Wernher von Braun 1912 - 1977 
Posted on 02/07/2004 5:41:19 PM PST by bondserv
Wernher von Braun 1912 - 1977
“It’s not exactly rocket science, you know.” The cliche implies that rocket science is the epitome of something that is difficult, obscure, and abstruse; something comprehensible only by the brainiest of the smart. Names that qualify for the title “father of rocket science” include Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and von Braun. But Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was mostly a visionary and chalkboard theorist, and Robert Goddard only targeted the upper atmosphere for his projects; he was also secretive and suspicious of others to a fault. Of the three, and any others that could be listed, Wernher von Braun has the prestige of actually taking mankind from the simple beginnings of rocketry all the way to the moon and the planets. His name is almost synonymous with rocket science. He is an icon of the space age. As we will see, he should be remembered for much more than that.
Von Braun (pronounced fon BROWN – and roll the R) is important in this series because he was recent enough to be in the living memory of many, and we have a great deal of documentation, photographs and motion pictures of him. Even young people (that is, anyone under 40) who did not live through the glory days of Apollo are all familiar with three of von Braun’s last great projects he took from vision to reality: the Space Shuttle, orbiting space stations and interplanetary travel. Unquestionably, he had a great deal of help. One does not do rocket science alone! At the height of the Apollo program, some 600,000 employees were involved in tasks from machining parts to managing large flight operations centers. Yet by wide consensus and by results achieved, Wernher von Braun was a giant among giants: highly regarded by his peers, respected by all who worked with him, a celebrity to the public, showered with honors, and unquestionably responsible for much of the success of the space program. Few have ever personally taken a dream of epic proportions to reality. The peaceful exploration of space! It was the stuff of dreams — dreams by Kepler, Jules Verne, science fiction novels and countless childhood imaginations, yet today it is almost too commonplace. Von Braun dreamed, but made it happen. He was the right man with the right stuff at the right time.
What kind of person was he? Many great scientists are quirkish or aloof in their personal lives, but we’re going to reveal a lesser-known side of von Braun, a spiritual side that kept him humble, grateful, unselfish, and strong. We’ll see a remarkably well-rounded individual, a family man who loved swimming and travel and popularizing science for children; a man who loved life, had charisma and energy and dignity and integrity, handled huge projects yet kept a winning smile and a sense of humor even in the most stressful of project deadlines. We’ll see a model of leadership that success-bound corporate heads would do well to emulate. Maybe you didn’t know (incidentally) that he was also a Christian and creationist. But first, a review of his record.
(Excerpt) Read more at creationsafaris.com ...
The Bible is silent one way or the other on the subject. I would say the scripture indicates that any living creature in the universe must go through Jesus Christ in order to escape our time domain.
In Christian venacular that would be a spiritual being must believe that Christ's sacrifice and resurection paid the ransom for our sin. There is one name above every name "CHRIST JESUS" in all of His created universe. King of Kings, Lord of Lords!
I think they are refering to the natural inability of those espousing that we are just evolved ameobas, have no grounds to defend the sanctity of human life.By that, ah, "logic", I should believe in slavery because I know that my ancestors on my mother's side owned slaves.It is a logical link to make as you eat your hamburger.
I think they are refering to the natural inability of those espousing that we are just evolved ameobas, have no grounds to defend the sanctity of human life.For that matter, my mother's ancestors came from England. How, oh how, have I managed to resist the temptation to drive on the left side of the road all these years? Why don't I have any desire at all for America to become a monarchy? How come I never developed a taste for tea? Why do I not break down in tears at the mention of Princess Di? WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME??? By creationist "logic", does this mean I must be adopted???It is a logical link to make as you eat your hamburger.
He was worried the Russians would get him. He knew they were snapping up engineers and researchers left and right to fuel their industrial machine. He figured ending up in America was a whole lot better than being forced to work for the Russians.
And yet, most 12 year old boys used to do it.
Dam right. Any German with a lick of sense tried to surrender to the West. If you know anything about Germany's horrible atrocities in Russia you would know that the Germans feared having done to them what they did to the Russians.
The Russians would have put him to work. But it would have been, "Work or die. Expect no priveleges." We should have done the same. Hitler could never have done as much as he did without the help of the German scientists who all thought he was a great guy until he started to lose. Once they lost suddenly everybody claimed , "I was against Hitler all along". What a crock.
So what? After all, it's not as if he was some kind of rocket scientist or anything.
Do you "OWN" a pet?
That is the great thing about knowing the truth; Christians can't be lawyered into being immoral imbeciles. (My dog doesn't wear a top, why should Janet have to?)
A scientist or engineer can be competent in one field (as von Braun surely was), yet a boob in others. Fred Hoyle comes immediately to mind. Such people may be successful in fields far removed from biology (Hoyle was the astronomer who coined the "tornado in a junkyard" comment about evolution), but the important point is that their "creation science" has produced nothing.
Consider the distinguished astronomer and mathematician, Simon Newcomb (b. 1835, d. 1909) who served for twenty years as Superintendent of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac Office at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington and professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. Even now, nearly a century after his death, his bibliography is impressive. But he may be best remembered because only weeks before the Wrights first flew at Kittyhawk, he published an article in The Independent (October 22, 1903. pp. 2508, 2510-2511), which showed scientifically that powered human flight was 'utterly impossible.' It's quoted HERE
So, if indeed von Braun believed in creationism, he is one of a number of people who were good in one thing and -- shall we say -- not so good in another. Here's a whole bunch of them: Erroneous Predictions (a very neat website).
The reason they refuse to call Saddam Hussein "evil"? That would be a moral judgment and would imply that their little evolutionary relativity foundation for living is wrong.
Witness the Lion. She kills in order to survive, much like our good friend in Iraq. That wood chipper can be viewed in the same light as the jaws of a Lion as it eats the still living Gazelle.
I am not kidding around by saying this. We have a world full of overlawyered morons. If you continue to refuse to acknowledge that your educated friends do not base their decisions on their natural relativism, enjoy your willful ignorance.
Follow the link of the article so that you can be exposed to the number of luminary scientists on the list. Mr. Coppedge has painstakenly demonstrated that a majority of the groundbreaking inspirational discoveries have been consistantly made by Creationists. Take a little time to view his other articles regarding scientists.
Try your best to avoid focusing in on the first thing you disagree with in order to rationalize your desire to ignore the evidence.
This is a disturbing book, especially given the stature of its primary author, Vincent Sarich, as one of the founding pioneers of molecular anthropology. In 1967, in a paper with Allan Wilson, Sarich, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, used a simple protein-molecular clock to show [sic] that humans share a common ancestor [sic] with the great apes from as recently as 5 million years [sic] ago — overturning previous estimates of more 20 million years.Miele is a senior editor of Skeptic magazine. Both men are ardent anticreationists. Sarich has debated Duane Gish four times, and each time characterized the debate as the “science game” being superior to the “faith game.” So what is Sarich doing here promoting emphasis on racial differences, in a day when the world is trying to put the abuses of racism behind? Proctor would like to know. But in his attack, he thinks evolutionary anthropology can, in moderation, put racial studies to good use:
(Emphasis added in all quotes.)
The authors’ ‘case for race’ draws heavily on contentious claims by raciologists such as Arthur R. Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, notorious for having postulated natural racial hierarchies in intelligence, criminality, athletic performance, sexual endowment and the capacity to accumulate wealth. This is a shame, because there are good reasons [sic] to believe that certain aspects of race are very real, and that important questions of human origins, prehistoric migrations and medical therapeutics can be fruitfully addressed by properly re-examining human biovariation.Proctor is especially upset that they made broad-brushed claims without proof or attribution. After some examples, he continues that “Stronger claims are made that border on the incendiary,” particularly about affirmative action, intermarriage and eugenics. He also finds it “remarkable” that the authors would simply accept, “with so little supporting evidence,” a claim of inherent low IQ for sub-Saharan Africans, “ignoring the many ways that such a sweeping and grotesque generalization could be flawed.” Not all anthropologists were racists, he assures the readers, and proper study of anthropology might find racial studies useful:
Here, though, we have an exercise in bombast and overstatement....
Flaws in this book are so numerous that it would be difficult to list them all.
The authors scoff at the idea of race as a social construct, but the historical account they present is full of idealized white-and-black polarities. The authors side with Ernst Haeckel over Rudolf Virchow, Madison Grant over Franz Boas, and Carleton Coon over Ashley Montagu. There is little effort to explore which of the myriad historical ‘realities’ postulated for race might have alternative explanations.
I suspect that the impact of this book could be the opposite of the authors’ intentions. There is much to be said for studying human genetic variability to explore questions of prehistoric ancestry and migration, and to investigate how different human populations respond to medical interventions. But the leap from these to immoderate speculations about the permanence of present-day inequalities is likely to give sceptics even more reason to question racial ‘realities’.
Anthropology has a mixed history of dealings with human racial injustice (think of Carleton Coon’s view that Africans became human some 200,000 years after white Europeans). The present book, so full of flim-flam and loose speculations, is more likely to re-arm than to deflate sceptics.
Mixed history, indeed. Evolutionists cannot whitewash the atrocities and genocide committed in the name of Darwin. Charlie himself, and many of his followers, were confirmed racists, although some were more ardent than others. Darwin maintained, at least outwardly, a deep concern for social justice, but Huxley and Haeckel flaunted their European chauvinism. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and admirer, was the father of eugenics. (Virchow, by contrast, was a vigorous anti-Darwinist, so Proctor cannot place him in any evolutionary pantheon.) For more on the racism of the Victorian-era Darwinians, see ch. 8-9 in Janet Browne’s Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002). She describes Darwin’s racist beliefs as expressed in his second-most influential book, The Descent of Man (1871):He ventured onto thorny ground.... His naturalism explicitly cast the notion of race into evolutionary and biological terms, reinforcing contemporary ideas of a racial hierarchy that replicated the ranking of animals. And he had no scruple in using the cultural inequalities between populations to substantiate his evolutionary hypotheses. Darwin certainly believed that the moral and cultural principles of his own people, and of his own day, were by far the highest that had emerged [sic] in evolutionary history. (p. 345, emphasis added).Darwinian apologists can, and do, point to misguided Christians who used Bible verses to support racism and slavery. But judging from the quote above, which belief system – evolutionary naturalism or Christianity – leads directly from its core doctrines and founding statements to racism? Darwin used evolution to explain and rationalize racial differences; the subtitle of his initial revolutionary book was The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Yet the Bible teaches that we all descended from one human pair, Adam and Eve. Paul reinforced this core doctrine of both Christians and Jews when he taught the Athenians that God had made all mankind of one blood (Acts 17:26). The teachings of Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere are the antithesis of racism. Jesus continually exalted the outcast, the poor, the underprivileged, and the weak as better than the mighty (the fittest). So does the rest of Scripture when each passage is understood in context. Faith, not race, is always the criterion for fellowship in God’s family, whether Rahab, Ruth, the Ethiopian eunuch, Cornelius, or countless others of any nationality, ethnicity, sex, or social standing. Between Darwinism and Christianity, the core doctrines and teachings of chief spokesmen lead in opposite directions regarding race.
Creationists might have some agreement with Proctor, in that there is some room for analyzing slight variations between people that resulted from their histories (to be able to provide appropriate medical care, for instance), but these variations are not due to differences in human origins or to prehistoric migrations, because the historic migrations of mankind are documented in the Bible. Biblical creationists explain the skin colors, eye slants, susceptibility to certain genetic diseases and other identifiable characteristics of ethnic groups as resulting from the separation of peoples after the Tower of Babel. But they would claim these very minor and superficial changes all occurred within just a few thousand years, and in no way reflect on the truth that we are all created equal, and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Proctor’s belief, on the other extreme, would put these “racial” differences far back, millions of years, into our alleged evolutionary ascent from ape-like ancestors. That could easily provide scientific justification to modern racism. The Bible, by contrast, teaches that for all who come to the foot of the cross, “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all” ( Colossians 3:11). A direct line can be drawn from orthodox Darwinism to racism, but not from the cross of Christ. (Note also that theistic evolutionism has no advantage over naturalistic Darwinism in this regard.)
Answers in Genesis has taken a lead role in revitalizing the concept that a Genesis understanding of human origins is the solution to racial tensions in the world today. So Vincent Sarich, the anti-creationist, sowed his core beliefs, and now they have sprouted. By their fruits you shall know them.
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