The book itself is on the origins of the moon and how it effects the planet we live on.. But since people here are interested in religion, I thought I might give you guys a snippit from the chapter I'm reading now.. I'd like to hear some rebuttals... (BTW-- I'm typing this up myself so excuse any spelling mistakes)

"Who Built the moon" By Christopher Knight And Alan Butler

Chapter 8
External Intelligence

The idea that intelligent life forms might exist elsewhere in the cosmos is a comparatively recent interest for humanity. For thousands of years and accross countless cultures, it was more or less accepted that anything dwelling outside our own immediate enviroment inevitibly fell into the classification of a god or a servant of the gods, such as the saunts, angels or seraphim that inhabit the heaven of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Even after the telescope appeared, around the year 1600, the Catholic Church in particular was not keen to have its dogmas reguarding the nature of the Earth and its relationship with space tampered with in any way. In Christian doctrine, the Sun and the Moon have both been directly created by God, as have the stars and the planets. The first book of the bible, Genesis, lay down the order in which God created the observable cosmos and anyone who seemed to be throwing a spanner in the works, for example Galileo (1564-1642) who suggested that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the centre of the solar system, was liable to be severly censured. Galileo was forced to recant his heretical views and was condemned to perpetual house arrest but was probably lucky to escape with his life.

Even before Galileo's time, thinking people were not fooled by the Church's accound of the solar system. The portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) understood what he was seeing at the time of a lunar eclipse: "The church says the earth is flat, but I know it is round for I have seen its shadow on the moon and I have more faith in a shadow than the church."

Only the effects of the Renaissance and Church reformations across Europe broke the hold of an old church dogma. By the late seventeenth century, with telescopes proliferating and almost anyone able to take a close-up view of the sun, moon, planets and stars, the cat was truely out of the bag and the genuine nature of the solar system in particular was beginning to become apparent.

Since Charles Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species" in the mid-nineteenth century it has become clear that life on Earth has evolved over billions of years from the first single-cell entities through to all of the creatures in the world today. Darwin's ideas were argued over fiercely at the time, but the massing evidence from palaeontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and many other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt.

It is ironic, therefore, that the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, the United States, has large numbers of 'Creationists' -- people who still cling to the teachings of the mediaeval Church. They are currantly trying to persuade politicians, judges and the general public that evolution is an unproven myth cobbled together by atheists. They lobby for their ideas, such as 'Intelligent design', to be taught as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. Their proponents admit that their aim is to keep the scriptures of the Christian religion taught in school as the word of God, rather than a collection of ancient Jewish texts.

Their arguments against Darwin's concept of 'Natural Selection" are not well reasoned or based on any normal principle of modern science. These people appear to be intellectually stuck, hundreds of years in the past, at a time before masses of new data became available. However, it is interesting to note that academics once thought like this too. Dr John Lightfoot, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge was not frightened of being precise about the origin of the entire universe when he said in 1642:

'Heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created together, in the same instant, and clouds of water... This work took place and man was created... on the 17th of september 3928 BC at nine o'clock in the morning.'

Poor Dr Lightfoot seems to have been ignorant of even the most basic facts of science. He clearly did not realise that there is no such thing as nine o'clock in the morning because every hour of the day exusts simultaneously on our revolving planet; it just depends on where you are standing. Happily, the very year that Lightfoot made this statement, a baby boy was born in the village of Woolsthorpe in Leicestershire. The infant's name was Isaac Newton and he went on to become Cambridge University's most famous professor and a man that would create a leap forward in humankind's understanbding of the universe. Newton however, did not dismiss the role of god as he wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecy, the decipherment of which he saw as being essentual to the understanding of God. His book on the subject espoused his view that Christianity had gone astray in 325 AD, when the crumbling Roman Empire declaired that Jesus Christ was not a man but an aspect of the very deity that had built the universe.

Today we have the benefit of masses of data from all kinds of diciplines that point to Earth being nearly five billion years old, but many creationists frequently quote the chronology produced by James Ussher who was Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland in the early seventeenth century. His analysis, based on his interpretation of the King James Bible, allowed him to confidently declaire that the creation of the world occured in 4004 BC.

Such a dating rises all kinds of problems, from fitting in the obvious existance of Donosaurs, for example, to the fact that the city of Jericho, near the river Jordan, has been continuously occupied for 10,000 years. (Interestingly, the origin of the name 'Jericho' is Canaanite and it means 'the moon').

There are creationalist websites that put forward 'evidence' that their writers believe demonstrates that people and dinosaurs lived at the same time -- presumably around the time that the Megalithic Yard was being introduced! But these are not fringe ideas as there are large numbers of people who believe that geological time is a myth. According to a survey run by the Gallup Organisation in 1999, the majority of Americans educated up to highschool level or less believe that God created humans in their present form within the past 10000 years or so. And a worrying forty-four per cent of collede graduates believe the same.

An international research team led by scientists at the University of British Columbia sees the creation as being a little earlier than Dr Lightfoot and Archbishop Ussher. Professor Harvey Richer, the study's principle investigator, confirmed previous research that sets the age of the Universe at thirteen to fourteen billion years. The team measured the brightness and temperatures of white dwarf stars (the burned-out remnants of the earliest stars which formed in our galaxy) because they are 'cosmic clocks; that get fainter as they cool in a very predictable way.

More recent calculations, by Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Brian Chaboyer at Dartmouth College, published in the journal Science, put the Universe at anything up to twenty billion years old.

Creationists often try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. John Rennie, the editor in chief of Scientific America has countered this by saying:

"...even if life on Earth turned out to have a non-evolutionary origin (for instance, if alien's introduced the first cells billions of years ago). evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless micro-evolutionary and macro-evolutionary studies.

It is true that, whilt science can explain how life has evolved on Earth, the it all began is a complete mystery. And, as far as we know, the Earth is the only location where life exists.

In the nineteenth century some people speculatied that there might be life, or even people, living on the moon. It is now certain that no natural life ................

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Ok thats about it for the section on religion, it goes on to speak on a wide range of subjects about the origin of life on planets and the unique conditions in which earth exists etc etc etc...

But if your interested in that, then I recommend you go buy the book... Its a real interesting read...

The reason I liked this section was because it really highlights how far out from logical reasoning religion exists. Their arguments against scientific theories like evolution most of the time just have no base other than "my scriptures say different".

Especially the quote from Isaac Newton about when Christianity went astray. That pretty much says it all for me....

Too bad large numbers of morons in this world just dont get it...

Ah well.. Thats their loss for missing the boat.....

Enjoy.

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RIP jono, peace out bboy.
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