That’s a bit unfair to Copernicus, don’t you think? Maybe nobody’s life was improved by heliocentrism directly, but the philosophic *consequences* of heliocentrism – the acknowledgment that the heavens are not fundamentally different from the earth, and the resulting conviction, expounded by Descartes and confirmed by Newton, that the same rule and measure that guide the stars in their courses also govern the soil, the wind, and the wave… I don’t see how you can say that zero lives have been improved by that. (Of course, the very names Descartes and Newton give away the fact that this was specifically a *Christian* response to heliocentrism, and therefore scarcely useful to the CPA; the atheist response, as exemplified by Hume, was exactly the reverse – to deny that there was order above the moon, rather than that there was chance below it. So I see what you’re getting at – but it might have been expressed more clearly, all the same.)
Yeah, I considered leaving heliocentrism off the list because I didn’t want people to think I was making fun of the model itself (or any genuine scientific achievement) rather than the ridiculously overblown reverence certain atheists have towards it. I decided to leave it in because that’s one of the ne plus ultras of shallow atheism. And for the purposes of a stick-figure comic I figured the lack of direct impact on most people’s lives was enough to make the gag work.
Serpent's Den 
That’s a bit unfair to Copernicus, don’t you think? Maybe nobody’s life was improved by heliocentrism directly, but the philosophic *consequences* of heliocentrism – the acknowledgment that the heavens are not fundamentally different from the earth, and the resulting conviction, expounded by Descartes and confirmed by Newton, that the same rule and measure that guide the stars in their courses also govern the soil, the wind, and the wave… I don’t see how you can say that zero lives have been improved by that. (Of course, the very names Descartes and Newton give away the fact that this was specifically a *Christian* response to heliocentrism, and therefore scarcely useful to the CPA; the atheist response, as exemplified by Hume, was exactly the reverse – to deny that there was order above the moon, rather than that there was chance below it. So I see what you’re getting at – but it might have been expressed more clearly, all the same.)
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Yeah, I considered leaving heliocentrism off the list because I didn’t want people to think I was making fun of the model itself (or any genuine scientific achievement) rather than the ridiculously overblown reverence certain atheists have towards it. I decided to leave it in because that’s one of the ne plus ultras of shallow atheism. And for the purposes of a stick-figure comic I figured the lack of direct impact on most people’s lives was enough to make the gag work.
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