Chesterton’s remarks seem specious to me. He says there’s nothing to compare the size of the universe with. How about a person such as you or me? If “universe” is an empty concept, we can just pick some particular galaxies and compare their inhuman scale with the puny, parochial, intuitive scale that comforts us in our naivety which in turn sustains our social orders and self-esteem.

It’s not only the size or age but the randomness of our planet’s position in time and space, our lack of central location which indicates our values are likely accidental and meaningless in the grand scheme. This is why the Church punished Galileo and Bruno for challenging the geocentric view of the cosmos, because of the existential implications of their objective cosmologies.

Chesterton can say the choice of how to feel about such cosmologies is arbitrary. Again, that’s specious. In any case, what isn’t arbitrary is the sense that all Catholic dogmas are anachronistic in light of scientific cosmology.

I agree that comparisons of size and age are relative, but to say we can feel equally at home in a geocentric universe consisting only of our solar system or in a universe of billions of galaxies, without warping our mind to adapt to the different situations is preposterous. Yes, we can train our mind to grasp at straws and avoid overwhelming fear, and that’s what Catholic intellectuals excel at: Jesuitical casuistry. The more specious their arguments, though, the greater the reality of the fear they mean to expel.