There’s a scene in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel movie in which the popular atheist intellectual Neil deGrasse Tyson appears on a news program to explain how Superman’s arrival on Earth changes our species’ understanding of itself. Tyson’s lines in the film are a fairly representative sample of the vague and hazy Enlightenment-inflected assumptions that often substitute for an education in history these days:
The familiar story, adapted in this instance to suit the plot of the movie, seems to go like this: In ages past, human beings, swayed by the benighted scepter of primitive religion, thought that they lived alone as the special and unique lords of creation at the geographic and symbolic center of a cozy, well-ordered, tailor-made universe. But when capital-S Science began its march through history, the superstitions of this anthropocentric cosmos were swept away. Copernicus displaced the Earth from its special location at the center of creation, Darwin displaced man’s special status as a creature qualitatively distinct from the lower animals, and then modern astronomy revealed just how infinitesimally small our planet is in relation to the vast and impersonal expanse of outer space.
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