timeimmortal

Just as a follow-up on this article, I downloaded a program called Celestia, and while it’s probably not 100% accurate, it does offer a fairly decent ability to simulate…well…a particular issue that was raised concerning the identity of the planet that was discovered at the end of the mid-season cliffhanger of Battlestar Galactica, a planet that is supposedly Earth.

Here’s the constellation Orion, as viewed from Earth (more or less). The stars highlighted in green are the component stars of Orion, while the star selected in red is Muliphein (Gamma Canis Majoris), a bright giant star situated just over 400 light years from Earth.

Looks pretty normal, eh? Now let’s look at Orion from nearby Alpha Centauri.

As the Reader can hopefully see, the alignment of the stars is nearly identical. For good measure, let’s look at Orion from one other nearby star, Tau Ceti.

And here again, Orion is nearly the same as would be seen from Earth…this despite the fact that Tau Ceti is just shy of twelve light years away from us.

Now, to hammer the point home, let’s take a look at Orion from Muliphein, which isn’t anywhere near as close to us, but not all that far when compared to the distances mentioned in BSG.

I can’t actually fit all of Orion’s stars into the frame of the picture, so spread out have they become. And the shape? Forget about it; from this frame of reference, Orion is no more. But hopefully the Reader can see that constellations are not a great way to mark a planet’s location, especially if one isn’t working from the most accurate data set to begin with.

Now, just to prove that I’m not using a biased sample here, let’s try the same experiment with a more complex constellation (and one that’s relevant to BSG as well): Capricorn. Here’s the view from Earth (this time, I managed to frame Earth in the shot as well).
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Nicholas — the same one as before? If so: my goodness, an atheistic trifecta! What a month! — writes in with some additional commentary on this article (and possibly this one as well).

It wasn’t Chesterton. See http://www.chesterton.org/qmeister2/any-everything.htm

[Well, not Chesterton directly, although he doubtless would have agreed with the statement! -- Ken]

And it’s not true. I know many Christians who also believe in homeopathy (for instance) [So do I -- my wife is one of them. They believe in it, in my experience, because it has demonstrably worked in their lives (which is not "belief" at all -- one need not believe in something that has been demonstrably proven). Certainly that has been the case with Grace; homeopathic remedies saved her life. — Ken]. And many atheists who are also skeptical about Astrology (for instance). On the other hand, the Father Brown stories are delightful.

As to the main point, I completely agree with you about the dangers of SatNav. Drivers who rely on it are most unwise to abandon any attempt to master map-reading, and do seem to lose their common sense as well. Bit like negotiating the moral maze, really. We have to work it out for ourselves, using what I would call the consensus of people of good will, and I guess you might call the natural law? There isn’t a MoralPS, either in the Bible (as I guess you would agree?) or even in the traditions of the RC Church, as I know you would not agree.

Utterly trivial point, but I guess you would rather get it right: a theodicy is an (attempted) excuse for a (postulated) benign God, in the face of the continual suffering of many life forms on this planet. Look it up in a dictionary, or the Catholic Encyclopedia, if you don’t believe me.

I realize, O Reader, that I tend to take the shortcut of using the term “theodicy” when describing the rather trivial atheist objection to faith that is more properly called the “problem” of evil (or, alternatively, the “problem” of suffering). That it’s a non-issue for Christians doesn’t yet seemed to have registered with proponents of atheism, especially in the online realm, but that’s neither here nor there — they are, after all, welcome to their ignorance. I see no need to make “excuses” for my faith; it is quite defensible without having to resort to any sort of desperate denials and dodges.

Still, I trust that my meaning is clear enough — certainly, Nicholas seems to have caught it.

As to Nicholas‘ remark about MoralPS and the lack thereof, I of course would disagree. Certainly there is a very concrete moral system articulated in the Bible, beginning with Mosaic Law and later re-shaped in Christ by the later authors of the New Testament. Of course, this is simply a formal articulation of a fundamental intrinsic morality — natural law — that has been woven into the fabric of creation. And the doctrine of the Church takes both sources together in its articulation of what it means to be “moral.”

In other words, there is certainly a form of MoralPS, as Nicholas would term it. Not unlike a GPS unit on the dashboard of a car, however, people are free to obey or ignore it at their whim (and, possibly, at their peril). Equally, people should double-check each “source” against the others, much as how a GPS unit should be checked against a map and against real-world observation of the facts on the ground. And finally, it serves to note that not everyone has a GPS unit in their car, in the same way that teaching pertaining to true Morality (that is: Catholic Christian morality) has not yet been brought to every person on Earth, nor has every person to whom it has been brought elected to adopt its use. This is a concept I cover elsewhere.

Which is not to say that the morality itself is incorrect. No, it is simply to observe that some people are wrong. Not that the revelation of human incorrectness should come as any shock — we all screw up, and then quite often. And certainly, our willingness to trust technology more than it deserves to be trusted is but one example thereof.

I do wish I could write as eloquently as David Warren does, especially when communicating a point of such profound importance:

To those who know some history, the modern sciences emerged in an unambiguously Christian milieu. They flourished, over centuries in the West, as the direct result of the Judaeo-Christian teaching that “God does not contradict Himself.” The whole notion of unalterable physical laws, and thus a universal order that will repay inquiry, is the product of a theological position unique to the West. It is a view that has been glimpsed in other civilizations, but could only be doggedly pursued in this one. science was stillborn in all other civilizations.

By contrast, an atheistical view involves no such dogma; and the prevailing Darwinist scientistic view involves an actual self-contradiction so glaring that it cannot withstand a moment’s review. For it claims to explain order by the chance accumulation of random events. Such a view is itself in revolt against a tradition which found reason in nature and an answering reason in man. It can only lead to the death of science.

The Christian outlook stood from the beginning on two ancient legs. One was the revelation to the Hebrews, which lights the way to Christ. And the other was our inheritance from the Greeks. For “Western Civ” emerged out of the ancient world as a set of uncannily adequate replies to questions Greek philosophers had raised about time and final causation. Indeed, the rebirth of empirical science in the Christian Middle Ages was a return to Athens and Alexandria, and to the inquiries of e.g. Aristotle, and Aristarchus (“the ancient Copernicus”).

…

One of the historical myths of today is that such pseudo-sciences as astrology and alchemy preceded the emergence of true science, which overcame them by its superior predictive powers.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the actual ancient world of the Mediterranean and Near East, it was the other way around. Astrology, alchemy, and various kinds of sorcery emerged from the decadence of Greek empiricism. The mystery cults that sustained them, began to flourish just as that Greek world was crumbling under the might of an expanding Roman power, in the centuries before Christ. The ancient degeneration of science was predicated not on the rise of an “irrational” religious force, that suppressed it, but on progressive loss of faith in, and growing cynicism towards, the ancient religious and cosmological order.

Indeed, many atheistic commentators often seem to forget, in their zeal to use highly selective examples to claim that the Church is antagonistic towards science, that it was the Church which preserved the accumulated knowledge of the “Old World” through the Dark Ages, that it was the Church which frameworked the ancient academies of learning which became the modern university, and that it was the Church and the scientific inquiry conducted through it during the Middle Ages that laid the groundwork for all the innovations and discoveries of the 17th century onward. Far from being anti-science, or anti-reason, or anti-knowledge, the Church has been at the forefront of reason and discovery through the centuries. Animism, Islam, Hinduism, and other religions have not produced the same vibrant tradition of inquiry and discovery; only the West founded by and upon Christianity has done so. And it is the height of foolishness to deny that the Christian origins of the West have had anything to do with the wondrous discoveries that have been made therein.