Recently, I expressed the opinion that, if God had created us, we would be at the center of the universe.  Rareairpug suggested that there was actual scientific evidence that we were, and he cited a rather old study to support his claim.  I want to start out this thread by acknowledging that we do appear to be at the center of the universe, and I will cite a more recent work to prove it.  The book is The View from the Center of the Universe by Joel Primack and his wife, Nancy Ellen Abrams.

Primack is an eminent cosmologist at UC Santa Cruz, and he co-teaches a popular course with his wife on the subject of cosmology and religion.  The book itself is about new scientific findings about the nature of the universe.  It is very light on mathematics, and it attempts to describe modern cosmology in language that is completely understandable to most people with a reasonable educational background.  Also, the book is anything but anti-religious.  One of its goals is to defend the notion that humans are unique and special in this universe from a scientific perspective.

On the other hand, this book is not something that religious conservatives will be comfortable with.  It goes into great detail on why the universe must be over 14 billion years old--a theory that has been solidly proven by a wide variety of corroborative observations and laboratory experiments.  It examines ancient Egyptian and Hebrew cosmology, and it explains how that early cosmology changed over time into our present science-based view of the universe.

So, why would people like sntjohnny and rareairpug want to read this book?  It contradicts their cosmology from almost the very beginning, and it soars off in a direction that is anathema to their worldview.  My answer is simple.  This book gives one the very latest scientific findings--within the past couple of years--and some rather big changes have happened to scientific cosmology since the 1990s.  Many of the competing theories of cosmology have dropped away, and the winner actually has something to say about what happened BEFORE the Big Bang.  Having read this book, religious conservatives will be armed with a much better, more up-to-date idea of the theory that they are competing with.  

What is the current cosmology like?  It is called the "Double Dark" theory of the universe.  The central claim is that only .5% of the universe is visible matter--directly detectable--to us.  4% consists of "invisible atoms"--material that could be detected in principle.  The rest consists of 25% dark matter and 70% dark energy.    Dark matter explains why galaxies don't fly apart and dark energy explains why the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate.  Neither dark matter nor dark energy can be detected.  We know of its existence only through mathematical models (which have been experimentally confirmed), but efforts are under way to detect it through more direct means.  We have no other good theory to explain why galaxies and clusters of galaxies behave the way they do.

What is so unique about humans?  We evolved at exactly the midway point between the birth and the "death" of the visible universe.  We are composed of the rarest elements in the universe--literally stardust.  And we are exactly midway in size between the smallest and largest objects in existence.  They go into great detail on why they think that all of that matters.  I highly recommend this book.