By the end of the Middle Ages, the Christian approach to cosmology was different from what’s often portrayed. It was surprisingly humble in its understanding of man’s role in the cosmic drama and largely relaxed about the possibility of a populated universe. Meanwhile, Christians in the field of astronomy, having inherited from the Greeks an utterly wrongheaded Aristotelian starting point, made remarkable scientific strides. The question remains, then: Why is the historical narrative of religious man’s gradual unmasking as a superstitious lunatic so prevalent? The answer lies in the fact that we have inherited our mode of historical thinking from the Enlightenment. It was those thinkers, and not our ancient ancestors, who crafted a self-aggrandizing and totally fictitious historical narrative that they then wrapped around their own pretensions. To call one’s own age an Enlightenment necessarily casts a pall of darkness over the ages preceding. Believing that their mastery of the scientific method marked the first and only real discontinuous break in human history, a break that would usher humans into the broad, sunlit uplands of a rational utopia, the Voltaires, Diderots, and Paines of the world injected a kind of chronological snobbery into the bloodstream of Western civilization that persists to this day. They predicted a future that would always and everywhere invalidate and undermine the values of the past. Many still hold on to this belief implicitly, with the conclusion being that since Christendom is of the past and first contact of the future, the latter must ineluctably bury the former under the sands of time.