Deep Ecology

morporc:

Historically the most famous example of anthropocentrism was the insistence that the earth was at the centre of the universe.
The argument went that since Man was the crown of creation all of the other planets (and originally all the stars) must orbit the earth, since Man’s home was obviously the centre of creation.

Geocentrism was a very sticky idead. An earth orbiting freely in space was an idea familiar to the ancient Greeks and Romans (it is mentioned in the opening lines of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’). But the Church was so determined that the Sun must orbit the earth that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for teaching otherwise as late as 1600.

For a more recent example of anthropocentrism you could look at the ‘science’ of baraminology. Baraminologists base their understanding of the animal kingdom primarily on the Book of Genesis, and arrange the animal kingdom into species and clades the way reall scientists do.

But whenever a baraminologist suggests any classification mechanism which would put Man into the same family as any other animal, his work is immediately discounted – because that would contradict Man’s separate creation in Genesis 2.7.

It may be difficult to believe that anybody takes baraminology seriously these days – but once an idea has got stuck in a believer’s head, it takes some shifting.