[Jason Jewell]

J.R.R. Tolkien felt compelled to offer a reply to the “heliocentrism disproves Christianity” line of thinking in his “Ainulindale,” the first section of the posthumously published Silmarillion.

I don’t have the book in front of me right now, but there’s a passage that comes shortly after Iluvatar (the story’s creation deity) creates the material universe in which the narrator scolds those who think that Arda’s (Earth’s) comparatively small size in the cosmos implies that it is unimportant or not central to divinely ordained events.

I point this out because it shows that this atheistic argument has been circulating for a long time.