I have participated in the GLOBE at Night program sponsored by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) for several years and continue to support it for two vitally important reasons:
As an amateur astronomer, light polluted skies wash out both the quality of what can be observed and can radically reduce the number of stars and other celestial objects that can be seen. Light pollution affects all visual telescopes, no matter how large they are. That is why the world’s greatest observatories are almost always built on very high peaks in very remote places far away from cities.
Light Pollution from the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory, Mt. Graham Int'l Obs., Arizona. Photo courtesy of Marco Pedani & University of Arizona
Every photon created by artificial light requires a human-manufactured source. Measured in what is called “kiloWatt hours” (kWh) the electricity that is used to create unnecessary light (overlighting) is a nonrecoverable expense. We waste billions of kiloWatt hours every year, costing us billions of dollars in the production and service used to create the light that wasn’t needed to begin with. As we think about our energy production and the price paid to create the fuels to generate it (coal, oil, gas, hydro, nuclear–even solar, wind, wave, geothermal, and other cutting-edge energy-producing technologies require huge costs to meet our power demands), just the amount lost to light pollution cannot be justified from either a perspective of economic sustainability or the stewardship of the earth’s finite resources.
Large Binocular Telescope. Currently the world's largest optical telescope for total combined aperture, 16.8 meters, 662 inches (55.16 feet). Mt Graham Int'l Obs., Arizona. Photo courtesy of John Hill and LBTO, University of Arizona.
I invite you to join in the effort to change this one vital part of preserving our natural resources, not just those from the Earth but also those of the sky. Please watch the short video, and then read the letter from Dr. Constance Walker, PhD*, Director of the GLOBE at Night campaign, and then follow the links to join in the fun of walking out your front door, looking up (I’ll bet you haven’t intentionally looked at the sky in a long time!), and with the very user-friendly GLOBE at Night instructions, instantly become an important participant in a global research project with such important implications.
Please note that the results for people living in the Northern Hemisphere must be submitted by April 4, 2011!
Note: Any connection between exposure to artificial light at night and cancer remains under investigation. The statement in the video represents that of the producers and not necessarily the views of DISCI, HELM, The Intersection, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) or GLOBE at Night. See links below for more information**.
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Join the 6th worldwide GLOBE at Night 2011 campaign:
March 22 – April 6
With half of the world’s population now living in cities, many urban dwellers have never experienced the wonderment of pristinely dark skies and maybe never will. This loss, caused by light pollution, is a concern on many fronts: safety, energy conservation, cost, health and effects on wildlife, as well as our ability to view the stars. Even though light pollution is a serious and growing global concern, it can be one of the easiest environmental problems you can address through responsible lighting on local levels.
Participation in the international star-hunting campaign, GLOBE at Night, helps to start the process of addressing the light pollution issue locally as well as globally. The campaign invites everyone all over the world to record the brightness of the night sky. The campaign runs from March 22 through April 4 in the Northern Hemisphere and March 24 through April 6 in the Southern Hemisphere. The campaign is easy and fun to do. First, you match the appearance of the constellation Leo or Crux with simple star maps of progressively fainter stars found. Then you submit your measurements, including the date, time, and location of your comparison. After all the campaign’s observations are submitted, the project’s organizers release a map of light-pollution levels worldwide. Over the last six annual 2-week campaigns, volunteers from more than 100 nations contributed over 60,000 measurements, 30% of which came from last year’s campaign.
To learn the five easy steps to participate in the GLOBE at Night program, see the GLOBE at Night website. You can listen to this year’s 10-minute audio podcast on light pollution and GLOBE at Night. Or download a 45-minute powerpoint and accompanying audio. GLOBE at Night is also on Facebook and Twitter. (See the links at the end.)
The big news is that children and adults can submit their measurements in real time if they have a smart phone or tablet. To do this, you can use the web application. With smart phones and tablets, the location, date and time are put in automatically. And if you do not have a smart phone or tablet, there are user-friendly tools on the GLOBE at Night report page to find latitude and longitude.
For activities that have children explore what light pollution is, what its effects are on wildlife and how to prepare for participating in the GLOBE at Night campaign, see the Dark Skies Rangers activities. Monitoring our environment will allow us as citizen-scientists to identify and preserve the dark sky oases in cities and locate areas where light pollution is increasing. All it takes is a few minutes during the 2011 campaign to measure sky brightness and contribute those observations on-line. Help us exceed the 17,800 observations contributed last year. Your measurements will make a world of difference.
Primary Mirror, Gran Telescopio CANARIAS, currently the world's largest single aperture optical telescope, 10.4 meters, 664 inches (55.3 feet). Photo courtesy GTC & ORM, Canary Islands
The Milky Way as you've probably never seen it under excellent dark skies. View inludes Sagittarius, Libra, Scorpius, Scutum & Ophiuchus from Cerro Tololo, Chile. Photo courtesy of W. Keel, Univ. of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.
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*Constance Walker, PhD, director, GLOBE at Night campaign (www.globeatnight.org)
chair, International Dark-Sky Association Education Committee
chair, IYA2009 Dark Skies Awareness Cornerstone Project
member, Astronomical Society of the Pacific Board of Directors
I just started reading one of the books I received for Christmas, titled, Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life, by Richard Cohen (Random House, 2010). As might be expected, early on Cohen deals with the various ancient beliefs about the sun and the solar cycles, and in particular the two annual solstices.
Two sentences grabbed my attention: “On the year’s longest day, it [the Sun] rises closest to that hemisphere’s pole. On both occasions it seems to stop in its path before beginning to double back” (p. 15). Stop in its path? A couple of sentences later, Cohen states, “…for two or three days, the Sun seems to linger for several minutes–hence the word ‘solstice,’ from sol (sun) and stitium (from sistere, to stand still: ‘armistice’ translates as ‘weapon standstill’) (p. 15).”
If you do what I do when I suddenly make a connection between a seemingly everyday event and a biblical miracle/event, I grabbed my Bible and looked up Joshua 10, the narrative where Moses’ successor, Joshua, petitions the Lord to make the Sun and the Moon stop high overhead so he can have the daylight he needs to complete defeating the Amorite Coalition led by Jerusalem King Adoni-zedek who have had the Gibeonites (an ally of the Israelites) under siege.
Adoni-zedek is important for another reason. At least six letters he almost certainly wrote are part of the Amarna Letters dated circa 1388 BCE-1333 BCE, dispatches he sent to the Egyptian Pharoah complaining about “raids by the Habiru.” If this reference is an authentic reference to the Hebrews’ invasion of Canaan, the historicity of Joshua 10 is significantly enhanced, regardless of the other details the biblical author wrote into his account.
There are two other relevant issues in this account the writer of Joshua chose to include as something the reader should know about the battle. First, though, a bit of geography to set the scene.
The geographical distances involved in this narrative are quite small by modern standards. The ancient site of Gibeon has been well established, located on one edge of the current Palestinian town of Jib. It sits less than 20 miles NE from Jerusalem, but it is over on the north side of the mountain ridge that separates Jerusalem from the Kidron Valley. Keep that in mind.
Gilgal is a bigger problem. Its exact location is still up for debate, but the consensus site at this time places it about a mile NE of Jericho deep in the Dead Sea Valley. In one respect, if the text is historically reliable and Joshua took and then destroyed Jericho it is plausible that he might have settled the Israelites there temporarily, but stategically it is a less than ideal site and creates another problem as I’ll describe below.
Returning to the text: First, to move his army from Gilgal deep in the Dead Sea Valley, all the way up and over the southern slopes of Mt. Ephraim to Gibeon, whom Joshua was bound by treaty to defend (9:14), he had to quick march his troops overnight to the city. Jericho is 846 feet below sea level, so the entire army had to first climb to sea level and then over the Central Mountains, a total increase in elevation of about 3500 feet! However there appears to have been a well established trade route from Jericho to Michmash near the summit, after which it was downhill, for the most part, to Gibeon. Clearly these were the Israelites’ “special forces,” for as the text says, they were “the best fighting men” (10:7). This specially trained unit alone could have made such a physically grueling march. Regardless, Joshua’s tactic was effective despite whatever fatigue his army was feeling. They arrived early in the morning at the encampment outside of Gibeon. This time of day undoubtedly was the least expected moment the Jerusalem-led forces would have anticipated an army to appear out of gloom of dawn. The Israelites were in full battle array. The other guys were most likely sitting around their campfires eating breakfast.
Second, the Amorite soldiers, quickly sizing up the situation, knew their only chance to survive was to beat a hasty retreat, having no time to put on their armor. And to their great misfortune, in their rush to escape the ranks of the Israelites already engaged in battle at the far edge of camp, they ran right into a massive hail storm. The text attributes the storm to God. But as is not that uncommon in Tornado Alley here in the U.S., hail measuring the size of golf balls all the way up to grapefruit is not impossible nor that uncommon when the conditions are right. Caught out in the middle of this meteorological bombardment, being driven by Joshua’s troops bearing down on them from the rear, the writer, clearly speaking from experience, makes a very matter-of-fact statement: “…and more of them died from the hailstones than were killed by the swords of the Israelites” (10:11). A careful look at a topographic map of ancient Israel shows Gibeon sits on the north slope of one spur of the Ephraim Mountain range and is exposed to any tropical moisture that would come spiraling out of the NW Mediterranean Sea. Thunderstorms with significant hail probably were not that uncommon. Particularly if given a little nudge by God.
Joshua, however, is not a “leave half the job unfinished” kind of commander. God had promised all the Amorites would be delivered to Joshua’s army so they could kill every one of them (See: herem), and he was going to make that happen.
Joshua in the midst of the battle asks the Lord to stop the Sun and the Moon over different valleys, that are identified, interestingly enough. Since we know where Gibeon was located, the Sun would be high directly over the city. We also know the location of the Valley of Aijalon where the Moon was commanded to stop. The problem is that Aijalon is just over the hill from Gibeon, a small valley that opens out onto the broad Plain of Shephela. In terms of line of sight, that would seem to have the Sun and the Moon right next to each other, with the Moon being slightly to the observer’s right. And that’s a problem that will be discussed below. This Sun/Moon configuration may just have to be left as a supernatural act by the God. On the other hand, we have at our disposal some powerful tools to examine a hypothesis of what might have happened.
Part 2
We considered above the possibility the Battle of Gibeon perhaps had an astronomical component to it that could be identified by looking at the history of solar eclipses in that region. We have also examined the route that Joshua and his army of select warriors had to take to get from Gilgal, located adjacent to Jericho deep in the valley of the Dead Sea at a below sea level elevation of 846 feet (one of the deepest land canyons on the globe), over the Central Mountains of the Mt Ephraim Range, a vertical rise of 3500 feet and then down to Gibeon, which sat less than 20 miles north-east over the hill from Jerusalem.
According to the text, this forced quick-march was accomplished in a single night. The distances, however, teeter on the edge of credulity. According to Google Maps, the walking distance from Jericho to the modern town of Jib, the known site of Gibeon, is 61.5 km (38.3 miles) assuming the army roughly followed the known trade routes fanning out from Jericho at the time and would take approximately between 13 and 14 hours.
This modern route however assumes walking on the sides of well developed motorways, and not an expeditionary force of soldiers in full battle armor, in the Bronze Age, in the dark to avoid detection, and very possibly avoiding the trade route between Jericho and the town of Michmash (modern Mukhmas) at the summit. Nevertheless, if the author assumed that the army left early enough the previous day so the march only took one night, then it is possible.
Another issue is the dating of the Book of Joshua itself. Although many scholars today date the work sometime during the era of the Babylonian Exile, circa 7th Century BCE, the core events may be attributable to the Second Millennium BCE. If the Egyptian Mernepthah stele is dated accurately circa 1209 BCE, and is, in fact, also an authentic historical mention of the Hebrews then the assertion can be made that that the conquest of ancient Canaan perhaps took place sometime between 1500 and 1300 BCE as Gerhard von Rad suggested.
Taking those assumptions, I entered the dates and set Jerusalem as the primary viewing site into my astronomy software (TheSky6 Serious Astronomer Edition by Software Bisque) and launched the Eclipse Finder. In ten year increments I was able to examine the date, time and track of every eclipse reasonably visible to an observer in Jerusalem for those two hundred years. I excluded those eclipses that just grazed a tiny percentage of the sun or were so close to sunrise that they were likely to go unnoticed and therefore did not fit the description of a major midday event that could have been to Joshua’s advantage. I included total, annular and partial eclipses.
The Eclipse Finder generated 30 events for that two century period. It is, of course, impossible to know which of those events were observed, or what the weather conditions made possible viewing any particular eclipse. Additionally, as any student of the Bible can tell you, the ancient Hebrews were not great observers of the sky, or at least they didn’t appear interested in communicating astronomical events in much detail in the text of their (and our) scriptures. There is an interesting irony to this apparent reality. The ancient cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt both were doing sophisticated astronomical observations in this period of time (White, 2008, Babylonian Star Lore London: Solaria). I’ll come back to that below.
First, some modern geography. Jerusalem sits at 31°47”N; 35°13” E. For comparison, the 32nd parallel enters the United States at El Paso, TX, located on the far western tip of the state and creates the state line between Texas and New Mexico. Continuing east, it bisects the rest of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and reaches the Atlantic Ocean right at the southern-most tip of South Carolina. On the opposite side of the Atlantic it makes landfall in Morocco, crosses the Central Sahara Desert through Algeria and Tunisia, and then enters the Mediterranean Sea just slightly south of Tripoli, Libya. Clipping the northern peninsula of Libya, it is then drawn across the southeast Mediterranean Sea just north of Egypt, until it connects with Israel and Jerusalem.
At this latitude, Jerusalem sits only about 9° north of the Tropic of Cancer, which is the northernmost latitude (23°N) that the Sun will appear directly overhead at the Summer Solstice (approx. June 21st). Because the city is located close to the Equator, the Earth’s axial tilt (also 23°) and the Moon’s orbit (on what is called the ecliptic) will naturally generate more visible eclipses than can be observed from more northern locations. Thirty eclipses, therefore, over a two hundred year period are a natural consequence of the concurrent synchronicity of the Earth’s daily rotation and orbit around the Sun, as well as the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. Nevertheless, only just over a third of these events were total eclipses (13 of the 30).
My Big Guess
I have to be honest with the text as presented. It does not mention an eclipse, and as I have said before the author ascribes God’s direct influence on both the Sun and Moon rendering them stationary and soon after causing the catastrophic hail storm. But as we have learned from the research regarding the Star of Bethlehem, it is reasonable to explore what natural events might have influenced the author, or those who were present at the event, to interpret these two phenomenon as clearly and literally an act of God.
The historicity of the narrative in Joshua is enhanced if astronomically-validated events can be identified at the time this battle is to have taken place. It would also mean that, assuming the date of the Book of Joshua is somewhere in the time span between 700-500 BCE, the author(s) had access to extant historical material from which this account was written. If it was during the Babylonian exile, and knowing the Mesopotamians’ extensive study and writings about the sky (North, J, 2008, Cosmos: An illustrated history of astronomy and cosmology), it can be conjectured that the Israelite scholars, might possibly have had a calendar or sky description source from which they based their narrative. Therefore, I am going to hypothesize that they did.
The thirty eclipses between 1500 and 1300 BCE can quickly be narrowed down to a handful if we follow two assumptions.
First, as Cohen in Chasing the Sun pointed out in Part One, the Sun particularly at the time of the summer solstice seems to linger at its highest point in the sky for a few days on either side of the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The text also implies the Sun was high overhead. If the battle took place during the vernal or autumnal equinoxes, the angle of the Sun in elevation from an observer on Earth would not meet the physical description of the Sun’s location that day. So we can look for eclipses that occurred in that general time frame of the solstice over that two hundred year period.
The second assumption is that perhaps the eclipse began at sunrise, or was in totality at sunrise, giving the day the appearance of starting very late, and by the time the eclipse was over, the Sun would have seemed to have appeared not at dawn but close to noon. This might be interpreted as the Sun having stopped in the sky, and near the longest day of the year, it naturally would provide a longer period of daylight.
A dawn extended by an eclipse would also potentially lend authenticity to the claim regarding making the march from Gilgal to Gibeon in one night. If the sun was totally blacked out by the moon at the time of sunrise, Joshua and his forces would have been given a rare gift to approach the Amorite camp under the cover of darkness and dusk, allowing for the possibility of a surprise attack, as I said before, right when the Amorites were eating breakfast. Caught unawares, likely not having donned their armor, they were at their most vulnerable, especially as the Israelite forces seemingly came out of nowhere and began to cut them down. Under the mandate of cherem, if God had commanded them to kill every person and beast in the camp, they were obligated to do just that.
Here, then, are the best candidates for producing the right kind of eclipse at the right time of the year that may have been the underlying natural event of a very divinely guided military campaign in Joshua, chapter 10:
Date
Type
Begin³
Maximum
End
June 23, -1442
Total¹
4:27
5:26
8:07
June 24, -1396
Annular
4:48
7:38
11:08
June 3, -1348
Total²
xx:xx
4:43
6:53
June 5, -1302
Total
7:34
10:34
13:54
Note 1: Eclipse was 95% full at sunrise.
Note 2: Eclipse was at totality at sunrise.
Note 3: All times Jerusalem Local in 24-hour format.
These four eclipses come closest to meeting the assumptions described above, from the description in the biblical text, the scholarly hypotheses regarding Joshua’s lifespan, and the estimated centuries in which the Israelites could have been moving into Canaan and conquering the cities and peoples who were already there.
But which eclipse is the best choice? Not knowing the date except in the scope of the broadest historical theories is a major hindrance. Each event has its pros and cons.
The 1442 BCE eclipse took place on June 23, which is very close to the summer solstice, was 95% full at sunrise, so it would have extended the perception of darkness, or at least a very deep dusk, giving Joshua’s forces an unexpected cover of darkness as they approached the Amorite camp. Its drawback it that it was not a very long event, reaching totality at 05:25, after which the light would begin to increase and it would have been fully sunny just after 8:00 a.m.
The 1396 BCE eclipse was annular. In this type, the moon covers only part of the sun, which at totality produces a bright ring of sunlight around the circumference of the disk. For Joshua, the darkness would not have been as deep, although it creates duskiness that some find odd, even to the point of feeling a bit spooky. An eclipse of this sort, although strikingly beautiful to our modern eye, might have been very disconcerting to the Amorite forces. Joshua’s warriors, too, may have been unsettled by the eclipse’s unusual visual characteristic, but keep in mind they were on a mission to save an ally and they firmly believed God was on their side. Whatever the event was, the Author was convinced this was an act of the LORD, and so it is possible to theorize they were able to put aside their discomfort and continue the march toward Gibeon. This eclipse has the advantage of taking place on June 24, again very close to the longest day of the year, as well as its duration of around six hours, returning to full sunlight an hour before noon. Put together the attributes of this eclipse make it a viable candidate for the Joshua narrative.
The 1348 BCE eclipse rose in totality at about a quarter to 5 a.m. The sun was fully visible at 6:21, making it a very short event, and in my assessment a less viable candidate than the one in 1442 BCE. Also, it occurred on June 3, well over two weeks before the Summer Solstice. Its one advantage might have been a very dark sunrise allowing Joshua and his men to get much closer to the Amorites before they launched their attack on the camp.
The last eclipse in 1302 BCE was also in early June but unlike the 1348 event, it began at 7:38, plunging a seemingly normal late spring morning into a spectacular and dark solar event, creating a total eclipse that lasted from start to finish six and a half hours. The end of the eclipse at nearly 2:00 p.m., is important to note because at 12:00, a significant percentage of the sun would already be visible, and it is possible to speculate that the perception of the sun and moon together at high noon, with the moon slowly pulling away from it could have looked like both of the heavenly bodies were standing still.
The Moon problem. The narrative is explicit that the Moon stopped to the right of the Sun high over the valley of Aijalon (10:12), which is southwest and on the south side of the hill from Gibeon. This creates a problem. The astronomy simulations in all cases clearly show that the Sun, not the Moon, moves to the right and that since the Moon is so much closer to the Earth, it is not visible in the daylight. The physics of this is straightforward. The Sun appears to move because the Earth is rotating on its axis. The Moon actually moves because it is in orbit around the Earth. The result is the Sun visually moves to the west faster than the moon.
In the end, my preferred choices are the eclipses in 1396 BCE and 1302 BCE. Both seem to have attributes that would provide Joshua’s army with a strategic advantage as they approached the Amorite’s camp. I acknowledge that I can’t prove that either one of these events answer the question about the Sun and the Moon standing still asserted in 10:12-13. What is not in doubt is that the author believed the events in the sky, both the astronomical and the meteorological were a direct result of the LORD fighting on behalf the Israelites:
There was no day like that before it or after it, when the LORD listened to the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel (v. 14, NASB).
Several final questions remain: Did Joshua know in advance what was going to happen? We know from the history of astronomy that predicting eclipses was one of the major efforts of the astronomer/astrologers of the ancient Near East. As I mentioned above, did the author of Joshua have access to Babylonian astronomical texts to guide him? Did the author have access to manuscripts saved when Jerusalem was sacked and the Israelites taken to Babylon? I again can only speculate, but the combination of these two possibilities raise interesting questions for further research on this fascinating narrative.
The alternative that I find very dissatisfying at best, although it cannot be ruled out, is that Joshua (and the Pentateuch) were written solely based on oral tradition or were essentially works of sacramental fiction. Granted, for a people in exile, far from their beloved homeland, knowing from stories by the elders that their holiest city, Jerusalem, was left in ruins, these books, even if largely constructed as mythology, because of their elegance and genius as narratives of faith, would have been read with great reverence. As such it is understandable how in a matter of a few generations they might be regarded as historical accounts, even if the foundation came from an oral tradition of uncertain veracity.
I prefer the hypothesis that if the actual date of the authorship falls within the time of the Babylonian Exile (7th Century BCE), that the Israelite scholars were introduced to the treasure trove of information in the libraries that have been found in Babylon (and many other Mesopotamian cities). North (2008, Ibid.) makes two relevant points. First, he describes the high level of astronomy being done during the Hammurabi Dynasty, ca. 1800 BCE- 1500 BCE, with the quest for predicting eclipses being exceedingly important, and second, the resurgence of Babylonian astronomy in the so-called “period of independence” from 612 BCE-539 BCE. The proximity in the first case to the dating of Joshua and the Israelite conquest of Canaan, and a thousand years later the Babylonian Exile simply cannot be ignored as creating the potential for reliable astronomical information Joshua as well as his chronicler may have had.
To all DÎSCÎ Readers: We received this annual report from WordPress.com on January 2, 2011:
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 8,800 times in 2010. That’s about 21 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 11 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 28 posts. There were 66 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 9mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.
In Part 1, I suggested that the story of the Star of Bethlehem is one that starts in the wrong place and the wrong time. I see that as an asset, for perhaps that contradiction contributed to both its lasting power and to its veracity. In the previous post, we looked at the creation myths from the Aztecs of Mesoamerica and from the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. These narratives were created by peoples on opposite sides of the Earth who never had contact with each other. Despite that, their creation stories have unmistakable and remarkable similarities that suggest that there is an archetypal human story, following the models about which Joseph Campbell wrote extensively.
The Star of Bethlehem, which appears only in the Gospel of Matthew, is an anomaly. One of the unsolved mysteries of the Nativity narratives is that the star is not mentioned in the Gospel of Luke. Other than the opening passages of Genesis the writers of the Bible simply seem to have no interest in the sky, except metaphorically. Stars are lights in the night sky that are compared to something earthly or are evidence of God’s creative power. The Hebrews, however, did have an organized cosmology:
The remarkable contrast of the above Hebrew model of the universe is clearly evident when compared to those of the Aztec’s and the Sumerian’s: In Genesis, there is a complete lack of violence in the act of creation. Few other religions have a similar cosmology in which an Earth Mother-goddess does not have to be destroyed and her various body parts used to make the earth, sky and humans. The ancient Hebrews had knowledge of these various stories from Mesopotamia and from Egypt, but in the Genesis account, those elements do not appear. For example, this Egyptian version (one of many Egyptian origin myths) demonstrates the more common world view of the Beginning:
Egyptian Creation Myth Illustrated--This Picture is based on the "Heliopolis Cosmogony," one of several dominant myths in the Egyptian Pantheon.
The Problem of “The Sky.”
I also suggested that humans began to differentiate the sky being distinct from the land and the oceans perhaps around circa 4300 years ago. Gavin White (2008), in his book Babylonian Star-Lore, maintains that “Babylonian astrologers started to export to their neighbors as early as the 13th century BCE” (p. 7). He goes on to contend that the development of natal horoscopes required a level of mathematics that was compiled in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, with the first modern equivalents finally appearing in the 5th century, or 2500 years ago. It is this assertion that raises the prospect of historically credible ties to planetary observations by Matthew’s Magi, and the possibility that the Star of Bethlehem’s discovery, or rather interpretation of a sky-based observation, was based on their millennial old texts and maps of the constellations.
These particular Magi were likely among the most highly educated individuals from any civilization, and familiar with astronomy from the known regions of the world. That would include Greece, where we must take a brief trip to meet the man who changed the sky and the universe four hundred years before the birth of Jesus.
To set the stage, I return to the question, “What is the sky?” White shares my view that these ancient cosmologies are neither crude nor primitive:
Today this “flat-earth” cosmology is generally belittled as being rather “primitive” and as far as it is given any attention it is relegated to the kindergarten of metaphysical speculation. This is unfortunate, as the model is actually a rather elegant presentation of archaic man’s view of himself and the universe in which he acted and had his being. It is a complex view of the world, one full of awe that utilizes the mysterious language of symbolism, where every element is a part of an interrelated network of forces. This model also underpins the rationale of celestial divination and magic, mankind’s first attempts to foretell and forestall the shape of things to come. (p. 21)
The tools of those attempts included defining the constellations, plotting the motion of the planets, phases of the moon, vital because they were tied to the seasons, but of course eclipses: lunar, more common than solar, the unexpected darkening of the day often believed to be a portent of evil or disasters. To many in the ancient world only comets might inspire a greater fear.
From China to India, Persia to the Mediterranean, Egypt across the great Sahara of North Africa, Asia Minor, Greece, the expanse of the Roman Empire all the way to Britannia, the great celestial scroll of the night sky unrolled from horizon to horizon, open to be examined, its mysteries to be plumbed, and the fate of humans read in its aetherial language.
Sometime around the 7th century BCE, in Greece, the question of the sky rose once more, and a startlingly new answer was ventured. What if, these renegade philosophers dared to suggest, using their emerging expertise in mathematics and geometry, the sky was not the abode of the gods? What if the sky was a place, just like the earth, that the Sun, Moon and stars, even the ones which wander, were places? And if that were even possible, how far away were these places? What caused them to move around the earth? And if they moved, what if the Earth moved, too? The intellectual battle raged for over 400 years, but no one could seem to find that one all-important key to prove whether it was right or wrong.
The Greek Geocentric Cosmos. Photo: Source Courtesy, A.H., 1996.
These were dangerous questions, on the level of heresy, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.
The Sky Problem Solved–But 1700 Years Too Soon!
Aristarchus of Samos
Those willing to think about daring questions at times come up with extraordinary answers. One such radical was Aristarchus of Samos, a mathematician and astronomer who lived circa 310-230 BCE. Samos, a volcanic island in the Aegean Sea, lies in the archipelago that separates modern Greece from Turkey. An older contemporary of Archimedes, he was known among his generation as “the Mathematician.”
According to Sir Thomas Heath, who published Aristarchus’ full text of “On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon” into English (1913, 2004), “There is not the slightest doubt that Aristarchus was the first to put forward the heliocentric hypothesis. Ancient testimony is unanimous on the point and the first witness is Archimedes, who was a younger contemporary of Aristarchus, so that there is no possibility of a mistake. Copernicus, himself admitted that the theory was attributed to Aristarchus, though this does not seem to be generally known” (p. 301).
Archimedes, to his discredit, did not accept Aristarchus’ heliocentric theory and campaigned against it. Aristarchus’ idea was not theologically popular either in some circles. One Cleanthes attempted to indict the Mathematician “on the charge of impiety for putting into motion the Hearth of the Universe… ” (Heath, p. 304). What enraged Cleanthes was Aristarchus used geometry to prove his hypotheses: “by supposing the heaven to remain at rest and the earth to revolve around an oblique circle, while it rotates, at the same time, about its own axis” (Ibid.). No one knew how prescient this hypothesis really was, until seventeen hundred years later another mathematician named Copernicus reached the same conclusion after studying Aristarchus’ text , and a second, 150 years after him, one named Galileo.
The Magi: The Hubble, Sagan, and Hammel of Their Age
What is the connection to our Christmas Star? Aristarchus used star charts and calculations developed by the Babylonians centuries earlier. Sir Thomas presents a number of examples where Aristarchus used, what he called “Chaldean lunations,” basically books of tables that all mathematicians of the era would have as a standard in their libraries (p. 314).
The Magi, it is reasonable to infer, would have read Aristarchus. Mathematically he was an “Einstein” of his age, his texts were in circulation, and even though they likely would not have accepted his heliocentric hypothesis, just like modern astronomers who still read Copernicus’ and Galileo’s works, they would have studied his math proofs and geometry to predict lunar and solar eclipses, and to calculate “The Great Year,” “which is completed by the sun, the moon, and the five planets when they return together to the same sign in which they were once before simultaneously found” (quote from Censorinus AD 238; Ibid, p. 316).
That very high level of geometric expertise would have been invaluable in calculating planetary conjunctions with a high degree of accuracy. Furthermore, the ability to correctly forecast the birth of a king was the Gold Medal of astrology/astronomy. Whoever they were, the Magi were convinced they had gotten this one right, and with a level of confidence so strong they were willing to travel from their homes somewhere east of Jerusalem, command an audience with King Herod and tell him right to his face!
Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We have seen his star in the east and have come to worship him. (Mt 2:2, NIV)
Saying that to a reigning monarch is the kind of thing that could get you beheaded in short order. What stayed Herod’s hand? Perhaps the sight of this from an east-facing palace balcony:
Bethlehem Star 12Aug -03 Jerusalem 0210hrs. Star Chart by TheSky6 Serious Astronomer Edition. The proof, as they say is in the pudding. This is a natural sky view of the proposed Star of Bethlehem. See if you can spot it without scrolling down to the annotated version.
A Historical Event Reconstructed out of a Myth: The Power of Good Science and an Astronomy Software Program
Michael Bakich, a Senior Editor of Astronomy Magazine writes in the January 2010 issue:
The biblical account says that the wise men spoke to Herod about the star. Neither Herod nor his scholars knew what they were talking about. No other Bible verse or secular writing mentions the star. What was it? Could it be Matthew, the only gospel writer who mentions the star, wanted to prove to his readers what he knew from reading the Old Testament? I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh; there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Scepter shall rise out of Israel… (Num. 24:17). Did the writer of Matthew invent a story to fulfill this prophecy from Moses? Most historians don’t think so (p. 37).
The solution is most likely a planetary conjunction. It is not, in the end, the definitive answer, nor does it subtract the mystery and miracle of that night.
It was the Star of Wonder. And if this particular conjunction or cycle of conjunctions that occured in 3 BCE signaled the birth of the Savior, how we can rejoice what a clever God we worship!
Bethlehem Star 12Aug -03 Jerusalem 0210hrs with Annotations. Star Chart by TheSky6 Serious Astronomer Edition
One can only imagine what was going through the minds of the Magi as they pointed this astronomical event out to Herod and his astrologers, going over their data and calculations. We know what was going through Herod’s mind.
The conjunction would have been very bright. Jupiter was shining at a magnitude of -1.8 and was at 99.98% phase full (think full Moon), and Venus was at a shadow-producing magnitude by itself of -3.9 and 93.38% full phase! Regulus by contrast would have almost seemed dim at its very bright -1.38 magnitude, and Sirius, the brightest star in the northern sky at -1.44 magnitude was glowing high in the SW sky.
Star of Bethlehem with Magi Card
After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. Matt 2:9.
Merry Christmas and may the Blessings of the Christ Child Come to You and Your Loved Ones.
Star of Wonder–Transformed from Myth to Astronomical Event?
The Star of Bethlehem? No, it's Canopus, 2nd Brightest Star in the Sky and a Specular Stand-in. 310 Light Years Distant. Image by D. Pettit taken from the ISS. Photo: NASA
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Prologue
This is a story that starts in the wrong place. They’re my favorite kind. And the wrong time. That’s even better. A story that starts in the wrong place and the wrong time has to be interesting. There’s something to be said for predictability, but it rarely makes for a good plot or an intriguing ending.
This story does not have those disadvantages. Some people have believed it was true. Others believed it was false. Others, still, believed it was myth, of uncertain veracity, but a beautiful, even elegant narrative. For two millennia, Christians have believed it was part of a miracle. Others, of different faiths, may have acknowledged it as a lovely story, but of no spiritual significance. For the past four hundred years, as men and women have studied nature in new and innovative ways, and expanded our understanding of the Earth and the sky into a cosmos unimaginably large and old, the story’s credibility declined, seemingly moving toward the status of a fairy tale.
All of this, while true, is not the start to which I was alluding.
The Bethlehem Star? No, but Another Beautiful Candidate. It is Procyon, 3rd Brightest Star. And It's a Double Star; Its Companion is a White Dwarf. 11 Light Years Distant. Photo: NASA.
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First, Some Historical Background
The Babylonian Cosmos. Image Courtesy: Gavin White. From: Babylonian Star-Lore, 2008. Click on the image for a larger version.
Around nine to ten thousand years ago, the human race, Homo sapiens sapiens discovered a problem. It might have been earlier, but the record left by humans before that is very hard to read. White (2008) in his book Babylonian Star-Lore, suggests that Babylonian astrology began as early as 15,000 years ago, although he states that the practice of astrology was quite different than the modern version. It relied on mathematical calculations written on clay tablets and the earliest tablets have been dated to the 7th or 8th Century, BCE. So, I’ll suggest ten thousand years, with the caveat that date might need to be adjusted with the next archaeological blockbuster discovery. The problem was the Earth. More specifically, the ground.
At this point I need to dispel one very important misconception: the fallacy of modernity. The individuals I to whom I am referring are modern humans. Same body, same brain, same capacity for intelligence, problem solving, or IQ. Just like Albert Einstein, your neighbor Justin, who wears only faded NASCAR t-shirts, your eccentric Aunt Lizzy, or that beauty Angelica or hunk Chad (depending on your hormonal drivings) who in high school you never had the nerve to ask out.
This is the paradigm I want you to remember: ancient ≠ primitive. Got that?
Back to our discovery. At some point in the ancient past, one of our ancestors had the revolutionary thought that the ground was substantively different from the sky. This was not a “well, duh,” moment. It was a paradigm shift, perhaps capable only due to the superior huge frontal cerebral cortex of the Homo sapiens. The shift was beyond the observation of a day/night cycle, although that would have been part of it. This shift, like the differentiation between the sense of the boundary between my body and not-my-body, changed the human perception between earth and sky.
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The Sky is a Problem, a Big Problem
If This was the Bethlehem Star, it Would Have Really Gotten Everyone's Attention. It isn't. This is Wolf-Rayet 104, a Totally Strange Double Star, But This Time, Both Stars are Massive. 8000 Light Years. Photo: NASA/Keck Telescope, Hawaii
Stuff comes out of the sky. Rain, snow, hail, clouds, wind, fog, as well as birds and bugs. Some of those things are good, even edible. Bad things like volcanic or range fire smoke and ash, dangerous wind blowing debris and biting things can come out of the sky, too.
Some things, most things actually, in the sky are beyond reach. The Sun, the Moon, the stars, and the wandering stars. Some stars appeared to streak across the sky; others appeared mysteriously out of nowhere glowing with a dim head and a long tail. And rarely, a flash of a new star in the night that soon disappeared. Or every once in a while there was an unexplainable event in which the Sun seemed to be consumed by a black disk, turning the day to dusk and all the birds stopped singing. The same thing happened to the Moon, its regular phases interrupted, a dark shadow crossing its face, then glowing a blood red before being released from its captivity.
The regular cycles of those things in sky that are out of reach is what we are interested in. We live on the ground. We can’t fly like the bugs or the birds. We can’t live under water, either, but that is not the focus of this discovery. Living on the ground, as we do, we know a lot about the ground. Most of what lives on the ground keeps us alive. Some of the other things that live on the ground can also kill us, but that, too, is secondary to our discussion.
On that day that one very bright modern human looked at the ground, maybe sifting a handful of dirt through his or her fingers, and then looking up at the sky, squinting at the sun or gazing at the bright swath of starlight of the Milky Way, and said the equivalent of “Huh, now that’s interesting,” and human understanding shifted forever.
From that moment, the science of astronomy was born, as well as those of geology and biology. The problem was, earth and life were tangible. The sky, however, was a complete mystery.
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What was the sky?
Supernova AD 1054. Chaco Canyon Petroglyph. Photo: Richard Goode, Porterville College, Calif.
Yes, that was the question: What was the sky? What were the lights in the sky? The daytime sky and the nighttime sky were so different. Why was that? Why did all the lights in the sky appear in the East, move in an arc reaching a highest point that changed with the season and then always set in the West? But what about the stars in the Northern sky that never rose nor set? For some of our observers, however, not knowing they lived below that line we now call the equator, the lights in the sky looked quite different, still rising and setting East to West, but those stars that never rose nor set were to the south. Of course, there were to main players in the diurnal cycle.
The Sun, the greater light to rule the day, its brightness so intense to dare a glance of more than a fleeting moment brought pain, even blindness. At the same time, it brought the warmth of the day, its risings and settings regular, though half of the time, the days would grow longer and half of the time shorter, and with it the corresponding warmth and seasons. The earth tuned itself to this great annular cycle, of living and dying, growing and seeding, warming and cooling. Our ancestors had figured out that part even before the start of our story.
The Moon, the lesser light to rule the night, possessed a soft glow that one could study without risk; its phases regular following the seasons decreed by its daytime master, its face never changing. Yet at intervals beyond comprehension, it, like the Sun, would be covered with a shadow, at times in part, at others completely. Still the phases of the moon was so reliable that as humans began to cultivate their food, not just gather it, the Moon’s monthly journey and phases became an essential resource for the planting, growing and harvesting the crops.
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The Dilemma of the Wandering Stars
Of the night, though, what of the Wandering Stars? The first a fleeting spark always near the Sun’s rise or setting. Next, brighter than the others, one of the mornings and one of the evenings, at times so bright it cast a light that caused shadows. Another with a glow of angry red, appearing out of nowhere and growing into a dominant light every two annual cycles. A fourth, a great golden giant stately moving through the heavens night after night. Also a fifth, whose trek seemed like that of an old one slowly working its way through the constellations. And some, it is said, saw a sixth, dim grey-blue phantom only on the rarest of nights. Against the apparent immutable backdrop of the other lights at night, why did these few shine but not twinkle like the others, and how, against all reason, did they change their direction in the sky and track back toward the East, then inexplicably again reverse and march toward the West?
Milky Way Band. Photo Courtesy of John Gleason/NASA
What was the sky? Why did some of the lights form patterns against the black velvet backdrop of night? What was the swath of light that cut across the sky from horizon to horizon? What was the force or cause of their motion? What were the faintest clouds of light, while others seemed to cluster into groups distinct from the random spread of most of the stars?
One might say the ancients had plenty of time to work this all out. Day after day and night after night, if they chose to pay attention, they could discover patterns and recurring risings and settngs as the year progressed from the shortest days to the longest. On every continent where humans collected, they in fact did pay attention, and observed the patterns and motions. What they decided those observations meant and what caused them, was another thing altogether.
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The First Astronomers
Sunburst Petroglyph, Chemehuevi People, near Lanfair, CA. Photo Courtesy: Donald Austin & NASA
To explain the sky, both day and night, these earliest of astonomers drew upon the source of information they understood the best: the ground and the sea, and the abundant life that inhabited both. Those were the things they would touch. They made the very logical assumption that the sky was made from the same things the earth and oceans were. They couldn’t have been more wrong. At the same time they couldn’t have been more right.
I must again remind you of our one rule: ancient ≠ primitive. The observers devised theories about how the earth, sea, and sky came into being, using the “materials” to which they had access. We call these descriptions of the creation of the world, myths. That is, if we are honest, modernocentric, even arrogant. It can result in our overlooking key facts and observations, assigning to them to the status of fable rather than seeing myths for what they were: descriptions of the origin and forces of nature and life.
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The Aztec Creation Story: Mother Sun Dismembered
The Aztecs provide a perfect example of a creation account that follows their observations of the natural world:
Quetzalcoatl: Aztec Lord of Morning Star & Wind
The dualistic gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, lightness and darkness, looked down from their dwelling in the sky at the water below. Floating on top of the water was an enormous Earth Monster goddess who devoured all things with her many mouths, for the goddess had gaping mouths at the knees, elbows and other joints.
Everything the twins created, the enormous, floating, terrible, insatiable goddess ate. The twin gods, normally implacable enemies, agreed she had to be stopped. They transformed themselves into two enormous, slithering snakes, and slid silently into the dark, cool water, their cold eyes and flicking tongues seeking her body.
One of the snakes wrapped itself around the goddess’s arms and the other snake coiled itself around her legs and together they tore the immense Earth Monster goddess in two. Her head and shoulders became the earth and her belly and legs became the sky. Some say Tezcatlipoca fought the Earth Monster goddess in his human form and the goddess ate one of his feet, therefore his one-legged appearance. Angered by what the dual gods had done, and to compensate for her dismemberment, the other gods decided to allow her to provide the people with the provisions they needed to survive.
Tezcatlipoca: Aztec Lord of Death, Creator of Fire, Night Sky, & Warriors
From her hair were created the trees, the grass and flowers; from her eyes, caves, springs and wells; rivers flowed from her mouth; and hills and mountains grew from her nose and shoulders.
The goddess, however, was unhappy, and after the sun sank into the earth the people would often hear her crying. Her thirst for human blood made her weep, and the people knew the earth would not bear fruit until she drank. This is the reason she is given the gift of human hearts. In exchange for providing food for human lives, the goddess demanded human lives. Source: James W. Salterio Torres.
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The Sumerian Creation Myth: The Mother Goddess Gets Dismembered
Though the price of human sacrifice causes us to shudder, the battle with the Earth Monster goddess, with her defeat and dismemberment is hauntingly similar to the Sumerian story of the defeat of Tiamat:
Tiamat possessed the Tablets of Destiny and in the primordial battle she gave them to Kingu, the god she had chosen as her lover and the leader of her host. The deities gathered in terror, but Anu, (replaced later, first by Enlil and, in the late version that has survived after the First Dynasty of Babylon, by Marduk, the son of Ea), first extracting a promise that he would be revered as “king of the gods”, overcame her, armed with the arrows of the winds, a net, a club, and an invincible spear.
And the lord stood upon Tiamat’s hinder parts,
And with his merciless club he smashed her skull.
He cut through the channels of her blood,
And he made the North wind bear it away into secret places.
Markuk slaying Tiamat. Bas relief on stone.
Slicing Tiamat in half, he made from her ribs the vault of heaven and earth. Her weeping eyes became the source of the Tigris and the Euphrates. With the approval of the elder deities, he took from Kingu the Tablets of Destiny, installing himself as the head of the Babylonian pantheon. Kingu was captured and later was slain: his red blood mixed with the red clay of the Earth would make the body of humankind, created to act as the servant of the younger Igigi deities.
Two creation stories, having so many parallels even though those who devised them lived on opposite sides of a planet they did not know as such, and who never had had contact with one another.
The ground, the sea, the sky were all the world. Thousands of years would pass before the problem of the sky would again be addressed. The untouchableness of the sky would create a new question, without which, this story could not continue in Part 2.
A Lesson for the 21st Century: Never assume the Universe can’t get any stranger. In fact, never assume our very own galaxy can’t get any stranger, either. Both assumptions will always soon be proven wrong. That happened just this week with the announcement from the NASA Fermi Telescope that “sees” in the almost-impossible-to-comprehend gamma ray radiation band.
Image of entire sky in 100 MeV or greater gamma rays as seen by the EGRET instrument aboard the CGRO spacecraft. Bright spots within the galactic plane are pulsars while those above and below the plane are thought to be quasars. Photo: NASA/PD
Gamma rays are the most energetic radiation in the known universe. They are also among the most dangerous form of radiation when they hit living tissue. For decades after their discovery by Paul Villard, a French chemist, in 1900, a dose of gamma rays was generally considered lethal. In subsequent decades as technology improved, scientists began to unlock a new potential for the gamma radiation. They could be used to sterilize and decontaminate food, a process we know as irradiation. And they also could be highly focused into a beam and kill certain types of cancer cells. Perhaps the most amazing use for these rays is in a medical device called a Gamma-Knife, which literally destroys small brain tumors in a matter of minutes. Patients, in just a single session, often come in for the treatment severely debilitated and after are able to walk out as if they had never had the tumors in their brain.
And now the Fermi has discovered a huge structure emanating from the center of our own Milky Way, that by all rights, should be impossible. It’s never been seen before and no one knows what it really is, except that it is 50,000 light years from top to bottom (for comparison, the Milky Way’s main disk is 100K ly wide; the closest star is only 4 ly distant from the Sun).
Photo Courtesy NASA/Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope
Tim Crane, Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, authored a column for the New York Times on August 5, 2010, titled “Mystery and Evidence.” He states:
“Religion…attempts to make sense of the world by seeing a kind of meaning or significance in things. This kind of significance does not need laws or generalizations, but just the sense that the everyday world we experience is not all there is, and that behind it all is the mystery of God’s presence. The believer is already convinced that God is present in everything, even if they cannot explain this or support it with evidence. But it makes sense of their life by suffusing it with meaning.”
Crane writes what I think is a very cogent and well crafted op-ed piece on the subject of the role of evidence in both science and religion, and how they are fundamentally different, and because of that one should not even compare the rules of evidence–or mystery–between the two.
From my perspective what I quoted above is a compelling insight for how I regard much of my faith. This thesis regarding religion’s role, however, is not the crux of his essay. To understand Crane’s point and its context, you have to read the entire piece.
Douglas Sloan is a member of DÎSCÎ and a regular contributor on the site’s forum discussions on The Intersection. Prof. Sloan currently serves as a computer information services instructor on one of the campuses of Indiana’s Ivy Tech Community College. His response to Crane’s essay was insightful and compelling, uncovering a reality that is evidently outside of this Cambridge scholar’s frame of reference. Here is Doug’s reply:
1) Read the article.
2) The one disconnect between science and religion is that religion allows us (encourages us?) to take leaps of faith. Leapfrogging evidence and direct conclusions is “bad science” – sometimes (usually?) dangerous and irresponsible bad science. When is a leap of faith dangerous and irresponsible?
3) Read the comments.
I want to “lift up” a specific response because it speaks to other conversations by this community about the dangers and limitations of privilege.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
The problem I have with atheism is that it is a position from privilege; only people with a critical amount of access to wealth and intellectual resources can have a legitimate shot at examining scientific evidence and deciding for themselves whether religion is bogus, or science explains the world, etc.
I suspect that a marginalized Muslim youth in Pakistan; or a recently widowed Haitian mother; or a landless Guatemalan peasant; or a displaced Darfuri refugee aren’t going to have the resources or intellectual wherewithal or rational capabilities to come to a fact-based conclusion regarding their place in the world. It’s not because they can’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t come to a conclusion that disavows religion; it’s because they’ve never been given a chance to decide.
Whereas someone who has tenure at Cambridge; someone who is given the best medical care in the world, someone who has the means to to eat, to learn, to read, to teach, to travel, to study, to grow intellectually, to attend lectures, someone who is allowed the leisure time that is required to question their beliefs – this extremely lucky individual can be said to have had every advantage and every opportunity to really examine life and come up with scientifically consistent answers. When this person says: “You know what? My life is just peachy, and I don’t really need God to explain anything or take care of me or be involved in my world in any way, shape or form,” – I believe them, and I have no problem with that attitude.
What I do have a problem with is if that lucky individual, from his lofty, ivory perch, feels compelled to castigate and ridicule people for embracing a belief system that helps them get through the day.
It should be expected that those with all the privilege, leisure, and luxury in the world would be the atheists of the world, being that they would have no need whatsoever for God or what the concept offers in terms of Hope, Redemption, Salvation.
There are no atheists in foxholes? I would say that there are no atheists in shanty towns, ghettos, slums, barrios or favelas.
Comments, as Always, are Welcome.
Tim Crane’s website can be accessed by clicking here. Prof. Crane includes a substantial collection of papers he has made available to the public on his site if you are interested in reading more of his work.
Orcus Patera "The Bootprint" 240 mile elliptical crater on Mars. Origin unknown. Photo: ESA
Mars used to be the friendly little planetary brother next door (Mars is named after a male god of war, after all. How it could be considered a good place for imagination when it was historically considered the war god is one of those paradoxes in history we just have to live with). A hundred years ago, Mars was regarded even by distinguished astronomers, such as Percival Lowell, as a intriguing planet. The telescopes of the day could see that Mars had seasons, it was inclined on its axis about the same as our planet and had a day just 40 minutes longer than ours. Its polar ice caps grew and receded, so making the assumption that these similarities would be conducive to liquid water and life was not a great intellectual leap. Though smaller than Earth, a case for intelligent beings inhabiting its surface was a widely held belief. H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” notwithstanding, Mars was a place that inspired flights of fancy of many educated adults around the world, having evidence in the broadest sense, yes, but details, no.
Mars, however, was a long ways away, not that realistic individuals thought humans would ever figure out a way to go there. Aircraft were hardly more than flying death-traps cobbled together out of doped canvas stretched over wooden frames held taut by untrustworthy wires and powered by engines of such questionable reliability, there was always a high chance of just falling out of the sky. The possibility that engineers could through some miracle devise a craft possessing both the structural strength and power to escape the bonds of Earth was a pipe-dream.
Most of these public was unaware of the work of two men on the opposite sides of the planet. One, Edwin Hubble, at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California, spent his days peering at millions of dark dots on a photographic glass plate taken the night before by a spectroscopic camera attached to a telescope. His realization that the deep space objects labeled nebula believed to inhabit our own galaxy was completely wrong, that astonishingly to the contrary they were unique island universes and they were moving at velocities so far beyond human comprehension at distances so disconcertingly large, that even today some people refuse to believe it. The other, Albert Einstein, in Germany, stared at the cosmically revolutionary formulas he had written, and pondered a universe so dramatically different than the model crafted by the immortal Isaac Newton, that a century later we are still struggling to understand all the implications of Einstein’s Relativity
Mars was, however, not alone. We entertained the same fantasies about Venus, now known to be completely lacking in the attributes of the goddess of love, with temperatures of 900° F and 90 atmospheres of pressure. That’s if 90 times the pressure of standing on the beach watching Earth’s ocean waves roll onto the shore is your idea of an ideal honeymoon spot (if you want to see what I consider one of the best, worst, portrayals of Venus, I recommend the 1968 film, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. This film is now considered in the public domain and can be downloaded by clicking here). The pressure would flatten you into a blob of protoplasm while your remains would quickly cremate in temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Not my preferred way to go, when that time comes.
Back to Mars…
The lede picture for this post, called the”Bootprint on Mars,” is a crater, but the sole of that shoe is not a small one. From heel to toe, it stretches approximately 240 miles. The photo was taken by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express’s HiRISE Camera. Known as “Orcus Patera,” here is the ESA’s basic description of the crater (on Mars, many craters are called “patera”):
Orcus Patera is an enigmatic elliptical depression near Mars’s equator, in the eastern hemisphere of the planet. Located between the volcanoes of Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons, its formation remains a mystery.
Often overlooked, this well-defined depression extends approximately 380 km by 140 km in a NNE–SSW direction. It has a rim that rises up to 1800 m above the surrounding plains, while the floor of the depression lies 400–600 m below the surroundings.
Hmm. That’s all well and good, but what does that really mean? First of all the ESA statement said it is in the eastern hemisphere (yes, Mars has eastern and western hemispheres just like Earth.). It also says it is near the equator. Good, that we understand, as well. And the objects named: Elysium and Olympus (Greek names, by the way)? Okay, it says they are volcanoes. We have plenty of those here. I live around 60-100 miles from a whole range of volcanoes, called the Cascades. That’s a common frame of reference. As long as one or more of the volcanoes here doesn’t pull a Mt St Helens, we’re in good shape.
So we have these two volcanoes, Olympus being the largest known volcano (and a shield volcano to boot) in the Solar System:
Olympus Mons on Mars: Tallest Volcano in the Solar System. Photo: NASA
The central edifice stands 27 kilometres (17 mi) high above the mean surface level of Mars (about three times the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level and 2.6 times the height of Mauna Kea above its base). It is 624 km (374 miles) in width, flanked by steep cliffs, and has a caldera complex that is 85 km (53 miles) long, 60 km (37 miles) wide, and up to 3 km (1.8 miles) deep with six overlapping pit craters. Its outer edge is defined by an escarpment up to 6 km (4 miles) tall, unique among the shield volcanoes of Mars. For a size comparison Olympus Mons is approximately the size of the U.S. State of Arizona. (Wikipedia)
And no, I don’t know if that approximation includes the Arizona fence or not.
Elysium Mons is a big volcano, too.
Elysium Mons (Center Peak) Adjusted for True Color. Photo: NASA/MSSS
Elysium Mons is a volcano on Mars located in the Elysium Planitia, in the Martian eastern hemisphere. It stands about 13.9 km (8.6 miles) above the surrounding lava plains, and about 16 km above the Martian datum. Its diameter is about 240 km (149.1 miles), with a summit caldera about 14 km (8.7 miles) across.
Elysium Mons was discovered in 1972 in images returned by the Mariner 9 orbiter. (Wikipedia) (Note: The volcano at the top is Hocates Tholus–the white wispiness are clouds not volcanic steam–and the lower volcano is Albor Tholus.)
But what is this “Mons” thing? Ah, we Americans can be so provincial. Mons is Latin for mountain, the plural being Montes (If you are a physician, you know any number of body locations that contain the word mons).
Back to the boot. This is one very odd crater. I know from the picture it does not look like much of an indentation. But on Mars, especially since there is no clear frame of reference for what is our equivalent of sea level, even from space, it is hard to gauge perspective for height, depth and width. Look at the difference in the images of Olympus Mons, which was taken directly above the volcano, and the other of Elysium Mons. In that image, the projection is orthographic, north is to the top, and illumination is from the lower right (Mars Global Surveyor, MSSS).
Here is another view, taken by the Mars Orbital Camera on the now inoperable Mars Global Surveyor in 1998. The photo provides another perspective of where Orcus Patera sits on the Martian surface.
Elysium Mons Region with Orcus Patera
The Orcus Patera is just above the word “Vallis.” According to the accompanying text from NASA Images, the dark field in the Elysium Basin is most likely a lava flow that cooled on the surface. Its relation to the three Elysium volcanoes remains under study. For those of you who follow the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, Gusev Crater, where Spirit is located is approximately 5oo miles almost due south from Orcus P.
As I noted above, the Bootprint is a crater, and one that has gouged out a print in the Martian surface that is 1.8 miles deep in some places. Despite that, it pales in comparison to Mars’ Valles Marinaris, a 2500 mile gash that is over 4,3 miles deep. The true depth of the impression gouged out below the filled surface has not been determined. Its surface also is not as smooth as it appears. Still, compared to some of Mar’s areology (the martian equivalent of geology; Ares, being the Greek word for the planet), it is a smooth feature. The European Space Agency, which has been studying the patera has published this perspective image:
Orcus Patera Perspective Image: ESA
This view, computer generated to be oblique, provides a more realistic view of the patera if you were flying over the planet at a very high altitude. The horizon looks odd to our eye because Mars is so much smaller than Earth. Even an explorer standing on the surface of Mars would perceive the horizon to be closer.
In Part 2, we’ll take a look at this strange feature up close, as well as explore other places in the Solar System that similar craters have been identified. Stay tuned!
News
Mars’s mysterious elongated crater
Orcus Patera on Mars
27 August 2010
Orcus Patera is an enigmatic elliptical depression near Mars’s equator, in the eastern hemisphere of the planet. Located between the volcanoes of Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons, its formation remains a mystery.
Often overlooked, this well-defined depression extends approximately 380 km by 140 km in a NNE–SSW direction. It has a rim that rises up to 1800 m above the surrounding plains, while the floor of the depression lies 400–600 m below the surroundings.
Today, August 27, the Disciples of Christ’s Higher Education and Leadership Ministries (HELM) announced that they have purchased The Intersection, the social media site to which DÎSCÎ is connected.
This announcement comes as welcome news because it provides The Intersection with the funding to continue to its ministry and services to members of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and their friends.
HELM is the Disciples’ denominational unit in charge of promoting higher education among the Disciples, campus ministries and various types of support for the Disciples colleges and seminaries. The Disciples of Christ have historically had a major commitment to higher learning and post-secondary education, as well as graduate seminaries for the preparation of those intending to enter the professional ministry. Currently the denomination has fourteen colleges and universities, four additional schools that are historically related to the Disciples but not formally in covenant with HELM, four seminaries, three divinity houses at other university seminaries, and three associate seminaries.
Here is the letter released by Brad Lyons, HELM’S Communications Director:
Dear partners in ministry,
Higher Education and Leadership Ministries (HELM) is pleased to announce we have assumed ownership, management, and financial support for The Intersection, the social network web site for members of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a larger ecumenical community. You can read the press release in The Forum on The Intersection’s main page.
As a subscriber, what matters to you is that we do not intend to change how the site works. If anything, we hope to add features to the site and grow in membership.
We also know how crucial you are to The Intersection’s vitality. Without you, The Intersection is useless. We appreciate the volunteers who work with the site and everyone who posts, whether regularly or sporadically.
We hope you continue to use The Intersection as one of many tools to expand your faith and to grow your faith family. We are happy to answer your questions or your opinions on this expansion of our ministry.
Thank you HELM! We look forward to the Intersection having a long and fruitful life for our members and explore how to make the site an even more interesting and engaging place for Disciples and their friends to share in a place “where faith meets life!”
The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History this spring opened it new exhibition called “The Human Origins Project”. Living on the West Coast, I would have to save a lot of pennies to be able to get to Washington, DC to attend the exhibit, but if it is as good as the website, it’s a winner! I’d love to hear a report from one of our DISCI members who live on the Eastern Seaboard who would have a chance to go through it and then give us a report of the experience.
Reconstruction of (L-R) Homo habilis, Homo heidelberensis, Home Neandertalensis. Smithsonaian Hall of Human Origins Header Photo. Photo Credit: Artist: David Gurche, Photographer: Chip Clark.
Key to the Human Origins home page is the prominent question set up so visitors to the site can comment: “What does it mean to be human?” That, in my opinion, is the gold-standard question regarding the entire history of the debate over evolution. If it were shown scientifically that every organism, except Homo sapiens evolved, the last 150 years of rancor and vitriolic rhetoric likely would have been quite different.
We have gotten used to hominid paleontologists finding ever older primate fossils such as the much touted, Ardipithecus ramidus, just this winter, dating in at approximately 4.3 million years old. The primate tree however has many branches and is by no means a linear progression. The Smithsonian’s interactive Human Family Tree is the most current thinking of the majority of paleoanthropologists regarding both grouping and dates the species’ lived: Click here: Human Family Tree.
But just as controversial is the discovery in Indonesia on the island of Flores, of an apparent hominid species previously unknown to science that is smaller than any other, officially named Homo floresiensis, but dubbed the Hobbit. From the web-page:
Remains of the most recently discovered early human species, Homo floresiensis (nicknamed ‘Hobbit’), have been found between 95,000 and 17,000 years ago on the Island of Flores, Indonesia. H. floresiensis individuals stood approximately 3 feet 6 inches tall, had tiny brains, large teeth for their small size, shrugged-forward shoulders, no chins, receding foreheads, and relatively large feet due to their short legs. Despite their small body and brain size, H. floresiensis made and used stone tools, hunted small elephants and large rodents, coped with predators such as giant Komodo dragons, and may have used fire.
This very recent date, clearly crossing time-lines with modern humans is both tantalizing and troubling to scientists. H. floresiensis remains a bone of contention (sorry, just couldn’t resist that one) in paleoanthropology, but the evidence supporting it as a legitimate hominid appears to be growing. We certainly will know within the next decade.
Where does that leave us? With the completion of the Neanderthal genome (you can read my take on the Smithsonian’s smart phone app for Android and iPhone called “Meanderthal” on my personal website, Extreme Thinkover) the level of the rhetoric is only going to increase over those who still reject evolution out of hand.
I would suggest, however, that as Disciples we can continue to follow the evidence, with a theology that holds integrity with the biblical text and the scientific research.
It is my opinion (since the chimpanzee genome has already been decoded) that the next project will probably be H. floresiensis. With their much more recent date, viable uncontaminated genetic material may be easier to identify and extract. The findings of these projects point to irrefutable evidence that the mutability of DNA/RNA not only makes evolutionary change a possibility but an inevitability. It would be reasonable to speculate that analysis is already underway.
My dear readers might expect the opening lines of a post bearing the title with such an obvious play on the most-published original English story in the world to follow the path of Dickens’ immortal words. In this case, however, I ask your indulgence to open with the words of another world-famous piece of literature, known for its dramatic presentation, but far fewer have ever read its introductory sentence:
NO one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
These words written in 1898 by the equally immortal English author, H.G. Wells, open his universally known War of the Worlds. I have to admit, with some embarrassment, that like many, if not most contemporary Americans, I know Wells’ story through its radio and cinematic productions, but have never read the book. I had to look up a copy of the text on-line, because unlike Dickens’ opening salvo in his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”, Wells opens his
H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" 1st Edition, 1898. Photo: Public Domain
at a much more subtle and cerebral level, “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched…” Watched by whom? Martians: perhaps the first modern depiction of alien life prescient of the field of astrobiology. Amazingly, many would have believed it; millions did. Mars was the planet of fanciful speculation, with good reason. But I will return to that later. Nevertheless, the universe was still a relatively small and cozy place. Science, as we know it today, was a toddler awkwardly running to and fro, counting and building things.
Yet a revolution was brewing, pushed by industry through the 1700s and 1800s, astonishing breakthroughs on how to build things big, how to make an inconceivable jump from the strength and power of humans and beasts to the harnessing of natural elements into machines with the power of a thousand beasts and ten thousand laborers. That however was prelude, for another force was being created and directed, a force that would not only create power but carry information.
Though this this revolution grew, another vortex formed like a gathering tropical storm, from an unexpected province, not over the consequences of the growing industries that were rapidly building on each step of the toddling sciences, but from the increasing rotation of the storm creating winds and havoc–its target–the very ground and the life that lived upon it: Geology. Biology. Evolution. The age of the earth. The origin of life. Bones, now stone, dug from the ground. Ocean shells on mountain peaks. That confluence of the science of the human mind and the science of the divine mind created a cyclone that like the Great Red spot on far distant Jupiter’s gaseous oceanic atmosphere, has now raged for over a century and a half.
As the turmoil over the origin of the world and life raged across the world, something much more quiet and solitary was happening after dark. For 300 years, since a Dutch oculist placed two pieces of curved glass into a tube and realized it could magnify the image at a distance, and soon after an upstart Italian mathematics professor pointed it at the sky, a select group of men, (almost always supported by women, from a sister who was devoted to her brother’s work, to a room filled with highly educated astronomers, but denied access to the telescopes growing in sophistication), began counting what they saw in the sky. What they saw amazed them. Very slowly it began to dawn upon them that these views of the heavens were going to change the universe in ways so profound that the debate over evolution or divine creation would pale almost to insignificance. Now, if they could just figure out why.
War of the Worlds Frontis Page, 1st Edition, 1898. Photo: Public Doman
In the three decades that followed Wells’ words, Science matured at staggering rate, accomplishing more in those thirty years than perhaps had been achieved in the previous thirty centuries. It is difficult to describe in words the sheer magnitude of the transformation of reality itself. The universe was not small, it was huge beyond comprehension. It was not young but old, so old that nothing in the cherished scriptures of three of the world’s greatest religions gave the slightest hint of that age. And that included an ancient age of the very Earth itself.
That was only the beginning of the stunning revelations. As the discoveries of science accelerated through the Twentieth Century, Edwin Hubble in 1929 proved the Milky Way galaxy was but one island universe among, not thousands, but billions, and they were not suspended motionless in the cosmic void, but were moving, and moving at speeds unimaginable previously to any human in history. Away from each other. Which led to only one other even more stunning conclusion: There had been a beginning. But what that beginning looked like was so close to being beyond human comprehension that nearly a century later, millions of people still cannot bring themselves to accept it.
It would make no difference though to those who stepped into the staggering reality of the universe. Within that one stupendous century powered flight was invented and human technology leapfrogged from crude aircraft barely able to climb into the air, to a machine of such great power and thrust, that humans broke the gravitational bonds of Earth. A scant 40 years after Hubble discovered the true nature of the universe, two humans would step upon the the surface of Earth’s moon.
By the end of the 20th Century, these two stories, one by Dickens and the other by H.G. Wells still command the literary attention of the world. At the same time, the two stories of reality, one guided by a devotion to a divinely inspired word, and the other guided by an inspired effort of humans to describe in words what they observed still have not found a way to comfortably accommodate each other, although growing numbers are searching for that integrative spark of the fusion of the two. It is among these seekers that the tale of two planets becomes a revelatory event, a new genesis, indisputable in its truth and its impact.
A Tale of Two Planets
Earth and Mars to Scale. Image: NASA
When H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1898, the photos above did not, could not, exist. What Wells had at his disposal were maps such as this drawing by the Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877:
Schiaparelli's Martian Map. One of the first attempts to map the Martian surface. Originally published in "Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (German encyclopaedia), 1888." Photo: Public Domain
A century later, through the combined efforts of NASA and European Space Agency (ESA), from satellites orbiting the Red Planet using sophisticated imaging equipment, the true topography of Mars has been revealed:
Mars Topographic Map. Image: NASA/JPL/ESA
The story, however, is a tale of two planets. In similar fashion, Earth-orbiting satellites have also mapped the topography of our own blue planet:
Earth Topographic Map. Image: GFSC/NASA
One of the most interesting facts about Mars and Earth is that Mars has almost the same amount of land area as Earth. The difference is that Earth’s oceans cover about 71% of the planet. Land accounts for 148.94 million square kilometers on Earth. Mars has 144.80 square kilometers of land. Where, then is the water? That’s a question that has been relentlessly pursued since, well, Schiaparelli labeled on his map “canale”, which was inaccurately translated into English as “canals” rather than “channels.” Earth-based telescopes could see that the north and south poles of the planet had what appeared to be ice-caps, which grew and shrunk with the seasons (which are
Mariner 4: 1st Image from Martian Orbit in History. Image: NASA
about twice as long as Earth’s due to Mar’s orbit being about 80 million km on average farther from the Sun). But was it enough ice to have once given Mars vital oceans? Those hopes seemed dashed (though prematurely) in 1964 when NASA’s Mariner 4, the first space probe to make it to Mars sent back pictures of a dry, dead, world. Still, the clues for a wetter Mars remained tantalizing. Over the course of the next half century as more robotic missions were flung toward this enigmatic world (almost half would fail), the possibility of water, in great quantities continued to lurk just under the surface.
The breakthrough finally came in the first decade of the 21st Century, as ever-increasingly sophisticated space probes, some in orbit, some as landers, photographed, radar-probed, scratched the soil, traversed the surface testing thousands of samples of rock and soil. The chemical hints of water were everywhere, but the proof seemingly nowhere. Schiaparelli’s channels were there, as were volcanoes of a height that stunned planetary scientists. The largest canyon known in the solar system, Valles Marineris, is as wide as the continental United States, deeper and wider than the Grand Canyon on a scale so massive as to make the great rift in the Earth look like a scratch by comparison.
Mars' Valles Marineris with U.S. Map Overlaid. Image: NASA
Ice on the poles was confirmed, too, although the amount of carbon dioxide ice “dry ice” mixed with the water is substantial. Still, the volume of water seemed too small, even accounting for evaporation and sublimation (liquid turning from ice to gas without going through a fluid state). In 2008, JPL/NASA/University of Arizona in partnership with multiple countries and international companies successfully landed Phoenix at 68.2° North. Although it was not designed to traverse the martian surface like the wildly successful rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, it had a shovel to scrape through the soil. On July 31, 2008, in a trench dug no deeper than a child might dig in the sand on a beach, NASA proved, once and for all that Mars had water:
Evaporating Water Ice on Mars. Phoenix Lander, 2008. Photo: JPL/NASA
Ice exposed in the trench on Sol 20 (the designation of a day on Mars), had evaporated/sublimated away on Sol 24. What if the Red Planet had once been the second Blue Planet?
Mars with Hypothetical Oceans. Image: MOLA. NASA/JPL/MSSS
And all this brings us to this photo of an unassuming-looking rock. Looks, however can be deceiving, for this rock is a meteorite, and it is from all places, Mars.
ALH84001,0. A Meteorite from Mars. Discovered: Antarctica, 1984, Wt: 1930.9g, Photo: JSC/NASA.
Although meteorites confirmed from Mars are extremely rare (only 12 have been verified), the most astonishing possibility as slices of three of these extraterrestrial rocks were subjected to electron microscopy, structures were present that appeared remarkably like microfossils found in earth rocks.
Possible Fossilized Nanofossil from ALH84001. SEM Image: David McKay/NASA
And this one from the Nakhla, Egypt Martian Metorite:
Complex biomorphs appear on another Nakhla chip shown in this scanning electron microscope (SEM) frame. This image contains three basic forms: Broad smooth knife-shaped features, elongated features with rounded endcaps and transverse compartments or dividers, and donut shaped small features, each about 1 micrometer in diameter. One possibility is the donut-shaped features are derived from the compartments present in the elongated features (Wikipedia):
Finally, this electron microscope image also taken from the Nakhla Martian meteorite of a possible nanofossil:
Martian Meteorite Nakhla, Possible Nanolife Fossil Image. SEM Image: David McKay/NASA
Does it not seem oddly paradoxical to recollect H.G. Wells’ opening sentence when he wrote,
…perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
We, the humans of Earth, are examining the rocks of Mars, scrutinsing them for “transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water,” even if that drop of water existed billions of years ago. We know we have found Mars’ water. Now, are these structures the remnants of life when Mars was the second blue planet? If that turns out to be the case, the indisputable fact that life existed on both planets, the tale of two planets will require not a new chapter, but whole new book. For those who cling to the accounts of the Divine Word as given to a one and only act of creation, from which Homo sapiens sapiens is the capstone of the cosmic plan, they will have to grapple, as never before–regardless of the tirades of the past 150 years–with the realization that the Creator they worship is more clever and speaks with words never heard by human ears, not only on our planetary sibling, but throughout a Universe too large to comprehend, but begging us to do so, nonetheless!
Earth Seen from Mars by Spirit Rover. JPL/NASA
This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration RoverSpirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd martian day, or sol, of its mission. The image is a mosaic of images taken by the rover’s navigation camera showing a broad view of the sky, and an image taken by the rover’s panoramic camera of Earth. The contrast in the panoramic camera image was increased two times to make Earth easier to see.
The inset shows a combination of four panoramic camera images zoomed in on Earth. The arrow points to Earth. Earth was too faint to be detected in images taken with the panoramic camera’s color filters. Source: NASA.
Little did H.G. Wells ever imagine that the first Martian to look at Earth would be through robotic eyes sent from Earth.
It is a rainy summer afternoon in the early 1970s. In a tidy kitchen, in a second-floor suburban apartment, a five-year-old girl sits at a formica table. In her chubby hands she clutches a grilled cheese sandwich. Her face is a puzzled frown as she looks from the sandwich to the oven across the room, then off into space and then back to the sandwich. She is trying to work out the answer to a very puzzling, very important question:
If God didn’t have a Mom, then who made His grilled cheese sandwiches when He was a kid?
The question, now, seems silly; but the wonder behind it was real. “Wonder” is the word for it: that puzzlement, the bigness of question that I was feeling in that second-floor kitchen all those years ago. I was concerned about God, of course, in that literal way of young children. “Poor God, all alone without a Mommy.” But there was something…else, something inside me, reaching, stretching, straining my greasy little fingers toward a concept just out of reach. “Infinity” was the concept’s name; and though I never grasped it – then or now – wonder is the thing that kept me reaching.
Author Madeleine L’Engel once said, “The most interesting people in the world are the very young and the very old, because they are the ones most likely to ask the really big, really interesting questions.” If that is true, than I must have been a very interesting young person! Time and time again, I asked the questions.
If space is on the other side of sky, then what’s on the other side of space?
What came before the beginning?
I can kinda see God never dying, but how could God have never even been born?
Why was I born ME, and not somebody else?
Why does cream stirred into coffee look like whirlpools and galaxies, and why do so many fractals look like things in nature?
In light of my wonder-driven youth, I suppose it was inevitable that I would learn about Galileo Galilei, and come to admire him as a kindred spirit. I didn’t share his inclination toward the deep-end maths and sciences – to this day I remain very much a Discovery-Channel generalist – but I sensed that he, like me, was a wonder-driven soul. I could just imagine him, frowning over his own lunch at his own kitchen table:
How fast does light go? What would happen if I dropped two different weights off a tall building? Why are the stars so far away and how can I see them better? What if all I’ve been told, isn’t all there is?
The world is not always kind to wonderers, of course. Galileo was famously shut down by a religious and political establishment that didn’t want people “wondering” if their leaders were right about everything. I, far less famously, was shut down by the encroaching preoccupations of adulthood. Somewhere along the line, the big questions of my youth gave way to the more immediate questions of adulthood: What should I wear to this job interview? How will we pay this repair bill? Why, oh why, is this baby still crying?
Adult life, as I lived it up until very recently, had a nasty way of back-burnering my innate will to wonder. Even ministry, a vocation of wonder if there ever was one, left my inner Galileo shut down and crowded out by more mundane concerns. What color should the new church roof be? How do we get more people to fill our pews? Who’s making all the grilled cheese sandwiches for next week’s VBS? The business, and busy-ness, of being an active church pastor left me very little time or energy to wonder about the intricate interrelationships of the Trinity, or how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
(The answer to that, by the way, according to one young child, is: “Four…or eight if they’re skinny.”)
In the “unmindful small-mindedness” of everyday living, I lost my spiritual telescope, my what-COULD-be, and put my inner Galileo under “house arrest” while trying to live a constricted what-SHOULD-be…holy wonderment sacrificed in the quest to be the PERFECT wife/mother/daughter/pastor/homeowner/minivan-driver/protestant/American.
Maybe I’m the only adult who’s ever done that. Maybe I’m not.
But God seems to favor cycles and seasons; and now, with a few good mentors and a little recent “lively chaos” to stir things kinetic again, I find myself here – now – at midlife, in a kitchen, with a grilled-cheese sandwich on my plate and a keyboard at my fingertips and a rediscovered telescope up to my soul’s right eye. I am looking, as I did when I was younger, to a future I cannot quite see clearly, just as my old friend Galileo could not quite clearly see his big new sky. But my future, like the sky Galileo did see, intrigues and invites and makes me want to know more. This, too, is wonder.
“Who made God’s grilled-cheese sandwiches when He was a kid?” -I didn’t know when I was five, and I don’t know now. But I do know that the stuff in formica tables, and in telescopes, and in me, and in you, and in planets, and in stars, and in all matter light and dark, known and not-yet-known, is surprisingly similar, spun out of the Infinity that holds it all within itself. I know that nothing, not even a grilled-cheese sandwich, is truly ordinary when I really stop to think about it.
To stretch my grubby little fingers toward Infinity is a “wonder-full” goal, then and now and always. It is knowledge too high to grasp; too holy not to try.
There’s a buzz out there amongst astrobiologists that before this year is out, Dr. David McKay and his exobiology research team are going to announce that they have definitively identified fossilized organisms in meteorites from Mars that have been collected on earth.
Martian microorganisms. Martians. Real Martians. That bubble of perception that life exists only here on Earth will have been burst.
The next step, of course, will be to design Mars missions to try and determine if any of those organisms have survived Mars’ harsh and extreme history in an environment in which only extremophiles (as we now know flourish on Earth) could survive.
Martian Meteorite NAKHLA2058. Electron Microscopy Photo of Possible Fossilized Life. Photo: NASA
All technical considerations aside, if and when this announcement comes, the theological implications, as well as our geo-centric Christology, will no longer be the topic of idle speculation but confront us with a reality that demands a response to the world.
Heliocentric Model, Detail from Copernicus' "Revolutions of the Celestial Sphere." Photo: Glasgow University
Since 1543, when Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Sphere) was published, we have been attempting to unify our Christology with our Cosmology. The results have been, in my opinion, at best, mixed.
The announcement of alien life, even microbial, requires a new conversation with a new set of rules. It shall be a heady time, indeed. Ours is the generation that broke the shackles of gravity and set off across the Solar System. If, too, we are to be the ones who confirm that life’s seed has been sown across the expanse of space like the Sower in one of Jesus’ parables, we have much work to do.
The horrific impact of the earthquake on the people of Haiti demands a response from all people of good conscience, of faith, and all people of all faiths as we share in our common humanity. As such, I am publishing the letter from Rev. Todd Adams, Associate General Minister and Vice President of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) making an appeal to help the people of Haiti.
Rev. David Waggoner, PhD, DÎSCÎ Moderator
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 14, 2010
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
I am writing this message on behalf of our General Minister and President, Sharon Watkins. Even though Sharon is on sabbatical, she has been keeping a close eye on the situation in Haiti.
Sharon and I request your prayers for the people of Haiti, for our Global Mission Partners, and our missionaries who need not only our prayers, but also our resources. I also request your prayers for Dr. Glen Stewart, Regional Minister of the Christian Church in Tennessee, who is in Haiti with a delegation from the Tennessee region.
At the time of writing, they are safe and have arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti. My understanding is that the U.S. State Department and the Tennessee Congressional Delegation are working to arrange their return. At the same time a delegation from the Oklahoma and the Great River Regions are on the other side of the island in the Dominican Republic. While they felt the earthquake, they did not have any damage.
In addition to these groups, I would urge you to pray for the Haitian communities within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). We have about 100 Haitian churches. These are anxious days and moments for many of them who have family and friends on the island. Charlie Wallace from New Church Ministries has traveled to be present with our Haitian churches in Florida.
As you can imagine, communication to and from the island is very limited. Week of Compassion, Global Ministries and others have been using all of their available resources and technology to connect with our missionaries and partners.
Yesterday afternoon, Rev. Amy Gopp, Minister of Compassion, participated in a phone call with Church World Service. This conference call provided additional information regarding the resources, needs and opportunities for service.
If you or your congregation are compelled to offer financial resources in support of our relief efforts and our partners, I invite you to give at www.weekofcompassion.org or send a check to Week of Compassion, 130 E. Washington St., Indianapolis, Ind., 46204; noted for Haiti or earthquake relief. Week of Compassion has already sent an initial grant to Global Ministries / Overseas Ministries in support of our missionaries and partners, as well as Church World Service.
Week of Compassion and Global Ministries are trying to keep their websites as up to date as possible and I encourage you to check them frequently.
It was with great disappointment and dismay that we learned in mid-December that DisciplesWorld was ceasing publication both in print and on-line.
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The first question was how would that affect The Intersection, and with it, DÎSCÎ? The Intersection, which was created and administered by Rebecca Woods, News and Website editor for DisciplesWorld, has been tied to the magazine, and was as much a labor of love for Rebecca as it has been part of her job.
The good news is that The Intersection is a Ning Network-based website, independent of DisciplesWorld’s, so the shutting down of the magazine’s site does not imperil its basic existence or ability to function.
Members of The Intersection are currently discussing strategies to perpetuate it according to its original purpose:
A community for members and friends of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and other people of faith to gather, share, and discuss.
It may take several months before all the issues can be worked out, such as who will be administrator(s), subscription fees to Ning, and other typical details.
DÎSCÎ: What’s next?
I created the Disciples’ Institute for Scientific and Cosmological Inquiry specifically to be a forum group on The Intersection. Membership thus far has required an Intersection account. At the same time, I had the desire for DÎSCÎ, as a forum on faith and science, to have a public face as well, so simultaneously, I set up the blog on WordPress. That arrangement has worked quite well, not only from an exposure perspective, but also, Intersection members of DÎSCÎ (and even any Intersection member who requested to post a topic on the forum), could also post their topic or comments on the DÎSCÎ blogsite.
DÎSCÎ can stand on its own, either as a forum in The Intersection, or as an independent blog site. Change begets change, however. The decisions made regarding the continuation of The Intersection will have an impact on DÎSCÎ, but I am hopeful and prayerful that both will go through this transition and flourish well into the future.
The retirement clock on the STS Shuttle systems is counting down to zero. One big question has been, what kind of craft will be ready to continue to service the ISS, as well as other payloads that could benefit humans in thousands of ways? We Americans are not really ready for the next generation of space transport, in my opinion, of course, because we’ve spent a lot of time the past twenty years spending our money, well, let’s just say on other international projects.
Funny though, even though the Soviets “lost” the space race, the Russians, might end up winning it after all, with stuff they just have left lying around.
One of those happened to be named Buran. The Soviet space shuttle that had several glide test flights, but only one successful orbital mission. The most amazing aspect of Buran, however, was its one launch and landing was fully robotic. No crew was aboard. Watch this video from Prime Time Russia. You’ll see some very familiar things…
Comments anyone?
Here is a video retrospective of the Buran program, also produced by Prime Time Russia:
In the opening of Part 1, I suggested that this is a story that starts in the wrong place and the wrong time, but perhaps that contradiction contributed to both its lasting power and to its veracity. In the previous post, we looked at two creation myths, the first from the Aztecs of Mesoamerica and the second from the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. Both of these narratives, although created by peoples on opposite sides of the Earth and who never had any contact with each other, have unmistakable and remarkable similarities that suggest what Joseph Campbell wrote extensively about the archetypal human story.
The Star of Bethlehem, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, is an anomaly in the biblical narratives. Other than the opening passages of Genesis, the Sun, a few references to the stars in Psalms and a couple of other places, the writers of the Bible have no interest in the sky, at least as we have been examining it in this discussion. The Hebrews, however, did have an organized cosmology:
The remarkable contrast between this concept of the cosmos and those of the Aztec’s or Sumerian’s is, like in the Hebrew creation story, the complete lack of violence in the act of genesis itself. Few other religions have a similar conceptual basis in which the Earth Mother God does not have to be destroyed and her various body parts used to make the earth, sky and humans. The Egyptian cosmology illustrates the more common archetype:
Egyptian Creation Myth Illustrated--This Picture is based on the "Heliopolis Cosmogony," one of several dominant myths in the Egyptian Pantheon.
In the previous post I also suggested that the study of the sky as distinct from the land and the oceans perhaps took place circa 6000 years ago, but admitted that was a guess. Since writing that post, I was fortunate to acquire Gavin White’s new work titled, Babylonian Star-Lore. I was, as it turns out, far too conservative in my estimations. White maintains that “Babylonian astrologers started to export to their neighbors as early as the 13th century BCE” (p. 7). He goes on to contend that the development of natal horoscopes required a level of mathematics that was compiled in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, with the first modern equivalents finally appearing in the 5th century, or 7000 years ago. It is this connection that reasonably ties planetary observations to the Matthew’s Magi, and the possibility that the Star of Bethlehem was based on their millennial old texts and maps of the constellations.
Returning to another assertion I made in the Part 1, these were modern humans using very high level reasoning and historically sound observations of the skies. These particular Magi were likely among the most highly educated individuals in the world, and familiar with astronomy from the known regions of the world. That would include Greece, where we must take a brief trip to meet the man who changed the sky and the universe four hundred years before the birth of Jesus.
I return to the question, “What is the sky?” White shares my view that these ancient cosmologies are not crude or primitive:
Today this “flat-earth” cosmology is generally belittled as being rather “primitive” and as far as it is given any attention it is relegated to the kindergarten of metaphysical speculation. This is unfortunate, as the model is actually a rather elegant presentation of archaic man’s view of himself and the universe in which he acted and had his being. It is a complex view of the world, one full of awe that utilizes the mysterious language of symbolism, where every element is a part of an interrelated network of forces. This model also underpins the rationale of celestial divination and magic, mankind’s first attempts to foretell and forestall the shape of things to come. (p. 21)
The tools of those attempts were constellations, the motion of the planets, comets, phases of the moons, and eclipses, lunar of course, but solar in particular, as they were tied to the seasons. From China to India, Persia to the Mediterranean, Egypt across the great Sahara of North Africa, Asia Minor, Greece, the expanse of the Roman Empire all the way to Britannia, the night sky was a great celestial scroll unrolling from horizon to horizon, open to be examined, its mysteries to be plumbed, and the fate of humans read in its aetherial language.
Sometime around the 7th century BCE, in Greece, the question of the sky rose once more, and a startlingly new answer was ventured. What if, these renegade philosophers dared to suggest, as they studied their emerging expertise in mathematics and geometry, the sky was not the abode of the gods? What if the sky was a place, just like the earth, that the Sun, Moon and stars, even the ones which wander, were places? And if that were even possible, how far away were these places? What caused them to move around the earth? And if they moved, what if the Earth moved, too?
The Greek Geocentric Cosmos. Photo: Source Courtesy, A.H., 1996.
These were dangerous questions, on the level of heresy, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.
Aristarchus of Samos
Meet Aristarchus of Samos. He was a mathematician/astronomer who lived circa 310-210 BCE. Samos, a volcanic island in the Aegean Sea, lies in the archipelago that separates modern Greece from Turkey. Older, but contemporary with Archimedes, he was known among his contemporaries as “the Mathematician.” According to Sir Thomas Heath, who published Aristarchus full text “On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon” into English (1913, 2004), “There is not the slightest doubt that Aristarchus was the first to put forward the heliocentric hypothesis. Ancient testimony is unanimous on the point and the first witness is Archimedes, who was a younger contemporary of Aristarchus, so that there is no possibility of a mistake. Copernicus, himself admitted that the theory was attributed to Aristarchus, though this does not seem to be generally known” (p. 301). Archimedes, to his discredit, did not accept Aristarchus’ heliocentric theory and campaigned against it. Aristarchus’ idea was not theologically popular either in some circles. One Cleanthes attempted to indict the Mathematician “on the charge of impiety for putting into motion the Hearth of the Universe… ” (Heath, p. 304). What enraged Cleanthes was Aristarchus used geometry to prove his hypotheses: “by supposing the heaven to remain at rest and the earth to revolve around an oblique circle, while it rotates, at the same time, about its own axis (Ibid.). Who knew how prescient this action would be nearly two thousand years later with another mathematician named Galileo?
What is the connection to our Christmas Star? Aristarchus used star charts and calculations developed by the Babylonians centuries earlier. Sir Thomas presents a number of examples where Aristarchus used, what he called “Chaldean lunations,” basically books of tables that all mathematicians of the era would have as a standard in their libraries (p. 314).
The Magi, it is reasonable to infer, would have read Aristarchus. Mathematically he was an “Einstein” of his age, his texts were in circulation, and even though they likely would not have accepted his heliocentric hypothesis, they would have studied his math proofs and geometry to predict lunar and solar eclipses, and to calculate “The Great Year,” “which is completed by the sun, the moon, and the five planets when they return together to the same sign in which they were once before simultaneously found” (quote from Censorinus AD 238; Ibid, p. 316). That very high level of geometric expertise would have been invaluable in calculating planetary conjunctions, with a high degree of accuracy. And the ability to correctly forecast the birth of a king was the Gold Medal of astrology/astronomy. Whoever they were, they were convinced they had got this one right, and with it a confidence so strong they were willing to travel from their homes somewhere east of Jerusalem, command an audience with King Herod and tell him right to his face!
Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We have seen his star in the east and have come to worship him. (Mt 2:2, NIV)
Saying that to a reigning monarch is the kind of thing that could get you beheaded in short order. What stayed Herod’s hand? Perhaps the sight of this from an east-facing palace balcony:
Bethlehem Star 12Aug -03 Jerusalem 0210hrs. Star Chart by TheSky6 Serious Astronomer Edition.
The proof, as they say is in the pudding. This is a natural sky view of the proposed Star of Bethlehem. See if you can spot it without scrolling down to the annotated version. Michael Bakich, a Senior Editor of Astronomy Magazine writes in the January 2010 issue:
The biblical account says that the wise men spoke to Herod about the star. Neither Herod nor his scholars knew what they were talking about. No other Bible verse or secular writing mentions the star. What was it? Could it be Matthew, the only gospel writer who mentions the star, wanted to prove to his readers what he knew from reading the Old Testament?
I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh; there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Scepter shall rise out of Israel… (Num. 24:17)
Did the writer of Matthew invent a story to fulfill this prophecy from Moses? Most historians don’t think so. (p. 37)
The solution is most likely a planetary conjunction. It is not, in the end, the definitive answer, nor does it subtract the mystery and miracle of that night. It was the Star of Wonder. And if this particular conjunction or cycle of conjunctions that occured in 3 BCE signaled the birth of the Savior, how we can rejoice what a clever God we worship!
Bethlehem Star 12Aug -03 Jerusalem 0210hrs with Annotations. Star Chart by TheSky6 Serious Astronomer Edition
One can only imagine what was going through the minds of the Magi as they pointed this astronomical event out to Herod and his astrologers, going over their data and calculations. We know what was going through Herod’s mind.
The conjunction would have been very bright. Jupiter was shining at a magnitude of -1.8 and was at 99.98% phase full (think full Moon), and Venus was at a shadow-producing magnitude by itself of -3.9 and 93.38% full phase! Regulus by contrast would have almost seemed dim at its very bright -1.38 magnitude, and Sirius, the brightest star in the northern sky at -1.44 magnitude was glowing high in the SW sky.
Star of Bethlehem with Magi Card
After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. Matt 2:9.
Merry Christmas and may the Blessings of the Christ Child Come to You and Your Loved Ones.
Star of Wonder--Yes. Astronomical Event--Just Maybe?
Part 1
This is a story that starts in the wrong place. They’re my favorite kind. And the wrong time. That’s even better. A story that starts in the wrong place and the wrong time has to be interesting. There’s something to be said for predictability, but it rarely makes for a good plot or an intriguing ending.
This story does not have those disadvantages. Some people have believed it was true. Others believed it was false. Others, still, believed it was myth, of uncertain veracity, but a beautiful, even elegant narrative. For two millennia, Christians have believed it was part of a miracle. Others, of different faiths, may have acknowledged it as a lovely story, but of no spiritual significance. For the past four hundred years, as men and women have studied nature in new and innovative ways, and expanded our understanding of the Earth and the sky into a cosmos unimaginably large and old, the story’s credibility declined, seemingly moving toward the status of a fairy tale.
All of this, while true, is not the start I to which I was alluding.
Lucy: Ancient Hominid, Australopithecus afarensus, est 3.2 million years old. Replica. Field Musum, Chicago. Your ancestor? Yes. Intellectual equal? Not even close! Photo: My Cell Phone.
Sometime around six thousand years ago, the human race, Homo sapiens sapiens discovered a problem. The Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and the Cro Magnon (Arcahic Homo sapiens) were long extinct; one hominid now possessed all that was known to exist (the earliest dating for Homo florsiensis is currently 18K years). It might have been earlier, but the record left by humans before that gets harder and harder to read. So, I’ll suggest six thousand years, with the caveat that date might need to be adjusted with the next archaeological blockbuster discovery. The problem was the Earth. More specifically, the ground.
I need to, at this point, dispel one very important, misconception. That is the fallacy of modernity. The individuals I to whom I am referring are modern humans. Same body, same brain, same capacity for intelligence, problem solving, or IQ. Just like Albert Einstein, your neighbor Justin, who wears only faded NASCAR t-shirts, your eccentric Aunt Lizzy, that beauty Angelica or hunk Chad (depending on your hormonal drivings) who in high school you never had the nerve to ask out, or even your cousin Zeke. All right, maybe not cousin Zeke, but that is only because he hasn’t put down the game controller or said a single word since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 113 came out. He may be more cyborg than human after all this time.
This is the paradigm I want you to remember: ancient ≠ primitive. Got that?
Back to our discovery. At some point in the ancient past, one of our ancestors had
Flores sapiens next to Homo Sapiens Skulls. Photo: National Geographic News & Peter Brown/Nature
the revolutionary thought that the ground was substantively different from the sky. This was not a “well, duh,” moment. It was a paradigm shift, perhaps capable only due to the superior huge frontal cerebral cortex of the Homo sapiens. The shift was beyond the observation of a day/night cycle, although that would have been part of it. This shift, like the differentiation between the sense of the boundary between my body and not-my-body, changed the human perception between earth and sky.
Stuff comes out of the sky. Rain, snow, hail, clouds, wind, fog, as well as birds and bugs. Some of those things are good, even edible. Bad things like volcanic or range fire smoke and ash, dangerous wind blowing debris and biting things can come out of the sky, too.
The Milky Way Over Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Photo: Mauna Kea Observatory
Some things, most things actually, in the sky are beyond reach. The Sun, the Moon, the stars, and the wandering stars. Some stars appeared to streak across the sky; others appeared mysteriously out of nowhere glowing with a dim head and a long tail. And rarely, a flash of a new star in the night that soon disappeared. Or every once in a while there was a day in which the Sun seemed to be consumed by a black disk, turning the day to dusk and all the birds stopped singing, or the Moon, its regular phases interrupted, too, a dark shadow crossing its face, then glowing a blood red before being released from its captivity.
Lunar Eclipse, 27 Feb 2007, Photo: Astronomy.com
The regular cycles of those things in sky that are out of reach is what we are interested in. We live on the ground. We can’t fly like the bugs or the birds. We can’t live under water, either, but that is not the focus of this discovery. Living on the ground, as we do, we know a lot about the ground. Most of what lives on the ground keeps us alive. Some of the other things that live on the ground can also kill us, but that is secondary to our discussion, as well.
On that day that one very bright modern human looked at the ground, maybe sifting a handful of dirt through his or her fingers, and then looking up at the sky, squinting at the sun or gazing at the bright swath of starlight of the Milky Way, and said the equivalent of “Huh, now that’s interesting,” and human understanding shifted forever.
From that moment, the science of astronomy was born, as well as those of geology and biology. The problem was, earth and life were tangible. The sky, however, was a complete mystery.
What was the sky?
Flock of Geese Over Surf, Oregon Coast, 23 Sep 07. Photo: DCW
Yes, that was the question: What was the sky? What were the lights in the sky? The daytime sky and the nighttime sky were so different. Why was that? Why did all the lights in the sky appear in the East, move in an arc reaching a highest point that changed with the season and then always set in the West? But what about the stars in the Northern sky that never rose nor set? For some of our observers, however, not knowing they lived below that line we now call the equator, the lights in the sky looked quite different, still rising and setting East to West, but those stars that never rose nor set were to the south.
The Sun, the greater light to rule the day, its brightness so intense to dare a glance of
Total Solar Eclipse with Diamond Ring Effect
more than a fleeting moment brought pain, even blindness. At the same time, it brought the warmth of the day, its risings and settings regular, though half of the time, the days would grow longer and half of the time shorter, and with it the corresponding warmth and seasons. The earth tuned itself to this great annular cycle, of living and dying, growing and seeding, warming and cooling.
The Moon, the lesser light to rule the night, possessed a soft glow that one could study without risk; its phases regular following the seasons decreed by its daytime master, its face never changing. Yet at intervals beyond comprehension, it, like the Sun, would be covered with a shadow, at times in part, at others completely.
Of the night, though, what of the Wandering Stars? The first a fleeting spark always near the Sun’s rise or setting. Next, brighter than the others, one of the mornings and one of the evenings at times so bright it cast a light that caused shadows. Another with a glow of angry red, appearing out of nowhere and growing into a dominant light. A fourth, a great golden giant stately moving through the heavens night after night. Also a fifth, whose trek seemed like that of an old one slowly working its way through the constellations. And some, it is said, saw a sixth, dim grey-blue phantom only on the rarest of nights. Against the apparent immutable backdrop of the other lights at night, why did these few shine without the twinkle of all others, and how, against all reason, did they change their direction in the sky and track back toward the East, then inexplicably again reverse and march toward the West?
Five planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - gather over the ancient Stonehenge monument in England. *Image Copyright*: Philip Perkins
What was the sky? Why did some of the lights form patterns against the black velvet backdrop of night? What was the swath of light that cut across the sky from horizon to horizon? What was the force or cause of their motion? What were the faintest clouds of light, while others seemed to cluster into groups distinct from the random spread of most of the stars?
One might say the ancients had plenty of time to work this all out. Day after day and night after night, if they chose to pay attention, they could discover patterns and cycles. On every continent where humans collected, they in fact did pay attention, and observed the patterns and cycles. What they decided those observations meant and what caused them was another thing altogether.
To explain the sky, both day and night, these individuals drew upon the source of information they understood the best: the ground and the sea, and the abundant life that inhabited both. Those were the things they would touch. They made the very logical assumption that the sky was made from the same things the earth and oceans were. They couldn’t have been more wrong. At the same time they couldn’t have been more right.
I must again remind you of our one rule: ancient ≠ primitive. The observers devised theories about how the earth, sea, and sky came into being, using the “materials” to which they had access. We call these descriptions of the creation of the world, myths. That is, if we are honest, modernocentric, even arrogant. It can result in our overlooking key facts and observations, assigning to them to the status of fable rather than seeing myths for what they were: descriptions of the origin and forces of nature and life.
The Aztecs provide a perfect example of a creation account that follows their observations of the natural world:
The dualistic gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, lightness and
Questalcoatl Aztec Lord of Morning Star & Wind
darkness, looked down from their dwelling in the sky at the water below. Floating on top of the water was an enormous Earth Monster goddess who devoured all things with her many mouths, for the goddess had gaping mouths at the knees, elbows and other joints.
Everything the twins created, the enormous, floating, terrible, insatiable goddess ate. The twin gods, normally implacable enemies, agreed she had to be stopped. They transformed themselves into two enormous, slithering snakes, and slid silently into the dark, cool water, their cold eyes and flicking tongues seeking her body.
Tezcatlipoca: Aztec Lord of Death, Creator of Fire, Night Sky, Warriors
One of the snakes wrapped itself around the goddess’s arms and the other snake coiled itself around her legs and together they tore the immense Earth Monster goddess in two. Her head and shoulders became the earth and her belly and legs became the sky. Some say Tezcatlipoca fought the Earth Monster goddess in his human form and the goddess ate one of his feet, therefore his one-legged appearance. Angered by what the dual gods had done, and to compensate for her dismemberment, the other gods decided to allow her to provide the people with the provisions they needed to survive.
From her hair were created the trees, the grass and flowers; from her eyes, caves, springs and wells; rivers flowed from her mouth; and hills and mountains grew from her nose and shoulders.
The goddess, however, was unhappy, and after the sun sank into the earth the people would often hear her crying. Her thirst for human blood made her weep, and the people knew the earth would not bear fruit until she drank. This is the reason she is given the gift of human hearts. In exchange for providing food for human lives, the goddess demanded human lives. Source: James W. Salterio Torres
Though the price of human sacrifice causes us to shudder, the battle with the Earth Monster goddess, with her defeat and dismemberment is hauntingly similar to the Sumerian story of the defeat of Tiamat:
Tiamat possessed the Tablets of Destiny and in the primordial battle she gave them to Kingu, the god she had chosen as her lover and the leader of her host. The deities gathered in terror, but Anu, (replaced later, first by Enlil and, in the late version that has survived after the First Dynasty of Babylon, by Marduk, the son of Ea), first extracting a promise that he would be revered as “king of the gods”, overcame her, armed with the arrows of the winds, a net, a club, and an invincible spear.
And the lord stood upon Tiamat’s hinder parts,
And with his merciless club he smashed her skull.
He cut through the channels of her blood,
And he made the North wind bear it away into secret places.
Marduk Slaying Tiamat: Sumerian Creation Myth.
Slicing Tiamat in half, he made from her ribs the vault of heaven and earth. Her weeping eyes became the source of the Tigris and the Euphrates. With the approval of the elder deities, he took from Kingu the Tablets of Destiny, installing himself as the head of the Babylonian pantheon. Kingu was captured and later was slain: his red blood mixed with the red clay of the Earth would make the body of humankind, created to act as the servant of the younger Igigi deities.
Two creation stories, having so many parallels even though those who devised them lived on opposite sides of a planet they did not know as such, and who never had had contact with one another.
The ground, the sea, the sky were all the world. Thousands of years would pass before the problem of the sky would again be addressed. The untouchableness of the sky would create a new question, without which, this story could not continue in Part 2.
The Keck interferometer on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The interferometer consists of two telescopes each with a 10 meter reflecting mirror, made up of 36 hexagonal mirrors on computer controlled actuators for pinpoint accuracy (4 nano-meters), in separate domes, about 279 feet (85 meters) apart. Photo Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory.
Twin Keck Observatories at Sunset, Mauna Kea, Hawaii
Note the observing shutters have been opened and are facing east, so when the first targeted objects come up over the horizon, the telescopes will be able to track them immediately. Interferometry has two great observing advantages. First, using two telescopes twice the amount of light coming from the object is captured. Second, just like having two eyes, each image is that tiny bit from a different perspective, giving the telescopes a kind of stereo vision and that allows for the computer processing the image to add in a great more detail. The observatory to the left of the two Kecks is the Subaru 8.2 meter optical/infrared telescope operated by Japan.
Keck Observatory--Cutaway View of Domes and Astronomy Center
The Keck Interferometer directly resolves the accreting material around supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei. Provided by Max Planck Institute, Bonn, Germany. December 8, 2009
“An international research team presents some of the first long-baseline interferometric measurements in the infrared towards nearby active galactic nuclei with the Keck Interferometric Telescope in Hawaii. The team, led by Makoto Kishimoto from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, found the measurements to indicate a ring-like emission from sublimating dust grains and its radius to yield insights into the morphology of the accreting material around the black hole in these nuclei.”
Cutaway view of the 30 Meter Keck Reflector Telescope
For more images of the Keck Observatories and their observations, click here.
Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating.
Comprehensive scans of the human genome reveal that hundreds of our genes show evidence of changes during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.
“We know the brain has been evolving in human populations quite recently,” said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Surprisingly, based on skull measurements, the human brain appears to have been shrinking over the last 5,000 or so years.
The Human Brain. Image Courtesy: dreamstime/MSNBC.com
The Human Brain. Photo Credit Courtesy: dreamstime/MSNBC.com
Weighing in at an average of 2.7 pounds, the human brain packs a whopping 100 billion neurons. Every minute, about three soda cans’ worth of blood flow through the brain
Image Credit: Courtesy: dreamstime/MSNBC.com
This research opens two very thorny issues for the church:
1. Accepting evolution as an accurate description of biological change through time, at the level of speciation, not just genetic mutations as happens in viruses.
2. Once the mechanism of evolution is accepted, the issue that Homo sapiens sapiens is continuing to evolve on both a micro and macro-level requires a theological discussion that exceeds the level of uncertainty involved in the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
I would open the discussion with the assertion that we do not have the language or theological constructs needed to have a meaningful dialogue about the issue of ongoing evolution of the human species. We, however, need to begin developing both very quickly.
To assist us in initiating this conversation, I have attached a lecture “Faith and the Human Genome” by Dr. Francis Collins, MD, who was the director of the Human Genome Project, and earlier this year was appointed director the National Institutes of Health by Pres. Obama. Collins, a devout Christian, is author of the book The Language of God, in which he described his journey as an agnostic medical doctor and researcher to having a conversion experience that radically transformed his life. Dr. Collins believes the time has long past for the Church to accept evolution:
…The past century has not been a good one in terms of the polarization between the more evangelical wing of the church and the
scientific community. We seem to be engaged in contentious,
destructive, and wholly unnecessary debate about evolution and creation. From my perspective as a scientist working on the genome, the evidence in favor of evolution is overwhelming.
His lecture provides a clear snapshot of how he came to his conclusions and how Christians should respond. Dr. Collins’ work has had a profound affect on my own journey in faith and science:
Casina Pio IV, Home of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Vatican. Image Courtesy: Panaramio by "silver2412"
From the Washington Post, dated 8 Nov 2009 by Marc Kaufman:
“This week the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first major conference on astrobiology, the new science that seeks to find life elsewhere in the cosmos and to understand how it began on Earth. Convened on private Vatican grounds in the elegant Casina Pio IV, formerly the pope’s villa, the unlikely gathering of prominent scientists and religious leaders shows that some of the most tradition-bound faiths are seriously contemplating the possibility that life exists in myriad forms beyond this planet. Astrobiology has arrived, and religious and social institutions — even the Vatican — are taking note.”
It’s good to know that we are so contemporary in our questions about astrobiology. The article gives a nice overview of what the Vatican is discussing. Comments, anyone?
Rev. Bob Cornwall is a Disciples’ minister and pastor to the Central Woodward Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of Troy, Michigan, a church historian by training, and editor of Sharing the Practice (Academy of Parish Clergy). He writes the blog: Ponderings on a Faith Journey and is a member of the Intersection
When matters of religion and science are discussed, Albert Einstein is sure to be brought into the conversation. Einstein often spoke in spiritual/religious terms, but whatever the nature of his spirituality it wasn’t conventional. However, there is a spirituality present, one focused on awe and wonder at the nature of the universe. He spoke of himself as being a “devoutly religious man,” but he didn’t believe in a personal God in conventional Christian terms (p. 22).Harvey Cox brings Einstein into the conversation because the great scientist understood the relationship between faith and awe, and in Cox’s estimation “faith starts with awe” (p. 22). Awe begins with mystery, but becomes faith only when meaning is ascribed to this mystery. Unfortunately this sense of awe and wonder, indeed faith, has been eroded by “cool, objective science and a religion too wedded to a human-centered view of the universe.” There is a need, perhaps of a bit of “re-enchantment” that some theologians have talked about. Thus, a place to look for help in our conversation may be Rudolph Otto and his concept of the holy, or as Cox puts it “the primal experience of awe or wonder, not any ideas about them” (p. 23). Einstein spoke of people who never experienced awe or wonder as “snuffed-out candles” (p. 23).
Religion and spirituality, at their best, help us give meaning to that which we experience. Thus, the mystery of death raises questions about the meaning of life. Consideration of the meaning and purpose of life is what gave rise to philosophy, religion, culture. Religion emerged within human evolution – in all of its forms – to answer the questions of why and what, not how or when. If we expect religion to answer scientific questions then we are going to get distorted answers. That doesn’t mean they don’t or can’t interact, but we should make sure we’re understanding what is expected.
Our dilemma today is rooted in the fact that religion has lost its meaning-giving power. It has become “morally and intellectually confusing,” in large part because religious leaders have cheapened our myths and stories by reducing them to doctrines and propositions.
But the result of the “literalization of the symbolic” is that something essential has been lost in translation. The ill-advised transmuting of symbols into a curious kind of “facts” has created an immense obstacle to faith for many thoughtful people. Instead of helping them confront the great mystery, it has effectively prevented them from doing so.” (p. 27).
As we read this, one wonders how the Enlightenment, which emphasizes rationalism, has influenced the approach to faith on the part of persons on both right and left. Both want facts, when maybe we must move in another direction. Indeed, Cox notes the emergence of a modernist approach that led to reductionism – the paring down of necessary items required for belief. This approach is as misguided as the more conservative attempt to determine essentials. The answer, Cox believes, is to be found in appreciating the “dazzling array of myths, rituals, and stories as an invaluable legacy of the human race” (p. 28). But, one wonders how this will work in a faith tradition that values history.
Cox goes into some detail about how faith and mystery have been understood, from Teresa of Avila to Reinhold Niebuhr. The key point he wants to make is that objective/scientific knowledge is not the only kind available to us. And faith is an expression of these other forms of knowledge and understanding.
Rev. Rebecca Woods is the creator of The Intersection, which is the home site for DÎSCÎ and also a member of the group. She is the News and Website Editor for DisciplesWorld and is an ordained Disciples minister.
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I posted this article from Religion News Service today on DisciplesWorld’s website and immediately thought of DISCI. Here’s the lead paragraph:
WASHINGTON (ENI/RNS, 10/19/09) — The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History will open a new permanent exhibit on the “discovery and understanding of human origins” in March and convene a panel of experts to bridge the gap between religion and science.
The Smithsonian currently has a temporary exhibit called Since Darwin: The evolution of evolution in its Museum of Natural History. When they open the permanent exhibit, they’ll also host a dialogue with a panel of experts to “bridge the gap.”
My first thought is, I’d love to see the exhibit and hear the dialogue (although I probably won’t be able to do the latter). But while I have a lot to learn about evolution, I’m also convinced. For me, there’s no “gap” to bridge.
What about for people who are conflicted though? What do you think? Do you see this as potentially helpful?
Brian Morse is a hospital chaplain. He is a member of DÎSCÎ and lives in Independence, Missouri.
Disclaimer: Growing up I “struggled” with math and science in school. Therefore I never really studied it. Recently I’ve been enjoying Science Channel and what-not. As an adult there is no stress of being judged as “getting it” or not.
I am most interested in this notion of a multiverse, or parallel universes. The ramifications for, well, everything is exciting. The part that really opens my mind to new ways of thinking is that every possibility already exists simultaneously.
However, since I’m getting this info on cable TV, I’m curious if the mainstream of the scientific community sees these theories as legit possibilities.
I work in a hospital, and a surprising number of my scientifically-trained medical colleagues have more superstitions about the full moon than we we have bed pans (which, by the way, now come in plastic and designer colors (why????), so you literally won’t freeze…well, you know.)
Back to the full moon. If you are addicted to nature shows like I am, you know that lunar cycles affect a lot of things, like when turtles come onto beaches and lay their eggs. Many other marine invertebrates and vertebrates (like the California grunion) also time spawning, mating, and egg-laying to lunar cycles, although not all during a full moon.
Lunar Phases Illustration. Credit: University of Nebraska, Lincoln
However, in a British study published this year by Dr. Rachel Grant, a biologist specializing in amphibians, she documented over a ten year period that newts, frogs, and salamanders synchronize their mating activity to the full moon. Lucky them. Although the thought of spending ten years crawling through the damp marshy underbrush of the English countryside at night, full moon or not, to confirm the amorous activities of newts, frogs, and salamanders, falls far from my idea of fun. I tip my hat to Dr. Grant for her tenacity. Maybe it’s a British thing. For the full BBC article, click here.
But when it comes to we humans, we just plain got the short shrift on the whole lunar cycle thing. Maybe God was thinking, “I’m going to give my humans that big brain, with all the fancy frontal lobe options, so I’ll just scratch the full moon thing I gave the amphibians off the list.” Except he seems to have left the “Fascination with the Full Moon” switch in the on position, so with the big frontal lobe we made up a whole bunch of stuff to fill in the gap. It’s just that none of it is true, even though we really, really want it to be.
Why I am thinking about this? (Don’t ask my wife; she’ll have a completely different answer.) For one thing, the existence of water on the moon was confirmed this week by NASA spacecraft, and that is a critically important resource if we ever go back to the moon. Send people, that is. With water, you can make, well, water to drink, you can make air by splitting the 2 H’s from the 1 O, and, you can make rocket fuel, by combining the H’s and the O’s and lighting them.
The other reason is MSNBC.com published an article on moon myths, titled, “Moon myths: How real are lunar health effects?” And since it is a good idea to keep lunar myths about health out of the Health Care Reform Legislation–They do not need another distraction–I thought I would offer you the chance to read the MSNBC piece: Click here, and then share your favorite myth, or if you’ve heard one they don’t list, it would be fun to add it. More fun than crawling through the muck looking for newts in the process of propagating their species.
Oh, and if you can find any scriptural references to the moon, by all means, include it. I just didn’t take the time to look.
Incidentally, the next full moon occurs on October 3, at 23:12 PDT. It is typically called the “Hunter’s Moon” but also is known from older sources as the “Blood Moon.” So, if you have clear skies and go out to moon at the full moon, please give the amphibians their privacy.
UPDATE and CORRECTION: According to Spaceweather.com, the full moon on October 3 is called the Harvest Moon, because it occurs after the Fall Equinox, regardless of whether it falls in September or October. The hunters apparently get the lunar short shrift this year. The next full moon is November 2, and the one after that December 1, but also December 31 (New Year’s Eve by the Full Moon! There’s got to be a myth about that, even if we have to make one up.) So the whole moon name thing doesn’t always line up really well.
Full Moon taken from the International Space Station. This is what the moon looks like without having to view it through earth's atmosphere. Credit: Nasa.gov.
Next time: Is the dark side of the moon really dark?
C. Edward Weisheimer is a member of DÎSCÎ. He lives in Ohio.
Hello Friends, I just finished reading Mortimer Adler’s little book, “How To Think About God.” It is an interesting book. A question arises for me out of his discussions. Do you think that the creation mythos in Genesis is necessarily the beginning of the physical world, or may it be something different, i.e. God giving order to the universe? This would be a creative act in and of itself, but it means that the material universe existed prior to God’s action of giving order through God’s “Word.” So, God and the material universe could co-exist eternally. What think ye of this proposition?
That’s a big question. Many would say an essential one, with the answer being to quote an old refrigerator magnet, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” So should we invest any of our time trying to reconcile what the Bible says about creation and the world in general with what Science (capital “S”) is telling us about the nature of the universe and the world in general?
What difference does it really make in my daily life if scientists insist the cosmos is vast, old, and that life began as some little squiggly that somehow turned into me? As long as I have the Word of God that I can read daily (kind of, daily), wonder at God’s miraculous works, and know that Jesus died on the cross for me, do I need any of that other scientific stuff? Okay, I do need the stuff that makes my cell phone and iPod work, and my debit card, and my cable or satellite TV signal for my new HDTV, my computer, and, oh yeah, the microwave, but that’s about it. And yeah, I prefer my showers hot, and the stuff in the fridge to be cold; and the car, ’cause if I didn’t have the car I couldn’t go to church. And it’s good to have the lights turn on when I flip the switch; I can admit that. Well, and food–the good stuff, not the stuff that makes you get all emetic because it’s got blue hair growing on it in the refrigerator. Oh, my triple shot white skinny chocolate latte with non-fat whipped cream and a double pump of sugar-free crème de menthe. Venti. Oh, I forgot about clothes…
We live in an age in which we take for granted the most powerful forces generated in the universe harnessed by scientists to make our lives easier; our toys work miracles from the perspective of any other generation; our work is the most productive in the history of the world; we repair our bodies and heal our illnesses with the equivalent of magic; we possess the ability to move about on the planet in ways believed only accessible to the gods by our ancestors.
Yet we regard science as an enemy of the faith.
What am I missing here? Is it because we know how to unleash those same forces in ways that could wipe all life from the earth? I don’t think so, because this question was hotly debated centuries before we unlocked the secrets of the atom.
We Disciples love the word reconciliation. Can faith and science ever be reconciled?
Day and night. The most important cycle that governs our lives. Our bodies are finely attuned to the light of day and the dark of night. It is as natural as breathing. We think of that 24 hour cycle as very simple. The earth spins on its axis; part of its surface is always in light and part is always in dark. It has been this way since the creation of the world. Both of the creation stories in the Bible, in Genesis 1 and 2 use the word “day” to describe God’s creative activity.
There is, however, nothing simple about it at all. The complex set of forces that keep us safely spinning around the life-giving warmth of the Sun are only now beginning to be understood.
Yet, because of its constancy, we take it for granted.
Let me ask you a question. When was the last time, when you left your home after dark, that you actually looked up at the sky? Not just a glance, but looked up with intention to see what, well, what you could see?
I’ll venture a guess: Probably only rarely. If you live in an urban setting, the combination of light pollution and air pollution might make it nearly impossible to see much of anything. If your home is in a rural part of the country, you may very well be able to see the starry arc of the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon. And if you are fortunate enough to live or visit well away from a population center, the night sky can be so bright you hardly need a flashlight to move around safely.
Whatever you can see, though, when you look up into the sky is not the present but the past. The photons hitting the retina in your eyes are all different ages even though every one of those photons is traveling at exactly the same speed–the famous speed of light, which is about 186,000 miles per second, or 300,000 km per second. Astronomers call this “look back time.”
The light reflected from the moon takes just a tick over one second to reach Earth. The Sun, some 93 million miles away, takes around 8 minutes. The farther the object is from me, the older the light is when it reaches my eyes. When Earth passes by Mars (which is the fourth rock from the sun), the light takes anywhere between three and about six minutes to reach us, because both orbits of Earth and Mars are elliptical, just slightly egg-shaped.
If I point my telescope at the Andromeda Galaxy (also called M31), which even in my suburban backyard I can easily see, I am looking at light that is over 2.5 million years old! And Andromeda is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. In fact, Andromeda and the Milky Way are moving toward each other and some billions of years into the future, they will collide and merge. Astronomers call it, somewhat tongue in cheek, “Milkomeda.”
Milky Way with Annotations. Generated from Spitzer Space Telescope Images. Our Solar System lives in the Orion Arm.
You get the idea. The farther away the object is, the older the light is when it reaches Earth.
The other key concept is that everything in the universe is moving, and not just moving haphazardly, but expanding away from each other (the trajectories of some galaxies, like the Milky Way and Andromeda, will cause them to collide). That’s what Edwin Hubble proved in 1925, using the Hooker 100 inch Telescope on Mt Wilson just up the hill from Pasadena, California, that was threatened by the huge “Station Fire” just last week. This discovery led to the realization that the universe was expanding from a beginning point in space and time, which we now call the Big Bang. And just a few years ago, astronomers discovered that the universe is not just expanding, it is accelerating.
What we’re interested in, though, is the Beginning, not the End. Astrophysicists have wound the cosmic clock backward and come up with an age that the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old. That’s old. Really old. Can we see anything that old in the sky? No, we can’t. But modern telescopes have gotten so powerful that we can see a long way away and therefore back in time. On September 2, 2009, Prof. Tomatsugu Goto of the University of Hawaii released this photo of the most distant galaxy with a central black hole, and therefore oldest object ever observed. It is 12.8 billion light years from us and the mass of the black hole is estimated to be a billion times that of our sun.
QSO (Quasi-Stellar Object) The Largest and Most Distant Black Hole Galaxy Ever Imaged. 12.8 Bn LY Distant. Photo: T. Goto, University of Hawaii.
Ponder this image for a few moments, as pixelated as it is. This is the image of a real galaxy with a real black hole at its center (just like our galaxy has, by the way) that existed billion years ago.
Here on Earth, which by comparison is only 4.5 billion years old, we humans–in particular we humans of the Judeo-Christian heritage–have viewed our universe as being, well, kind of cozy. As the old saying goes, “God’s in his (sic) heaven and all’s right with the world.” And although about 500 years ago that coziness began to be challenged and started unravelling when Copernicus published his “On the Revolutions” in 1543, we have been mostly content to think and talk about God in the way we always have.
Enter the dawn of the 21st Century. We are struck by the enormity of what astrophysics has revealed to us; new discoveries make the news every week. The universe is not cozy. It is huge, old, complex, colder than we can imagine and hotter than we can imagine. The very molecules that make up our bodies were born out of forces we can barely describe when stars blew themselves apart.
How do we talk about God in this kind of reality? And life? Life on one planet in a universe that stretches 46.5 billion lights years in every direction? How do you talk about God in this reality?
This is where we will start. The Disciples’ Institute for Scientific and Cosmological Inquiry is officially open for discussion.
Before you answer, if you can, go outside and look up into the sky for a while, and ponder what is out there, as ancient photons hit your retina, and your brain translates them into the points of light we call stars.
The Disciples’ Institute for Scientific and Cosmological Inquiry.
This site is under construction. Check back often for updates and content.
Rainbows in the Crashing Surf, Yachats, Oregon, January 2008
DÎSCÎ is pronounced “dye-sigh.”
DÎSCÎ will be a forum for discussing issues that the Church confronts in the ongoing conversation and debate between religion and science.
Sue, the tyranasaurus rex, the largest & most complete fossil of a t-rex ever found. On display at the Field Museum in Chicago. Photo taken with my cell phone.
DÎSCÎ contributors will be members and friends of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), usually called “Disciples” for short. They will include clergy and lay people, scholars, scientists, and those with an insatiable drive for learning.
Peking Man Homo Erectus by Russell Ciochon UIowa
The goal of DÎSCÎ will be to confront head-on the most difficult controversies between the church and science, but to discuss those controversies in a manner that is respectful and tolerant.
Sagittarius A*, the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Source: Spitzer Space Telescope
DÎSCÎ will be a virtual institute for those who have the spiritual gift of terminal curiosity about God’s universe, life, biology, astronomy, quantum physics, geology, exobiology, paleontology, meteorology, and any other “ology” that might merit discussion and scholarly reflection.
Here, from a PBS interview, in this statement by Dr. Francis Collins (former director of the Human Genome Project, and just last month sworn in as the Director of the National Institutes for Health), is a perfect example of one way to illustrate of the kind of dialogue that DÎSCÎ will hope to conduct :
Actually, I don’t see that any of the issues that people raise as points of contention between science and faith are all that difficult to resolve. Many people get hung up on the whole evolution versus creation argument — one of the great tragedies of the last 100 years is the way in which this has been polarized. On the one hand, we have scientists who basically adopt evolution as their faith, and think there’s no need for God to explain why life exists. On the other hand, we have people who are believers who are so completely sold on the literal interpretation of the first book of the Bible that they are rejecting very compelling scientific data about the age of the earth and the relatedness of living beings. It’s unnecessary. I think God gave us an opportunity through the use of science to understand the natural world. The idea that some are asking people to disbelieve our scientific data in order to prove that they believe in God is so unnecessary.
If God chose to create you and me as natural and spiritual beings, and decided to use the mechanism of evolution to accomplish that goal, I think that’s incredibly elegant. And because God is outside of space and time, He knew what the outcome was going to be right at the beginning. It’s not as if there was a chance it wouldn’t work. So where, then, is the discordancy that causes so many people to see these views of science and of spirit as being incompatible? In me, they both exist. They both exist at the same moment in the day. They’re not compartmentalized. They are entirely compatible. And they’re part of who I am.
The fading infrared afterglow of GRB 090423 appears in the centre of this false-colour image taken with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii. The burst is the farthest cosmic explosion yet seen (Image: Gemini Observatory/NSF/AURA/D Fox/A Cucchiara/Penn State U/E Berger/Harvard U)
DÎSCÎ will be based on the following scientific and theological assumptions:
God created the universe, and as such, what we are able to observe, both on the largest and smallest scales is real.
It is assumed that God would not create an observable universe that is not real in order to deceive the observer because those observations do not match what is described in certain passages in Scripture.
Science is based on a process that involves hypotheses, observation, testing, and theories built on the results of that process.
Doing science is a dynamic process that changes over time as new hypotheses are developed based on new observations.
Science is always an interpretive process, and the hypotheses may be proven wrong. They may also lead to new hypotheses that are confirmed by observation and experimentation that results in a theory that accurately describes what was observed.
Scientists change their minds as needed when new observations require new hypotheses.
Disciples accept God as creator of the universe, and as such, seek to understand what is the role and meaning of humans, as a part of that creation.
Disciples, as a rule, believe that the Bible contains God’s revelation to humans regarding that relationship, and that the Word of God was made flesh and walked among us.
As stated in the Preamble to the Design of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada: “We believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and we confess him as Lord and Savior of the world.
Resurrected Christ by Mattias Grunewald, Isenheim Altar Piece, 16th Century
The DÎSCÎ Perspective:
Although Disciples’ views vary regarding the historicity of what is written in the Bible, DÎSCÎ, as an institute for scientific and cosmological inquiry, will assume that the Bible is the divine guide to faith, but is not a scientific treatise, was not intended to be such, and that in particular the two creation stories in the text of the book of Genesis are not historical or literal descriptions of the creation of the universe, and with it, humanity.
Single Molecule Pentacene. First Molecule Photographed in History. Source: IBM
DÎSCÎ is moderated by Rev. David Waggoner, PhD, a Disciple’s minister for over 30 years. His personal blog, http://www.extremethinkover, can be read by clicking here.
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DISCI: Disciples' Institute for Scientific and Cosmological Inquiry 