Tuesday, May 29, 2012

A critique of George Sim Johnston’s: Why Catholics Like Einstein





Why Catholics Shouldn’t Like Einstein A critique of George Sim Johnston’s: Why Catholics Like Einstein. This article originally appeared in the March 1996 edition of Crisis Magazine. 
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/why-catholics-like-einstein-2 


G. Johnston: The great irony of the Galileo affair is that until Galileo forced the issue into the realm of theology, the Church had been a willing ombudsman for the new astronomy that emerged in the sixteenth century. In 1543, Nicolai Copernicus, a Polish canon and devout Catholic, published his epochal book supporting the heliocentric (earth around the sun) model at the urging of two Catholic prelates, dedicating it to Pope Paul III, who received it cordially. R. Sungenis: It was condemned shortly thereafter by the next Pope just five years later in 1548. G. Johnston: If the issue had remained purely scientific, Church authorities would have shrugged it off. Galileo’s mistake was to push the debate onto theological grounds. Galileo told the Church: Either support the heliocentric model as a fact (even though not proven) or condemn it. He refused the reasonable middle ground offered by Cardinal Bellarmine: You are welcome to hold the Copernican model as a hypothesis; you may even assert that it is superior to the old Ptolemaic model; but don’t tell us to reinterpret Scripture until you have proof. Galileo’s response was his theory of the tides, which purported to show that the tides are caused by the earth’s rotation. Even some of Galileo’s supporters could see that this was nonsense. Also, ignoring the work of Kepler, he insisted that the planets go around the earth in perfect circles, which the Jesuit astronomers could plainly see was untenable. In fact, the Copernican system was not strictly “proved” until 1838, when Friedrich Bessel succeeded in determining the parallax of star 61 Cygni. R. Sungenis: No, it was only believed that the parallax of Cygni proved heliocentrism. Those who did so erred. We now know that parallax is not proof of heliocentrism since it is also demonstrated in the geocentric system. G. Johnston: The real issue in the Galileo affair was the literal interpretation of Scripture. In 1616, the year of Galileo’s first trial, there was precious little elasticity in Catholic biblical theology. But this was also the case with the Protestants: Luther and Melanchthon had vehemently opposed the heliocentric model on scriptural grounds. Another irony of the affair, pointed out by John Paul II, is that Galileo’s argument that Scripture makes use of figurative language and is meant to teach “how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go” was eventually taught by two great papal encyclicals, Leo XIII’s Providentissumus Deus (1893) and Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943). R. Sungenis: Neither Leo XIII nor Pius XII said anything about interpreting cosmological passages figuratively. Both merely said that Scripture sometimes contains figurative language. G. Johnston: There are fundamentalists out there, Protestant and Catholic, who do not understand this simple point: Scripture does not teach science. The Book of Genesis was written in the archaic, prescientific idiom of the ancient Palestinians. The author of Genesis could not have told us that the universe is twelve billion years old, because the ancient Hebrews did not have a word for one billion, and even if they had the fact is hardly necessary for our salvation. R. Sungenis: By the same token, the Declaration of Independence doesn’t teach religion, but when it touches upon religion (e.g., “all men are created equal and have inalienable rights endowed by their Creator”) it is authoritative and we use such statements as the basis for democracy. The same is true with Scripture. It is not a science textbook, but when it touches upon science in some form (as it does with the cosmos), it is authoritative and we are required to obey it. G. Johnston: If the universe were roughly 6,000 years old, as a literal reading of Genesis would suggest, then we would not be able to see the Milky Way. The light would not have reached the earth yet. R. Sungenis: Not true. If the stars expanded outward when they were created on the Fourth Day (as Scripture suggests when it speaks of the firmament expanding), the starlight would have already been seen on the Fourth Day and the stars would later assume the precise position we see them at today, many billions of miles from the Earth. G. Johnston: As Catholics, we must believe that every word of Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, a claim the Church won’t make even for ex cathedra pronouncements. But we must not think of the sacred writers as going into a trance and taking automatic dictation in a pure language untouched by historical contingency. Rather, God made full use of the writers’ habits of mind and expression. It’s the old mystery of grace and human freedom. R. Sungenis: The method of how God put his own words in Scripture is not the primary issue. The issue is this: is what Scripture says about history completely true or does it contain falsehoods and mistakes? The Catholic Church has always taught that the history is 100% true. That is, Scripture is not merely inerrant when it speaks of salvation (which is a heresy), but true and trustworthy in its history also. G. Johnston: Once we understand how to read Scripture, the vexed subject of evolution should not present a problem. That evolution per se is not an issue for Catholics was made clear by John Paul II during a brilliant series of catechetical talks on creation at his Wednesday audiences in 1986: The theory of natural evolution, understood in a sense that does not exclude divine causality, is not in principle opposed to the truth about the creation of the visible world as presented in the Book of Genesis. . . . It must, however, be added that this hypothesis proposes only a probability, not a scientific certainty. . . . it is possible that the human body has evolved from antecedent living beings. R. Sungenis: According to Augustine and Leo XIII, we are not permitted to read Scripture in a non-literal fashion unless science can first prove that Scripture cannot be read literally. Evolution is only a theory, not scientific fact, therefore we have no right to interpret Genesis figuratively. Lateran Council IV and Vatican Council I state that God created all things instantaneously and nothing evolved into being. G. Johnston: The pope got it exactly right. Not only is Darwinism not proved, almost every aspect of it is currently subject to a heated debate among geneticists and paleontologists. Darwin’s model of gradual evolution does not square with the fossils, which show species appearing fully formed, staying around for a million years or whatever, and then suddenly disappearing (99 out of 100 known species are extinct). There are no transitional forms between any of the major animal groups, and even in “thought experiments,” smooth intermediates between, say, reptiles and birds are almost impossible to construct. Darwinism also does not square with breeding experiments; dogs remain dogs, fruit flies remain fruit flies. While DNA allows a certain elasticity in a species for ecological adjustment, it programs living things to remain stubbornly what they are. The essence of Darwinism is the unwarranted extrapolation of the small changes that happen all the time within species into the really big jumps (reptile to bird); as any statistician will tell you, extrapolation is a dangerous business, and in the case of Darwin it goes flat against the evidence. The earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. Bacteria appeared 3 billion years ago, followed by blue-green algae and a few oddities. Then, 530 million years ago, came biology’s Big Bang: the Cambrian explosion. There was a sudden profusion of complex life-forms – mollusks, jellyfish, trilobites, chordates – for which there are no discernible ancestors in the rocks. A man from Mars looking at the subsequent fossil record would say that species are replaced by other species, rather than evolve into them. Primates as a class appear out of nowhere; Homo sapiens also makes an abrupt arrival, fully equipped with a will, intellect, and language – capabilities simply not found in apes. Thus far, there is no coherent scientific explanation of how all this happened. But you have to go outside the Anglo-Saxon countries, where Darwin is dogma, to find honest admissions of this. The late Pierre P. Grasse, the most eminent French biologist of his generation, called himself an “evolutionist” on the basis that all life-forms share certain genetic material, but he was frankly agnostic about how the higher life-forms came about. He dismissed Darwinism as a “pseudo-science” and ended his book on evolution with the admission that on the question of origins, “Science, impotent, yields the floor to metaphysics.” Whatever their differences, Darwin’s staunchest defenders – John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould – are all hostile to religion. Dawkins’s remark that Darwin made atheism intellectually respectable is typical. If you cut through all the verbal camouflage, the basic argument of the Darwinist camp is, “There is no God, therefore it had to be this way.” But this is ideology, not science. Darwinism – like Marxism and Freudianism – has too many philosophical additives to be fully trusted as a science. Evolutionary materialism has a serious flaw that is never acknowledged by its proponents. If man is no more than an accidental collation of atoms, a product of blind material forces that did not have him in mind, then humans do not possess a free will. If this is so, we cannot trust any products of the human intellect, including books by Darwinists. This is the Achilles’ Heel of all materialist philosophies; their truth claims are self-canceling because they downgrade human consciousness to an epiphenomenon of matter. Walker Percy’s remark that Darwin’s Origin of Species explains everything except Darwin writing Origin of Species neatly summarizes the problem. Darwin’s real motive, as revealed by notebooks not published until the 1970s, was to get rid of a Creator, a motive he shares with modern cosmologists like Hawking and Steven Weinberg. And creation is an unsettling idea. The notion that the universe had a beginning ex nihilo is one of the most radical concepts introduced by Christianity into the mind of the West. The Fourth Lateran Council defined it as dogma in 1215. It’s an idea that would have scandalized an ancient Greek, who thought matter eternal, as much as a nineteenth century positivist. Today, the fact that the universe had a beginning with, and not in, time is a commonplace of astrophysics. R. Sungenis: I very much appreciate Mr. Johnston’s critique of evolution by using scientific evidence against it. Obviously, then, we cannot interpret Genesis figuratively. G. Johnston: When Einstein formulated the General Theory of Relativity, which deals with gravity and the curvature of space, he was perturbed that his equations showed an expanding universe, which points to its beginning. So he introduced a fudge factor, the “cosmological constant,” to keep the cosmos static. He later called this “the biggest mistake of my life.” When Edwin Hubble, the American astronomer, published data in 1931 showing that the universe was indeed expanding, Einstein finally accepted “the need for a beginning.” When in 1964 two scientists from Bell Labs accidentally discovered the three-degree background radiation throughout the entire universe, which can only be explained as a remnant of a super-heated Big Bang, modern cosmology came of age – and found Catholic metaphysics and theology waiting there all along. R. Sungenis: The background radiation has about a half-dozen possible explanations, but only one of them is chosen by modern science – the one that promotes a 13.7 billion year-old universe, the Big Bang. But Mr. Johnston should be awakened to the fact that the reason science promotes the Big Bang is not because it believes in a beginning. It promotes the Big Bang because it could never get the Steady-State (infinite time and space) model to work, so they had no choice left but the Big Bang. But the Big Bang is neither the “beginning” that Mr. Johnston is hoping for nor what “Catholic metaphysics and theology” were “waiting for all along.” Modern science says the Big Bang is merely one explosion in an infinite number of explosions that will occur randomly forever, with each explosion creating another universe, which science now calls the Multiverse. In other words, the universes create themselves. There is no need for God. So Mr. Johnston is quite deceived if he is trying to equate Catholic theology and the Big Bang together. G. Johnston: The universe began with an “initial singularity”: all matter was packed into an infinitely dense space. The Big Bang, which may have occurred twelve billion years ago, must not be pictured as the expansion of matter within already existing space; space, time, and matter came into existence simultaneously, a fact that would not have surprised St. Augustine. What Stanley Jaki calls the “specificity” of the formation of the universe is breathtaking. If the cosmic expansion had been a fraction less intense, it would have imploded billions of years ago; a fraction more intense, and the galaxies would not have formed. Picture a wall with thousands of dials; each must be at exactly the right setting – within a toleration of millionths – in order for carbon-based life to eventually emerge in a suburb of the Milky Way. You cannot help but think of a Creator. R. Sungenis: Except for the fact that the “Creator” doesn’t describe it the way Mr. Johnston does. The Creator says he brought the universe into being ex nihilo and instantaneously, not over 12 billion years and not by a Big Bang. The Creator says the Earth was made first and that the sun and stars came later. The Big Bang doesn’t bring us to a Creator, as Stephen Hawking has wisely stated in his book, The Grand Design. The Big Bang brings us to quantum fluctuations which produce the “initial singularity,” and many, many other singularities. The god of modern science is Quantum mechanics, not the God of Genesis. G. Johnston: Einstein’s universe, which is finite and highly specific, presents an enormous opportunity for the rearticulation of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Although the universe points strongly to its dependence on a Creator, Catholics have to be careful not to fall into the trap of “creation science.” Creation is a strictly philosophical concept; it has nothing to do with empirical science, which deals only with quantitative nature. It’s difficult to say who turns themselves into the biggest pretzel: creationists trying to fit science into a biblical template, or agnostic scientists trying to avoid the existence of a personal God. R. Sungenis: The bigger pretzel is that of Mr. Johnston trying to fit the personal God into an impersonal quantum fluctuating multiverse that has no beginning and no end. G. Johnston: Putting God in the gaps unexplained by science has always been a mistake, because science eventually fills those gaps with material explanations. An enlightened Catholic view of science must be anchored in the proposition that God delights to work through secondary causes. God concedes an enormous degree of causality to his creation, and we ought to be in awe as science explains more and more of it. At the same time, we ought to remind those who will listen to us that the universe will never finally explain itself. Modern cosmology will reach its final maturity only when it makes that admission. R. Sungenis: Yes, God often works through secondary causes, but Mr. Johnston must realize that he can only attribute a finite number of secondary causes to God before he comes back to the primary cause. At some point, the primary cause was ex nihilo and instantaneous. Along those lines, Genesis does not say that the primary cause produced an “initial singularity” since God had no intentions of promoting the idea of quantum fluctuations as the Creator. Genesis says the primary cause produced the “heavens and the earth, and the earth was empty and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.” The question is, why is Mr. Johnston so afraid of taking those words literally? Doesn’t he, as a Catholic, take the words “This is my body” literally, even against the wishes of science? Mr. Johnston also should consider the fact that the Big Bang doesn’t work. He forgot to mention that even Einstein’s lambda fudge factor wasn’t enough to keep the Big Bang going. Modern science tells us today that it is missing 95% of the matter and energy needed to make Einstein’s equations of the Big Bang work correctly. Mr. Johnston should then realize that pointing Catholics to the Big Bang is nothing but a big dead end. It doesn’t work. It’s about time he started putting his faith in God, the Fathers and Lateran Council IV instead of theories that even modern science says are failures.


Friday, May 18, 2012

The Real Face of Jesus?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3FeJW1eSUEc

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About The Real Face of Jesus?.The Shroud of Turin.The Technology.Episode Guide

PhotosAAACite This.What did Jesus look like? Artists, scholars and millions of Christians around the world have been pondering the question for centuries. And on Tuesday, March 30, at 9/8c, HISTORY viewers may get closer to an answer than ever before, thanks to a special two-hour event.



The Real Face of Jesus? follows a team of graphic experts as they use cutting-edge 3D software to bring a holy relic known as the Shroud of Turin to life. Many believe Jesus Christ was buried in this ancient linen cloth, which bears traces of blood and the faint, ghostly image of a man. With the help of modern technology, can HISTORY finally unlock the secrets of one of the world’s most scrutinized and controversial artifacts?



To attempt this feat, HISTORY turned to computer graphics artist Ray Downing of Studio Macbeth, who used photographs and digital animation to reconstruct Abraham Lincoln in 2009. As Ray and his team grapple with the task, we delve into the Shroud of Turin’s long history, along with the many perplexing questions that centuries of scientific research have failed to settle. How, for instance, did the figure’s imprint appear on the cloth? And how can we extract 3D information from a two-dimensional piece of linen?



In The Real Face of Jesus?, HISTORY unveils the fruit of many months of labor, made possible by sophisticated computer tools in very capable hands: an accurate depiction of the man many believe to be Jesus Christ. For the devout and curious alike, this is a compelling story of transformation—a fascinating journey from the realm of creativity and imagination into the domain of science and technology.



Just in time for Easter and the Shroud of Turin’s first public viewing in 10 years at Turin’s Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, watch The Real Face of Jesus? on March 30 at 9/8c.

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Taken from: http://www.history.com/shows/the-real-face-of-jesus/articles/about-the-real-face-of-jesus

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Study: Neanderthal DNA Lives On in Modern Humans




A decade after scientists first cracked the human genome, researchers announced in the May 7 issue of Science that they have done the same for Neanderthals, the species of hominid that existed from roughly 400,000 to 30,000 years ago, when their closest relatives, early modern humans, may have driven them to extinction.



Led by ancient-DNA expert Svante Pääbo of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, scientists reconstructed about 60% of the Neanderthal genome by analyzing tiny chains of ancient DNA extracted from bone fragments of three female Neanderthals excavated in the late 1970s and early '80s from a cave in Croatia. The bones are 38,000 to 44,000 years old.

(See a story about the jewelry worn by Neanderthals.)



The genetic information turned up some intriguing findings, indicating, for instance, that at some point after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, they mingled and mated with Neanderthals, possibly in the Middle East or North Africa as much as 80,000 years ago. If that is the case, it occurred significantly earlier than scientists who support the interbreeding hypothesis would have expected.



Comparisons with DNA from modern humans show that some Neanderthal DNA has survived to the present. Moreover, by analyzing ancient DNA alongside modern samples, the team was able to identify a handful of genetic changes that evolved in modern humans sometime after their ancestors and Neanderthals diverged, 440,000 to 270,000 years ago.

(See whether humans were responsible for the death of Neanderthals.)



The process of sequencing was painstaking. Among the challenges were eliminating bacterial and fungal DNA, which accounted for 97% of the genetic material in the samples, and guarding against contamination from the researchers, whose DNA might be mistaken for Neanderthals'. Plus, the DNA was so fragmented that the chains were often no longer than 40 or 50 base pairs. "We used half a gram of bones to produce the 3 billion base pairs," Pääbo said in a May 5 press conference. "I really thought until six or seven years ago that it would remain impossible, at least for my lifetime, to sequence the entire genome." New sequencing technologies made it feasible, he said.



Researchers compared the Neanderthal genome with the genomes of five living people: one San from southern Africa, one Yoruba from West Africa, one Papua New Guinean, one Han Chinese and one French person. Scientists discovered that 1% to 4% of the latter three DNA samples is shared with Neanderthals — proof that Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred. The absence of Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of the two present-day Africans indicates that interbreeding occurred after some root population of early modern humans left Africa but before the species evolved into distinct groups in Europe and Asia.

(See a photo gallery celebrating the genius of Darwin.)



The gene flow of Neanderthal DNA into early human DNA was found in only one direction: from Neanderthals to us. The study found no early modern human DNA in the Neanderthal genome. It is not clear whether interbreeding happened a few times among small populations or frequently among large populations; the genetic remnants would look the same with current technology. The Neanderthal DNA appears in the modern human genomes randomly, suggesting it offers no evolutionary benefit and is merely a genetic relic.



Finding any mixture of DNA was a surprise to the team. "We came into the project extremely biased against the idea of gene flow," said Harvard Medical School's David Reich, one of the study's authors, who specializes in examining the relationship between human populations using genomic data.







Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1987568,00.html#ixzz1v55gSHO6

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

What was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?



Taken from: http://www.gotquestions.org/Sodom-and-Gomorrah.html

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Question: "What was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?"



Answer: The biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah is recorded in Genesis chapters 18-19. Genesis chapter 18 records the Lord and two angels coming to speak with Abraham. The Lord informed Abraham that "the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous." Verses 22-33 record Abraham pleading with the Lord to have mercy on Sodom and Gomorrah because Abraham's nephew, Lot, and his family lived in Sodom.



Genesis chapter 19 records the two angels, disguised as human men, visiting Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot met the angels in the city square and urged them to stay at his house. The angels agreed. The Bible then informs us, "Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom — both young and old — surrounded the house. They called to Lot, 'Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.'" The angels then proceed to blind all the men of Sodom and Gomorrah and urge Lot and his family to flee from the cities to escape the wrath that God was about to deliver. Lot and his family flee the city, and then "the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah — from the LORD out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities..."



In light of the passage, the most common response to the question "What was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?" is that it was homosexuality. That is how the term "sodomy" came to be used to refer to anal sex between two men, whether consensual or forced. Clearly, homosexuality was part of why God destroyed the two cities. The men of Sodom and Gomorrah wanted to perform homosexual gang rape on the two angels (who were disguised as men). At the same time, it is not biblical to say that homosexuality was the exclusive reason why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were definitely not exclusive in terms of the sins in which they indulged.



Ezekiel 16:49-50 declares, "Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me..." The Hebrew word translated "detestable" refers to something that is morally disgusting and is the exact same word used in Leviticus 18:22 that refers to homosexuality as an "abomination." Similarly, Jude 7 declares, "...Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion." So, again, while homosexuality was not the only sin in which the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah indulged, it does appear to be the primary reason for the destruction of the cities.



Those who attempt to explain away the biblical condemnations of homosexuality claim that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was inhospitality. The men of Sodom and Gomorrah were certainly being inhospitable. There is probably nothing more inhospitable than homosexual gang rape. But to say God completely destroyed two cities and all their inhabitants for being inhospitable clearly misses the point. While Sodom and Gomorrah were guilty of many other horrendous sins, homosexuality was the reason God poured fiery sulfur on the cities, completely destroying them and all of their inhabitants. To this day, the area where Sodom and Gomorrah were located remains a desolate wasteland. Sodom and Gomorrah serve as a powerful example of how God feels about sin in general, and homosexuality specifically.



Recommended Resource: Coming out of Homosexuality by Bob Davies and 101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality by Mike Haley.





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Related Topics:



What does the Bible say about gay marriage / same sex marriage?



Why was Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt?



Why did Lot offer up his daughters to be gang raped? Why did God allow Lot's daughters to later have sex with their father?



What does the Bible say about homosexuality? Is homosexuality a sin?



What does the Bible say about bisexuality (bi-sexuality)? Is being a bisexual (bi-sexual) a sin?









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What was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?



Tuesday, May 8, 2012

The Far-Seeing Magi



Dr. Scott Hahn is one of the most eminent Catholic theologians in our country today. Discover what scholars now know about the shepherds, the mysterious Magi, and King Herod. Your Advent journey will take on new meaning as you prepare your heart for the birth of our Lord. This illuminating presentation is sure to help you grow in appreciation of the greatest gift ever given to mankind - Jesus Christ.


This revealing look into the culture of Jesus' day and the principal characters surrounding His birth gives an even deeper understanding of the miracle of Christmas!

Judith - Essex, VT

This CD sheds incredible light on the Kingship of Christ and how to gain a much greater appreciation of Advent.

James - Sycamore, IL

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Taken from: http://www.lighthousecatholicmedia.org/store/speaker/dr_scott_hahn

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Ice Age Astronomers




Taken from: http://www.archeociel.com/Accueil_eng.htm


[We (AMAIC) would query date of 35,000 years ago].



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Welcome to the site of Chantal Jègues-Wolkiewiez, independent researcher, PhD in Humanities, Anthropologist, Ethno-astronomer and psychologist






This site presents the main results obtained during fifteen years of investigations. First, since 1992, it was the Vallée des Merveilles, a site full of cave engravings from the Chalcolithic period and from the Ancient Bronze Age, located in the Maritime-Alps. Later, starting from 1998, a study of the caves and Paleolithic ornamented shelters in France (Ornamented caves and shelters Atlas), and other different caves recently discovered.



My works belong to the Archeoastronomy and ethno-astronomy domains. Through several studies together with geographical and astronomical orientation measurements made in the field, which were later related with the specific celestial coordinates of each period, these disciplines succeeded to establish the observations and celestial knowledge achieved by the human groups that created the works founded in the site.

About archeoastronomy: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaar_as.html



My researches tend to prove that as well as the Paleolithic works date from 35000 years ago (the Blanchard shelter bone in Sergeac en Dordogne), the works founded in the Vallée des Merveilles show precise and meticulous observations of the solar, lunar and stellar cycles. They reveal unsuspected astronomical knowledge in periods as ancient as the Aurignacienne era. All this knowledge was indispensable for the survival of Occidental Europe’s first habitants. It allowed them, for example, to anticipate season changes with the deriving modifications in their vital environment as animal migration.



However, beyond that, these parietal works, furniture, caves, could reveal the link between the sequence of seasonal celestial cycles and the foundational myths of the Indo-European civilizations, myths that we will find later in ancient Egypt or in Mesopotamia, Greece, Etruria and more.



By presenting here my results I wish sincerely that they will be discussed, verified or infirmed. I hope above all that these hypotheses will serve as parting points for future interdisciplinary works, carried over by other people. When coming to the hyper-specialization of researches, these works will be able to conciliate between two disciplines that tend to ignore and even turn their backs on each other: The astronomy and the prehistory, on the expense of the comprehension of the major sites of our prehistoric patrimony. Can a future dialogue contribute to the discovering of the meaning of the deep mystery bequeathed by our ancestors in the form of signs, painted animals, engraved or sculptured in the depths of the ornamented caves…



I would like to thank all the scientists and sites owners for allowing me to have the access to all these fascinating research fields and to the researches from the different disciplines that believed in my capacity for getting onto these questions with the double vision of an ethnologist and astronomer, even though I do not belong to any research laboratory. Following their suggestions, their lectures, critics of my studies or articles, and the conversations we had, they helped me to progress on the difficult path of the comprehension of our ancestor’s astronomic motivations. I’m thinking about: Emannuel Anati, CCSP’s Director, Capo di Ponte, Italy; Christian Archambeau, Dordogne’s regional curator; René Castanet and his grand-daughter Isabelle, Pre-historians and owners of the Castel-Merle site; Jean Clottes, Patrimony General Curator; Christine and Hubert de Commarque owners of the Commarque caves and castle; Annie Echassoux, Maritime-Alps departmental archeologist; Pierre Erny, Ethnologist; The Corte Faculty and the Ajaccio amateur astronomers, who created the ARKEORB program: Antoine Ottavi, François Radureau and Jean-Pierre Boyer. Jean-Michel Geneste, Lascaux’s cave curator, and Prehistory National Director; Brian Hayden, Archeologist of the Simon Fraser University; Jean-Pierre Jardel, Professor of Ethnology Laboratory of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Gérard Jasniewicz, Languedoc Astronomy and Astrophysics research group Director; Jean Michel Le Contel, Astronomer, CNRS research director; Yannick Le Guillou, Pre-historian, Mid-Pyrennees curator; Henry de Lumley, Archeologist, Natural History Museum’s Director; Jean Malaurie, Geographer, arctic studies director for EHESS; Catherine Schwab, Paleolithic collections Director in the National Antiquity Museum; Robert Triomphe, Linguistic.



Chantal Jègues-Wolkiewiez, France



Abstracts and Publications (Paleolithic period)



- “Lascaux, View of the Magdalenian Sky” Abstract: In 1999, it was found that the setting sun during the summer solstice entered the cave, illuminating the paintings on this one occasion in the year, a revolutionary discovery for the perception of this art, which was considered above all as art that existed in the darkness. It was also calculated that the paintings in the Lascaux cave were the image of the Palaeolithic sky.



Publication: Val Camonica 2000 Symposium of Cave Art, Italy. “Lascaux, View of the Magdalenian Sky”, Prehistoric and tribal art, Conserving and safeguarding messages, 10/11/2000.



- “Chronology of the orientation of painted caves and shelters in the French Palaeolithic”

Abstract : Measurements of 130 caves in the south of France showed that all are oriented in the direction of important solar points: sunrise and sunset at summer and winter solstice and spring and autumn equinox. It was also showed a relationship between the way in which some animals were painted (fur colour, erection) and the season when the sun illuminated the cave: summer for animals painted with a summer coat, winter for animals with winter coats.



Publication: Val Camonica 2007 Symposium of Cave Art, Italy. “Chronology of the orientation of painted caves and shelters in the French Palaeolithic” (pages 225-239), 19/05/2007.



- “The roots of astronomy, or the hidden order of a Palaeolithic work”

Abstract : Measurements on a small bone, with 69 engraved incisions made 32,000 years ago in the “Abri Blanchard”, Dordogne, associated with calculations of the moon’s position in the Palaeolithic sky, showed that the 69 incisions corresponded to the trajectory of the moon over a 69-day period. This is an important revelation, that indicates astronomical knowledge in very ancient periods: it was hitherto thought that the origins of astronomy were to be found in Babylonian culture, 6000 years ago.



Publication: “The roots of astronomy, or the hidden order of a Palaeolithic work” (in Les Antiquités Nationales, tome 37 pages 43 - 52), February 2007.









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" Whilst other animals lean towards the soil and only have eyes for it, man (the creator) turns his face towards the sky which proposes to him the contemplation and invites him to raise his vision towards the stars "

(Ovid, Metamorphosis, I.V. 84-86)











Cette page a été mise à jour le 05 mars 2012.





Stone Age People Not Ignorant: Challenge to Evolutionary View


Taken from: http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/Earth/OldStarCharts.html



The Planet Earth:


Carved and Drawn Prehistoric Maps of the Cosmos





Ancient star chart carved in ivory mammoth tusk

[Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies]

A European researcher has interpreted carvings in a 32,500-year-old ivory tablet as a pattern of the same stars that we see in the sky today in the constellation Orion.



The tablet is a sliver of ivory from the tusk of a mammoth — a large woolly animal like an elephant. Mammoths are extinct today.



Carved into the ivory is what appears to be a carving of a human figure with outstretched arms and legs. The pose suggests the stars of Orion, according to Michael Rappenglueck, formerly of the University of Munich, known for his interpretation of ancient star charts painted on walls of prehistoric caves.



The ivory tablet has notches carved on its sides and back, which are not understood but might be an ancient pregnancy calendar to estimate when a woman would give birth.



The tiny piece of ivory was in a cave in the Ach Valley in the Alb-Danube region of Germany when it was discovered in 1979. Scientists used a process known as carbon dating to check the age of bone ash found next to the tablet. Carbon dating is used to determine the age of an old material by measuring its content of carbon 14. Results of carbon dating tests on the nearby bone ash suggested that the tablet might be between 32,500 and 38,000 years old. If correct, that would make it one of the oldest drawings of a human ever found.



Stone Age people. The tablet probably was carved by a member of the Aurignacian people. Little is known about Aurignacians, except that they moved into Europe from the east replacing the Neanderthals who had been living there.

Neanderthals were the original Stone Age "cavemen" who occupied Europe and parts of Asia and north Africa for 150,000 years before modern humans arrived. They made stone tools and other artifcats. Neanderthals now are an extinct human species.

Aurignacians were similar early humans. Like Neanderthals, they made stone tools as well as figures of stone and bone, graphic artwork, and clothing with adornment.

The Stone Age was a time when the earliest chipped stone tools were made, from about 750,000 years ago to about 15,000 years ago. That was a time when northern glaciers appeared and receded. Species related to humans were widespread. By the end of the period, numerous land mammals, such as mammoths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, had become extinct.

A tiny artifact. The ivory tablet is small, measuring a mere 1.5 x 0.5 x 0.2 inches. The archaeologists working with it say they think that was its original size and that it is not a fragment of a larger artifact.

A human figure with legs apart and arms raised is on one side of the tablet. The figure's waist is narrow and its left leg is shorter than the right. Between the legs may be a sword.





The human figure could be a person praying or dancing. It could be half-man, half-cat. It might represent a god. By the very definition of pre-history, archaeologists don't know the myths of those ancient peoples who lived before humans started keeping records — before they started recording history.

Orion. Orion is one of the most noticeable constellations in Earth's sky. Betelguese is one of two prominent stars in Orion. Ancient Egyptians identified their god Osiris with Orion. In fact, Orion has had special significance for many cultures throughout history.



The Orion constellation is known to stargazers today as "the hunter." Does the ivory tablet depict the constellation of Orion as it was 32,000 years ago? Did the Aurignacian people also call it the hunter?



Michael Rappenglueck sees in the proportions of the human figure on the table a pattern corresponding to the pattern of stars that form the Orion constellation. He points out the slim waist, which corresponds to a belt of three stars crossing Orion. And, the left "leg" of the hunter in the constellation is shorter. The sword, which may hang between the legs of the figure on the ivory tablet, might correspond with a feature of the Orion constellation.



Pregnancy calendar. The 86 notches on the tablet may relate to the human gestation period.



The number 86 might have two significant meanings:

First, 86 is the number of days that must be subtracted from a year to equal the average number of days of human gestation.





Second, 86 is the number of days that the Orion star Betelguese is visible. Could this have linked human fertility with gods in the sky in the minds of the Aurignacian people?



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Ice Age Map of the Night Sky Painted in French Cave





Lascaux Caves ancient painted star map

[Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies]

A painted map of the prehistoric cosmos is on the wall of a famous Ice Age cave at Lascaux in central France.



Cro-magnon man — distant ancestors of humans living much later than the earlier Neanderthals and Aurignacians — painted the Lascaux caves with drawings of bulls, horses and antelope some 16,500 years ago. Thus, the map may be 16,500 years old.



The Ice Ages were cold periods in ancient history when glaciers descended across the northern continents and then receded. The temperatures experienced by humans and their ancestors alternated between cold and warm. Scientists say there have been at least four Ice Ages. Today, when people speak of "the Ice Age," they usually refer to the most recent glacial period, which ended about 8,000 years ago.



Summer Triangle. The painted walls of the Lascaux caves were discovered in 1940. The sky map was identified year later in a region of the Lascaux caves known as the Shaft of the Dead Man. Painted on to the wall of the shaft is a bull, a strange bird-man and a mysterious bird on a stick.



Since it was in the time we call pre-history — before people started recording history — no one knows if a cave could have been used as a kind of planetarium where stars were charted.



European researcher Michael Rappenglueck, however, suggests that it is a map of three particular stars — Vega, Deneb, Altair — that astronomers today refer to the Summer Triangle. Those stars are among the brightest objects in the sky during the middle of a northern summer. Rappenglueck sees the eyes of the bull, bird-man and bird as representing Vega, Deneb and Altair.



More palaeolithic shamanistic cosmography. A map that looks like the Pleiades star cluster also has been spotted among the Lascaux frescoes. Another pattern of stars, drawn some 14,000 years ago, has been found in a cave in Spain.





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Oldest Lunar Calendar Painted in a Lascaux Cave





Lascaux Caves ancient painted lunar map

[Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies]

A dappled brown horse with dark mane painted on the wall of the prehistoric Lascaux caves in France 15,000 years ago might be part of the oldest lunar calendar.



German researcher Michael Rappenglueck has interpreted the painting as symbolic of the phases of the Moon. He sees groups of dots and squares painted by Cro-magnon man alongside images of bulls, horses and antelope as depicting the 29-day cycle of Earth's natural satellite.



Cro-magnon man. Cro-magnon man thrived during the Ice Age by living in the temperate Dordogne Valley while the rest of Europe was held in the grip of an ice age.



Dordogne is a river flowing from the Auvergne Mountains of south-central France 300 miles southwest to the Garonne River north of Bordeaux.



To protect the Lascaux caves from trampling by 21st century tourists, only a replica called Lascaux II is open to the public.



Phases of the Moon. One Lascaux painting of a deer is above a line of 13 dots. Rappenglueck sees those dots as picturing half of the Moon's monthly cycle. Thirteen dots would be one for each day the Moon can be seen in the sky. At the new Moon, when it vanishes from the sky, there is an empty square, symbolizing the absent Moon.



Beneath the dappled brown horse is a row of 29 dots — one for each day of the Moon's 29-day cycle as it passes through its phases in the sky. A series of dots that curve away from the main row might represent the time of the new Moon, when it disappears from the sky for several days.





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Seven Sisters are Mapped in a Lascaux Cave





Seven Sisters star map in Lascaux cave [Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies]

Dots near a drawing of a Bull in the Lascaux cave may chart the cluster of stars modern astronomers call the Seven Sisters. Inside the bull are more spots that may represent other stars found in the same region of the sky.



Is the bull significant? Modern astronomers say this part of the sky is the constellation known as Taurus the Bull. Could ancient relatives of humans also have seen a pattern of stars that looked like a bull in that area of the sky 14,000 years ago?



Ancient Spanish star map. A map that may depict the Northern Crown constellation is painted on the wall of the Frieze of Hands area of the Cueva di El Castillo cave in the mountains of Pico del Castillo in Spain.







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Moon Stone Lunar Map in Ireland



What may be the oldest map of the Moon ever made is inside a 5,000-year-old Neolithic burial mound at Knowth in County Meath, Ireland. The few who have seen them in modern times say the crescent shapes seen in the pre-historic tombs are images of the Moon.



The burial complex at Knowth is the largest ancient monument in Ireland with many stone engravings and artifacts. It has the largest collection of megalithic art in Europe, including the circular and spiral patterns that may be lunar symbols. The mound's two tunnels are the longest cairn passages in Europe.



A tall chamber at the heart of the mound houses the map of the Moon that is reputed to be ten times older than any other.



The Neolithic lunar map was etched in the stone, named Orthostat 47, by pitting the rock with a lump of quartz. Carved into the rock are dark spots like those seen on the face of the Moon with the naked eye.



Stars and crescents representing the Moon also are on a large stone basin in a recess off the central chamber.





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Learn more:

Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies



Michael A. Rappenglueck, M.A.



The Cave of Lascaux



Paleolithic Shamanistic Cosmography: How is the Famous Rock Picture in the Shaft of the Lascaux Grotto to be Decoded? by Michael A. Rappenglueck, M.A.



Shroud of Turin Is Real, Scientists Claim, Citing New Evidence


Taken from:
http://www.christianpost.com/news/shroud-of-turin-is-authentic-scientists-claim-new-evidence-reignites-debate-video-65284/

inShare.0By Stoyan Zaimov , Christian Post Reporter


December 22, 2011
11:39 am

The Shroud of Turin, which many believe to be the burial robe of Jesus Christ – is likely to be authentic in nature, Italian scientists have recently claimed.



Photo: (REUTERS/Claudio Papi)

A negative version photo of the Shroud of Turin, Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, revealing a face commonly associated with Jesus Christ, taken in August 1978.

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The ancient 14-foot long piece of cloth is said to hold remarkable imprints of a crucified man with long hair and a bearded face. However, critics insist the shroud in question is a forgery created in the Middle Ages, somewhere between 1260 and 1390.



Radiocarbon tests conducted in 1988 in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich seemed to prove that theory to be true, but were disputed due to claims that fibers from the cloth were used around that time period simply to repair the shroud, which would explain the skewed findings, The Telegraph reported.



Attempts in the past had been made to replicate the relic in order to prove that it is a fake, and although scientists from Italy's National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Development managed to create such a duplicate, they concluded that it would be impossible for anyone to have done the same with technology available in the Middle Ages:



"The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin, has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining ... is impossible to obtain in a laboratory," the experts said.



The leader of the project, Prof Paolo Di Lazzaro, explained that their research was based purely on the scientific evidence at hand and left theological interpretations up to the "conscience of individuals."



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Between 1978 and 1981, a group of 31 American scientists, called the Shroud of Turin Research Project, conducted 120 hours of X-ray and ultraviolet tests that arrived to the same conclusion.



"There are no chemical or physical methods known which can account for the totality of the image, nor can any combination of physical, chemical, biological or medical circumstances explain the image adequately," they said, according to the Telegraph.



A professor of chemistry at Pavia University, Luigi Garlaschelli, shared with The Independent: "The implications are... that the image was formed by a burst of UV energy so intense it could only have been supernatural. But I don't think they've done anything of the sort."



Shroud of Turin Not a FakeThe Shroud of Turin is kept in the royal chapel of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, and preserved in a temperature-controlled case. The relic, visited by millions of people each year, has never been formally denied or accepted by the Catholic Church.