God, creation, science, religion: the conflicts

The idea that the Sun orbited the Earth – rather than the other way around – was the common position throughout antiquity. The Bible, in verses like the one above, seemed to support it.

While it made intuitive sense – the Earth feels solid, while the skies seem to move – close observation of the heavens raised serious questions. The ‘wandering stars’ – now known to be the other planets – periodically seemed to change direction and travel backwards, rather than continuing on a smooth orbit.

Copernicus and Galileo, using new technology like the telescope, suggested that the Earth went around the Sun. The Church, angered, condemned Galileo to lifelong house arrest on “grave suspicion of heresy”.

By 1835, in the face of overwhelming evidence, the Church had dropped all opposition to heliocentrism, and in 1992 Pope John Paul II gave an official apology for his treatment. There are now plans to build a statue to Galileo inside the Vatican walls.

The age of the Universe
One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Peter 3:8)

While the Bible never explicitly states the age of the Earth, many Bible scholars attempted to deduce it using the dates and ages of its characters.

While there were problems with this approach – the chronology becomes confused after King Solomon – several attempts nonetheless came up with strikingly similar figures. The Venerable Bede suggested that the Earth was created in 3952BC, while Johannes Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton said 3992BC and 4000BC respectively.

The most famous, however, was the Ussher chronology, put forward in 1650 by the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. With almost comical precision, it claimed that the first moment of creation was in the evening of 22 October, 4004BC. Scientists point out that all of these dates would mean that the planet came into existence a full thousand years after the domestication of the guinea pig.

Radio dating using lead ores suggests the Earth is around 4.54 billion years old, while the age of the Universe has been put at around 13.7 billion years. This has been established partly by looking through powerful telescopes at distant stars; the Hubble Space Telescope’s Deep Field Image (pictured) shows galaxies over 13 billion light years away, in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

If the Ussher date was correct, we would only be able to see stars 6,000 light years away, or about six per cent of the way across our own galaxy.

Creation and evolution
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:27)

The 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s great book detailing his discovery of the processes of evolution, caused the greatest split between the Church and empirical science since Galileo. The idea that man was not created in God’s image, but evolved from an ape-like ancestor, appalled many Christians.

While not all clergy were opposed to the theory of evolution, some were furious. In the famous debate at the Oxford University museum, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, asked “Darwin’s Bulldog”, Thomas Huxley, whether he claimed descent from the apes on his mother’s or his father’s side.

The argument rages to this day, although the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly in favour and very few biologists now question the basic idea of evolution.

However, some Christians – those who believe that God created the world as described in Genesis – have called for Creationism or “Intelligent Design” to be taught alongside evolutionary biology in school science lessons.

The Church of England issued a posthumous apology to Darwin last year, saying that it showed too much “anti-evolutionary fervour” when his book was published.

Noah, the Great Flood, and fossils
Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. (Genesis 7:2)

In the early 19th century, a young girl called Mary Anning discovered a strange beast in the rock of the cliff-face in Lyme Regis, Dorset. It was a fossil ichthyosaur – a marine reptile that lived at the time of the dinosaurs.

Other fossils were being found in their hundreds, in Britain, the United States and elsewhere. The fact that many of the creatures being found did not seem to exist on Earth led to problems with another of the Bible’s teaching: that God, through Noah, had saved all the animals of the world from the Flood.

Taken together with the belief that God had given Adam “dominion over every living thing that moveth over the Earth”, it was widely believed that it was impossible for animals to go extinct. Anning’s discovery, and the arguments of Georges Cuvier and other scientists, made that position untenable.

Another, greater problem for literal readings of the Bible was that if Noah had saved the dinosaurs, humanity must have coexisted with them.

While some still argue this, most theologians have backed away from taking Scripture literally. The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales says: “We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision”.

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Darwinian evolutionary theory will help find alien life, says Nasa scientist

In a talk marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, a Nasa scientist said that Darwinian evolution will be the driving force of life anywhere in the universe, and we should use its predictions to decide where to look.

Dr John Baross, a researcher at the Nasa Astrobiology Institute, said: “I really feel that Darwinian evolution is a defining feature of all life.

“And so the limits of Darwinian evolution will define the range of planets that can support life – at least Earth-like life.”

Speaking at a public lecture at the Nasa Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, Dr Baross said that the Kepler Space Telescope’s mission, looking for Earth-like planets around other stars, made this an exciting time for astrobiology – the search for alien life.

He said: “I predict in the next five to ten years, we will make discoveries that will lead to theories and ideas at least as profound as Darwin’s.”

Dr Baross said that looking for alien life has always involved using the Earth as a model. While our understanding of how life began is incomplete, it seems clear that there are certain requirements.

All life on Earth needs water, carbon-based organic molecules, and an energy source, either solar or chemical. But alien life may not be entirely Earth-like. Dr Baross said: “I’d like to point out there are many different ways for non-Earth-like life to not use light or chemical energy but use some other form like radiation energy, wave energy, or ultraviolet energy.”

Similarly, the need for water may not be universal. Dr Baross said: “[Life may exist] in an organic solvent rather than liquid water on Titan, or… at temperatures of minus 100 degrees Celsius — there are a lot of ways to think of this because those conditions exist on other planetary bodies.”

So far, astronomers have found 403 “exoplanets” – planets outside our own solar system. While most of them are Jupiter-like gas giants hundreds or thousands of times bigger than the Earth, a few smaller ones have been found, and Kepler is expected to start finding many more over the next few years.

“I think all of us really believe that rocky planets, like Earth, are going to be found at some point,” said Baross.

Story via The Register.

Water found on Moon by Nasa!

What exactly has Nasa found?
The equivalent of 24 gallons of frozen water, mixed in with the rock and dust that was thrown into the air when a rocket was deliberately crashed into a crater near the Moon’s south pole last month. It is far from the science fiction fantasy of an underground lake, but still pretty impressive for a satellite long dismissed as arid and dull.

Didn’t we know there was water on the Moon already?
Scientists have long suspected that there was water on the Moon, but have struggled to prove it. The sensors on orbital craft have detected evidence of hydrogen on the lunar surface, but the quantities were tiny. A major breakthrough came last September, when India announced that its Chandrayaan-1 craft had detected that chemical reactions producing water are still taking place.

Where does the water come from?
No one is certain. One theory suggests that hydrogen released by the Sun in solar winds could have reacted with compounds containing oxygen in the Moon rock, producing tiny amounts of H20. Another explanation proposes that the water came from vapour produced when comets and meteors crashed into the Moon’s surface.

 

What does this all mean?
Nasa has been so keen to find water on the Moon because it brings the dream of a permanent lunar base one step closer. If water exists in the quantities that Nasa now believes, it could be drunk by astronauts, turned into oxygen to make stations inhabitable and – most excitingly – converted into fuel. The Moon could then become the space equivalent of a service station – acting as a staging post for manned missions to Mars.