GEN29 The past four hundred years have marked an incredible growth in man’s ability to control and manipulate the world of nature.  Man’s sway extends from the microcosm of the sub-atom to the macrocosm of stellar space.  But this fantastic expansion of man’s capacities has set dialectic in motion that was not originally evident.  Together with this trend toward ever greater control and mastery of the world about him, another tendency, parallel to it yet diametrically opposed, has been making itself felt—a steady decline in man’s sense of his own self-worth, a growing feeling of his unimportance in a vast universe.  Best by impersonal forces and automatic processes that seem to defy control, man sees himself reduced to helplessness, his hopes and dreams turning to ashes.  … Previously the earth was conceived of as the center of creation, with the sun, the moon, and the stars having been made for man’s benefit: in the words of Genesis, to “serve as signs both for festivals and for days and years.”  [this verse].  Now the earth was reduced to the role of a lesser planet revolving around the sun, with man becoming a brief sojourner on a minor astronomical speck in the universe.  A few centuries later, scientists were to demonstrate that the entire solar system was only one galaxy among an almost limitless number.  But the major blow to man’s self-esteem had already been inflicted by Copernicus.  Man had become physically insignificant in the cosmos.  Theoretically, one could still hold fast to the old faith that man is created to glorify God, but his hosannahs tended to be drowned out in the vast reaches of interstellar space.  GORLAW 10-11