly and celestial things: the sun, moon, and stars belong to the heavens; the earth is below them; and hell is under the earth.
But maybe it’s more to do with a wrong idea of “revolving” instead. The ancients had no concept of freefall. When they imagined an object revolving around another, they may have imagined a sling-stone being swung in a sling. “If the earth were swinging around the sun, surely we would fall off!” The earth has discernible features such as oceans, trees, and people which might “fall off” under motion, but the sun doesn’t, being a seemingly featureless body of light: so the evidence of ordinary terrestrial experience favors the stability of the earth and the motion of the sun.
Even after heliocentric cosmology, it took more than a century to come up with the unification of celestial and terrestrial gravity: that the same rules govern the motion of the planets and moons that also govern cannonballs.