How arrogant and silly to look at these incredible pictures and think “Yep, this was all made for ME. I am the center of the universe!”.

Q1: What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.

The Christian belief is that creation was made for God and not the other way around. It's actually profoundly not focused on the self.

It actually is incredibly human-centered, to the point that humans were made in _his_ image and the Sun is supposed to turn _around_ the Earth.

But all this makes sense when you realize it’s a primitive human myth made by primitive people with limited understanding of the universe and the world around them.

Not to get to into the weeds but being made in the image of God does not necessarily involve physical appearance. Also, it has nothing to do with being heliocentric or geocentric.

I don’t really get the point that you’re making.

Geocentrism is not a particularly Christian belief. It's also as true as heliocentrism.

Well, creation was made for one god, which happens to look just like us and never once mentions other peoples. To be a Christian astronomer you have to believe one of these:

1. God is wasting the vast, vast, vast majority of the universe on emptiness while he focuses on his fave planet.

2. The universe is full of humans, in which case Jesus is presumably getting re-crucified every few seconds to absolve new groups. Or I guess maybe he split up into a trillion copies that all got crucified at once? Or we’re the 1-in-a-trillion lucky ones that everyone else just gets to hear about?

3. The rest of the universe has aliens because god got bored/wanted things for us to play with, as his super special favorite species. The aliens don’t get to look like god, ofc.

No offense intended to anyone, but I don’t see how you could possibly accept Christian doctrine without necessarily thinking of earth as unfathomably special.

Oh I do think it’s special. But thinking of the universe as a waste because there are lots of uninhabited planets is pretty human focused. Why would it be a waste for an infinite god with infinite amount of attention to spend time creating a large universe?

How arrogant for anyone to look at these incredible pictures and think they know ANYTHING at all. We may be the center of it all, we may not, this may be a massive simulation, or a massive random accident. The only correct answer is to admit we know nothing. Humans are so fixated on knowing everything.

I think this line of reasoning does a disservice to all the scientists and thinkers who contributed to a considerable amount of knowledge. We learned so much about the universe in the past 100 years, it's impudent to call this nothing just because it's not everything.

I'm talking about filling in the blanks in things that are not yet known, not discounting all scientific progress. The point was that the person I replied to held just as irrational a belief as the person they were criticizing. Neither of them knows the deeper nature of reality and whether humanity was created by something or is just an accident of nature, so both of their replies are absurd as one another's.

I do know one thing: fairy tales are not real.

To be fair, as a christian I don’t believe in goblins and unicorns. I do believe in something though. I suppose you do too, and in the end our core beliefs might not even be that different.

But that’s just where you happen to draw the line and is not really relevant. You do believe in whatever your bestiary happens to contain, like magical burning bushes, giants, and super-strong men with magical hair. Whether a goblin is in there or not is an implementation detail.