Maybe it's a good thing all around, for the aliens and us.
Posted on 07/25/2007 12:57:22 PM PDT by mngran
Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries — particularly the United States and his native Germany — between creationism and evolution was an “absurdity,” saying that evolution can coexist with faith.
The pontiff, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said that while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God.
“They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other,” the pope said. “This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”
He said evolution did not answer all the questions: “Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question, ‘Where does everything come from?’”
Benedict also said the human race must listen to “the voice of the Earth” or risk destroying its very existence.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Sorry, I’m not able to embrace your religious belief. I’m Catholic and I don’t have any conflict with God and his application of science which we are probably very far from ever understanding.
Whether evolution is in fact part of His plan or not, I’m not altogether certain. But I can’t embrace a declaration with no proof that the mere acceptance of evolution at some level is part of a satanic plan.
God did in fact create the law of physics, no? Or is that also part of a satanic plan?
I'm glad to see someone else that follows this line of thinking. It answers so many questions.
This is evidence that you haven't a clue about dating or even the meaning of scientific agreement. Disagreements only arise as one attempts to get more specific. There is a big difference between dating something at plus or minus 5,000 years and plus or minus five days. There are numerous dating techniques in play, that when used in combination make dating archeological dating in the last 5,000 years to within a 100 year span absolutely unimpeachable. Let me give you a brief tutorial on the methods.
Seriation: A Seriation is thought to be the first application of statistics in archaeology. Archaeologists use lots of different techniques to determine the age of a particular artifact, site, or part of a site. The two categories of chronometric techniques that archaeologists use are called relative and absolute dating. Relative dating determines the relative age of artifacts or site, as compared to others, but does not produce precise dates. Absolute dating, methods that produce specific chronological dates for objects and occupations, was not available to archaeology until well into the 20th century.
Stratigraphy is the oldest of the methods that archaeologists use to date things. Stratigraphy is based on the law of superposition--like a layer cake, the lowest layers must have been formed first.
That is, artifacts found in the upper layers of a site will have been deposited more recently than those found in the lower layers. Cross-dating of sites, when one compares geologic strata at one site with another location, and extrapolates relative ages in that manner is still used today, primarily when sites are far too old for absolute dates to have much meaning.
The scholar most associated with the rules of stratigraphy (or law of superposition) is probably the geologist Charles Lyell. The basis for stratigraphy is quite intuitive, but its applications were no less than earth-shattering to archaeological theory. For example, Worsaae used this law to prove the Three Age system.
Seriation, on the other hand, was a stroke of genius. First used, and probably invented by the archaeologist Sir William Flinders-Petrie in 1899, seriation (or sequence dating) is based on the idea that artifacts change over time. Like fins on the back end of a Cadillac, artifact styles and characteristics change over time, coming into fashion, then fading in popularity.
Generally, seriation is manipulated graphically. The standard graphical result of seriation is a series of "battleship curves," which are horizontal bars representing percentages plotted on a vertical axis. Plotting several curves can allow the archaeologist to develop a relative chronology for an entire site or group of sites.
The most famous seriation study was probably Deetz and Dethlefson's study on changing styles on gravestones in New England cemeteries. The method is still a standard for cemetery studies.
Absolute dating, the ability to attach a specific chronological date to an object or collection of objects, was a breakthrough for archaeologists. Until the 20th century, with its multiple developments, only relative dates could be determined with any confidence. Since the turn of the century, several methods to measure elapsed time have been discovered.
The first and simplest method of absolute dating is using objects with dates inscribed on them, such as coins, or objects associated with historical events or documents. For example, since each Roman emperor had his own face stamped on coins during his realm, and dates for emperor's realms are known from historical records, the date a coin was minted may be discerned by identifying the emperor depicted. Many of the first efforts of archeology grew out of historical documents--for example, Schliemann looked for Homer's Troy, and Layard went after the Biblical Ninevah--and within the context of a particular site, an object clearly associated with the site and stamped with a date or other identifying clue was perfectly useful.
But there are certainly drawbacks. Outside of the context of a single site or society, a coin's date is useless. And, outside of certain periods in our past, there simply were no chronologically dated objects, or the necessary depth and detail of history that would assist in chronologically dating civilizations. Without those, the archaeologists were in the dark as to the age of various societies. Until the invention of dendrochronology.
The use of tree ring data to determine chronological dates, dendrochronology, was first developed in the American southwest by astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass. In 1901, Douglass began investigating tree ring growth as an indicator of solar cycles. Douglass believed that solar flares affected climate, and hence the amount of growth a tree might gain in a given year. His research culminated in proving that tree ring width varies with annual rainfall. Not only that, it varies regionally, such that all trees within a specific species and region will show the same relative growth during wet years and dry years. Each tree then, contains a record of rainfall for the length of its life, expressed in density, trace element content, stable isotope composition, and intra-annual growth ring width.
Using local pine trees, Douglass built a 450 year record of the tree ring variability. Clark Wissler, an anthropologist researching Native American groups in the Southwest, recognized the potential for such dating, and brought Douglass subfossil wood from puebloan ruins.
Unfortunately, the wood from the pueblos did not fit into Douglass's record, and over the next 12 years, they searched in vain for a connecting ring pattern, building a second prehistoric sequence of 585 years. In 1929, they found a charred log near Show Low, Arizona, that connected the two patterns. It was now possible to assign a calendar date to archaeological sites in the American southwest for over 1000 years.
Determining calendar rates using dendrochronology is a matter of matching known patterns of light and dark rings to those recorded by Douglass and his successors. Dendrochronology has been extended in the American southwest to 322 BC, by adding increasingly older archaeological samples to the record. There are dendrochronological records for Europe and the Aegean, and the International Tree Ring Database has contributions from 21 different countries.
The main drawback to dendrochronology is its reliance on the existence of relatively long-lived vegetation with annual growth rings. Secondly, annual rainfall is a regional climatic event, and so tree ring dates for the southwest are of no use in other regions of the world.
It is certainly no exaggeration to call the invention of radiocarbon dating a revolution. It finally provided the first common chronometric scale which could be applied across the world. Invented in the latter years of the 1940s by Willard Libby and his students and colleagues James R. Arnold and Ernest C. Anderson, radiocarbon dating was an outgrowth of the Manhattan Project, and was developed at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory.
Essentially radiocarbon dating uses the amount of carbon 14 available in living creatures as a measuring stick. All living things maintain a content of carbon 14 in equilibrium with that available in the atmosphere, right up to the moment of death. When an organism dies, the amount of C14 available within it begins to decay at a half life rate of 5730 years; i.e., it takes 5730 years for 1/2 of the C14 available in the organism to decay. Comparing the amount of C14 in a dead organism to available levels in the atmosphere, produces an estimate of when that organism died. So, for example, if a tree was used as a support for a structure, the date that tree stopped living (i.e., when it was cut down) can be used to date the building's construction date.
The organisms which can be used in radiocarbon dating include charcoal, wood, marine shell, human or animal bone, antler, peat; in fact, most of what contains carbon during its life cycle can be used, assuming it's preserved in the archaeological record. The farthest back C14 can be used is about 10 half lives, or 57,000 years; the most recent, relatively reliable dates end at the Industrial Revolution, when humankind busied itself messing up the natural quantities of carbon in the atmosphere. Further limitations, such as the prevalence of modern environmental contamination, require that several dates (called a suite) be taken on different associated samples to permit a range of estimated dates.
In the 50 or so years since Libby and his associates created the radiocarbon dating technique, refinements and calibrations have both improved the technique and revealed its weaknesses. Calibration of the dates may be completed by looking through tree ring data for a ring exhibiting the same amount of C14 as in a particular sample--thus providing a known date for the sample. Such investigations have identified wiggles in the data curve, such as at the end of the Archaic period in the United States, when atmospheric C14 fluctuated, adding further complexity to calibration.
One of the first modifications to C14 dating came about in the first decade after the Libby-Arnold-Anderson work at Chicago. One limitation of the original C14 dating method is that it measures the current radioactive emissions; Accelerator Mass Spectrometry dating counts the atoms themselves, allowing for sample sizes up to 1000 times smaller than conventional C14 samples.
While neither the first nor the last absolute dating methodology, C14 dating practices were clearly the most revolutionary, and some say helped to usher in a new scientific period to the field of archeology.
Since the discovery of radiocarbon dating in 1949, science has leapt onto the concept of using atomic behavior to date objects, and a plethora of new methods was created. Here are descriptions of a few of the many new methods. Potassium-Argon.
The potassium-argon dating method, like radiocarbon dating, relies on measuring radioactive emissions. The Potassium-Argon method dates volcanic materials and is useful for sites dated between 50,000 and 2 billion years ago.It was first used at Olduvai Gorge. A recent modification is Argon-Argon dating, used recently at Pompeii.
Fission track dating was developed in the mid 1960s by three American physicists, who noticed that micrometer-sized damage tracks are created in minerals and glasses that have minimal amounts of uranium. These tracks accumulate at a fixed rate, and are good for dates between 20,000 and a couple of billion years ago. (This description is from the Geochronology unit at Rice University.) Fission-track dating was used at Zhoukoudian. A more sensitive type of fission track dating is called alpha-recoil. There is a newsletter for the fission track community called OnTrack.
Obsidian hydration uses the rate of rind growth on volcanic glass to determine dates; after a new fracture, a rind covering the new break grows at a constant rate. Dating limitations are physical ones; it takes several centuries for a detectable rind to be created, and rinds over 50 microns tend to crumble. The Obsidian Hydration Laboratory at the University of Auckland, New Zealand describes the method in some detail. Obsidian hydration is regularly used in Mesoamerican sites, such as Copan.
Thermoluminescence (called TL) dating was invented around 1960 by physicists, and is based on the fact that electrons in all minerals emit light (luminesce) after being heated. It is good for between about 300 to about 100,000 years ago, and is a natural for dating ceramic vessels. TL dates have recently been the center of the controversy over dating the first human colonization of Australia. There are several other forms of luminescence dating as well, but they are not as frequently used to date as TL.
Archaeomagnetic and paleomagnetic dating techniques rely on the fact that the earth's magnetic field varies over time. The original data-banks were created by geologists interested in the movement of the planetary poles, and they were first used by archaeologists during the 1960s. Jeffrey Eighmy's Archaeometrics Laboratory at Colorado State provides details of the method and its specific use in the American southwest.
This newly developed method is a chemical procedure that uses a dynamical systems formula to establish the effects of the environmental context (systems theory), and was developed by Douglas Frink and the Archaeological Consulting Team. OCR has been used recently to date the construction of Watson Brake.
Racemization dating is a process which uses the measurement of the decay rate of carbon protein amino acids to date once-living organic tissue. All living organisms have protein; protein is made up of amino acids. All but one of these amino acids (glycine) has two different chiral forms (mirror images of each other). While an organism lives, their proteins are composed of only 'left-handed' (laevo, or L) amino acids, but once the organism dies the left-handed amino acids slowly turn into right-handed (dextro or D) amino acids. Once formed, the D amino acids themselves slowly turn back to L forms at the same rate. In brief, racemization dating uses the pace of this chemical reaction to estimate the length of time that has elapsed since an organism's death.
Racemization can be used to date objects between 5,000 and 1,000,000 years old, and was used recently to date the age of sediments at Pakefield, the earliest record of human occupation in northwest Europe.
Since there may be contradictions in results archeologists and related scientists never rely on a single method for dating of significant finds like Pharoh's tombs. So how do archaeologists resolve these issues? There are four ways: Context, context, context, and cross-dating.
I see that you are looking at this from an anti-evolutionary perspective and looking for reasons for the theory to be wrong. That's OK too.
The Pope was right about Islam, about what is true religion, and about evolution/creation. That’s a clean sweep.
Why don't you just 'consider' wherever you end up to be 'heaven,' and you won't have to worry a bit about where the rest of us are! ;o)
I agree - informative site.
Honestly, I have no issue with what he said here.
But natural selection requires the opposite. It requires an animal to carry around a useless non-vestigal apparatus, and then a later generation picks up another useless non-vestigal apparatus, and another, until all the pieces are in place for the new apparatus to function. Before that it is dead weight at a minimum, costing calories to carry around, and giving no benefit. Further, you used a single cell that can detect light or dark as an example. Assuming this is a fact that this exists, my bet is that there are probably tens or hundreds or thousands of changes at the cellular level required for this to happen . . . and they would all need to be in place as well for the single cell to provide a benefit . . . so it's the same problem even to get that single cell.
At the risk of igniting a "religious war" let me answer factually, with no disrespect intended. Christians do not agree that Jews have a better understanding of the Old Testament than Christians (did you really think we did?). Christians regard Jewish reading of the scriptures Old Testament and New as blinkered, lacking in the guidance of the Holy Spirit conferred on Christians at the Pentacost, and dead to Christ. Christ had a lot to say regarding the Pharisee's understanding of their own scriptures and largely condemned it, saying that they did not see the "signs of the times" among other things (meaning they did not see the fulfillment of prophecy).
You nailed it. The Old T only makes sense in that it was preparation for the New in the plan of salvation.
And the lack of evidence! One wag asked the obvious question: If there are millions of alien civilizations, where are they?
These aliens don’t seem to know much about us either.
Celestial tit for tat....
Maybe it's a good thing all around, for the aliens and us.
Or some is and some isn't.
“At the risk of igniting a “religious war” let me answer factually, with no disrespect intended. Christians do not agree that Jews have a better understanding of the Old Testament than Christians (did you really think we did?). Christians regard Jewish reading of the scriptures Old Testament and New as blinkered, lacking in the guidance of the Holy Spirit conferred on Christians at the Pentacost, and dead to Christ. Christ had a lot to say regarding the Pharisee’s understanding of their own scriptures and largely condemned it, saying that they did not see the “signs of the times” among other things (meaning they did not see the fulfillment of prophecy).”
“The Old T only makes sense in that it was preparation for the New in the plan of salvation.”
The “Old T” makes plenty of sense without the “New T” (and, of course, not being Christian I simply don’t believe in the “New T”-for me there’s simply “The Bible” or the “5 Books”).
Here’s a quote from http://mesora.org/_private/mesora.html Please note that I have taken it verbatim, since it conveys a lot of information and I don’t wish to alter it. However, in some places the writer is extremely straightforward (i.e. not very PC or ecumenical). Here it is:
“Behold the days are coming - the word of G-d - when I shall sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah, the seed of man and the seed of animal. And it shall be that just as I was diligent concerning them, to uproot, to smash, to destroy, to annihilate and to bring evil, so will I be diligent to concerning them to build and to plant - the word of G-d. In those days it will no longer be said, ‘The fathers ate sour grapes, but the teeth of the sons are set on edge.’ Rather, every man will die for his own sin, and the man who eats the sour grapes, his own teeth will be set on edge. Behold, days are coming – the word of G-d – when I will seal a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Not like the covenant that I sealed with their forefathers on the day I took hold of their hand to take them out of the land of Egypt, for they abrogated My covenant, although I became their Master – the word of G-d. For this is the covenant that I shall seal with the house of Israel after those days – the word of G-d – I will place My Torah within them and I will write it onto their heart; I will be a G-d for them and they will be a people for Me. They will no longer teach – each man his fellow, each man his brother – saying ‘Know G-d’. For all of them will know Me, from their smallest to their greatest – the word of G-d – when I will forgive their iniquity and will no longer recall their sin. Thus said G-d, ‘Who gives the sun as light by day and the laws of the moon and the stars as a light by night; Who agitates the sea so that its waves roar; G-d, master of Legions is His name. If these laws could be removed from before Me, - the word of G-d – so could the seed of Israel cease from being a people before Me forever.”
G-d says that just as the laws governing the luminaries and the ocean will never cease, so too the people of Israel will never cease from being a people from before G-d. It could not be clearer: G-d will never abandon Israel. What is more startling is that G-d openly says, “…I will place My Torah within them and I will write it onto their heart.” The Torah is clearly never abandoned by G-d. This “new covenant” that the Christians imagine to be Christianity, is in fact the original Torah, as G-d says:
“For this is the covenant that I shall seal with the house of Israel after those days – the word of G-d – I will place My Torah within them and I will write it onto their heart; I will be a G-d for them and they will be a people for Me. They will no longer teach – each man his fellow, each man his brother – saying ‘Know G-d’. For all of them will know Me, from their smallest to their greatest – the word of G-d.”
G-d said, “for they abrogated My covenant”, i.e., the Jews forsook G-d. G-d therefore promises a reestablishment of His providence over the Jews. This is the meaning of a “new covenant”. And with this new covenant, G-d will never again be removed from the thoughts of the Jews – they will never again abrogate their relationship with G-d. In the prior generation, the Jews abandoned G-d. What G-d will now do in the future is guarantee that the Torah and G-d are never lost from the Jews. This is the “new covenant”. To suggest it refers to Christianity is overtly foolish, and displays Christianity as illiterate.
Furthermore, the Torah again says as follows (Isaiah, 59:21):
“And as for Me, this is My covenant with them, said G-d, My spirit which is upon you and My words that I have placed in your mouth will not be withdrawn from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your offspring, nor from the mouth of your offspring’s offspring, said G-d, from this moment and forever.”
What is the word that was already “placed in your mouth”? Christianity suggests Isaiah prophesied for the future about Jesus. However, this cannot be, as Isaiah is clearly referring to the past. G-d clearly refers to the “word” that will never be lost forever, as that which is already “placed in your mouth”, past tense. Thus, G-d declares that the word, which He already placed in the mouth of the Jews – the Torah – will never be withdrawn. End of story. G-d will never replace the Torah. Isaiah’s “new covenant” refers to something in the past, and not in the future. G-d’s word in the past is clearly the Torah given at Mount Sinai. Review G-d’s words, “For this is the covenant that I shall seal with the house of Israel after those days – the word of G-d – I will place My Torah within them and I will write it onto their heart”.
(Parenthetically, quoting this section as their “proof” for Christianity is shooting itself in the foot, for in this very section we read, “every man will die for his own sin”. This portion denies their doctrine that Jesus can die for others, although he did not sin!)
Isaiah teaches the opposite of what Christianity claims: G-d openly attests that he will never forsake the Torah or the Jewish people.
Tell me, I’m curious: How can you
a) use the Jewish Bible as proof of the coming of your Messiah;
b) who according to your scripture declared that “not one jot or tittle will by any means disappear from the Law” [Matthew 5:18] (he was speaking of the continuing significance and importance of every detail in the Torah, indeed the whole canon of Hebrew Scriptures);
c)yet fail to observe the Sabbath from Friday night till Saturday night, nor do you keep kosher. Further, you say that Judaism the religion specified by G-d in the Hebrew Scriptures, has been superceded????
Simply put, if the Judaism set forth in the 5 Books of Moses is valid (and it is an all or none thing - it claims to be the Word of G-d, so it either is or is not), then your religion is not (unless, of course, G-d is lying about His eternal covenant with the Jews, but I don’t think that any of us believes that). OTOH, if the 5 Books of Moses are a bunch of hogwash (anything that purports to be forever, and then is superceded must be wrong, i.e. hogwash), then where does that leave you guys?
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