2 The discovery of other solar systems--extrasolar planets orbiting sunlike stars--began in 1995 (Mayor and Queloz 1995), with more than 300 exoplanets found as of 2011. Geoffrey W. Marcy and R. Paul Butler have been leading discoverers. See Marcy's Exoplanet Orbit Database. See also Jean Schneider's The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia.) Dusty disks or rings of dust, possible solar systems in the making, have been found around AU Microscopii, Beta Pictoris, Fomalhaut, Vega, 55 Rho1 Cancri, and other stars (ScienceDaily; Liu 2004; Kalas et al. 2004; Mouillet 2004; Holland et al. 1998; Cowen 1998a and 1998b; Schilling 1998a and 1998b; Begley 1998; Boss 1998; and Rodriquez et al. 1998).
Most of the exoplanets found have been gassy giants like Jupiter, observed indirectly (due to the distances) by radial velocity (the gravitational wobble of the parent stars). But in 2008 two teams of astronomers reported the first direct imaging of exoplanets: three planets, between 5 and 13 times the size of Jupiter, orbiting the star HR 8799 (130 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus), and a planet perhaps three times the size of Jupiter orbiting Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years from Earth (Marois et al. 2008; Kalas et al. 2008). In 2011 NASA reported the discovery by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope of the first known rocky exoplanet (named Kepler-10b), the smallest exoplanet yet found (Kremer 2011).
On the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, see the SETI Institute and Basalla 2005. On Fermi's Paradox--if life is common in the universe, why haven't extraterrestrials shown up on Earth?--see Skindrud 1996. For 50 possible solutions to Fermi's Paradox, see Webb 2002. Many scientists would agree with the late biologist Ernst Mayr (1988, 67-74) that intelligent life in the universe is an "incredible improbability." The key word is "intelligent," as Mayr was among those who consider the probability of simple life forms arising through natural cosmic chemistry to be high. "Life," argues Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Christian de Duve, "is a cosmic imperative. The universe is awash with life" (1995a; see also De Duve 2002). (See "The Biochemist's Tale," lines 301-337.) See also Ward 2005.
The orbiting 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft, the NASA golfcart-size Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity (see the Mars Exploration Rover Mission), and the European Space Agency's orbiting Mars Express have found clear evidence that liquid water once existed on Mars (see Squyres et al. 2006; Bibring et al. 2006a, 2006b; Cowen 2005c; Poulet et al. 2005.), and in 2008 NASA�s Phoenix Mars Lander found clear evidence of water ice away from the polar ice caps (Moskowitz 2008). Liquid water is a prerequisite for life as we know it on Earth (Golombek et al. 1997; Smith et al. 1997; Kerr 1997f), water providing a solvent or liquid medium for life's essential chemical reactions (Vogel 1999). In July 2005 the Cassini spacecraft discovered a gyser-like plume on the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The plume consists of water vapor, methane and other organics, precursors to the building blocks of life (see Ehrenberg 2008; special section on Enceladus in Science 3/10/06, and Cowen 2006b). A significant amount of water was discovered on Earth's moon in 2009 through analysis of the plume created by the designed crash of the satellite Lcross into a lunar crater (Chang 2009). There is also evidence of subsurface water on three icy moons of Jupiter (Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede).
The discovery, in a meteorite from Mars known as ALH84001, of possible microfossils of primitive life was announced by a team of NASA researchers in 1996 (McKay et al. 1996), but further studies have shown the evidence to be inconclusive. (On meteorites from Mars, see Head et al. 2002). On the observed release of methane on Mars, a possible sign of life, see Mumma et al. 2009. Former NASA scientist Gilbert Levin and others believe that re-analyzed data from a Martian soil experiment conducted by the Viking Lander in 1976 strongly indicates that some form of life was detected in the soil (David 2001; ScienceDaily). (Incidentally, the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor [in 1998 and 2001] and Mars Express [in 2006] have returned new images of the so-called Face on Mars--pictures that show an unfacelike eroded mesa. See also Happy Face Crater and some Martian valentines.) Future missions will be required to determine if in fact there has ever been life on Mars (Britt 2004c).
In 2007 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report (The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems) urging that the search for extraterrestrial life be broadened to include "weird life," that is, life with an alternative biochemistry to that of life on Earth. For example, liquid methane that has been detected in the form of lakes on Saturn�s moon Titan (see Cassini spacecraft website) could work as a biosolvent instead of water. Methane is also the first organic compound that has been detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet (Cowen 2008b).
Such quests for extraterrestrial life do not seem to excite creationists, who are averse to the idea of life beyond Earth. God could create life elsewhere, but "it is not a question of what God could do," wrote the late Henry Morris (1997c). "What He says is that our planet Earth is where He created life" (emphasis in original). Creationist speaker Kent "Dr. Dino" Hovind concurs, saying there is no intelligent life on other planets because the Bible states that "Eve is the mother of all living" (Weaver and Norris 1996; see Dave Matson on Hovind, and more on Hovind below). Physicist Don DeYoung of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), arguing that "the Earth is uniquely created for life," quotes Isaiah 45:18: "God Himself that formed the earth and made it: He hath established it, He created it not in vain, He formed it to be inhabited." While extrasolar planets will no doubt continue to be found, says DeYoung, where life is concerned "there is no place like home" (1999).
As for UFOs, creationist leader Kelly L. Segraves (see "General Prologue," note 21) states in his book Sons of God Return that UFOs are piloted by "fallen angels and followers of Satan." The ICR has likewise published material on the demonic nature of UFOs (Bennetta 1988a). Creationist seminary professor Dr. Norman Geisler has described UFOs as "Satanic manifestations for the purposes of deception" (Ecker 1990, 136). Kent Hovind likes the "theory" proposed in Stanley Deyo's book The Cosmic Conspiracy (it "really struck home with me," says Hovind) that Satan travels in a UFO, since the devil, unlike God, can only be in one place at a time (Weaver and Norris 1996). (Hovind was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2007 on 58 tax fraud charges. He had maintained that he owes no taxes because everything he owns belongs to God [Stewart 2007].)
3 See "The Cosmologist's Tale," lines 74-97.
4 In Woody Allen's film Annie Hall, young Alvy Singer becomes depressed after reading that the universe is expanding.
5 The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) established the heliocentric or sun-centered model of the solar system, displacing the geocentric or Earth-centered Ptolemaic system that was the cosmological orthodoxy for 1400 years. Earth and its moon suffered a further indignity in 1610 with the discovery by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) of the four moons of Jupiter, two of which, it is now believed, may harbor life (Showman and Malhotra 1999; see note 2 above). In 1633 the Roman Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant his teaching, after Copernicus, that "the Earth is not the center of (the Universe) and that it moves." Three and a half centuries later, in 1992, the Church admitted that it was wrong (Smith 1992). On Galileo, see Finocchiaro 2005; Shea and Artigas 2003; and Sobel 1999.
6 The Hubble constant is the rate of expansion of the universe. Though gravity was long assumed to be slowing expansion, it now appears that a repulsive or antigravity force has actually been accelerating it (Kirshner 2002; Livio 2000; Goldsmith 2000; Glanz 1998d; on this "dark energy," see "The Cosmologist's Tale," note 31). The Hubble constant is also problematic due to difficulty in determining distances (the standard measurement method being to observe the pulsing of stars called Cepheid variables). A rate measurement reported in 1994 presented an unsettling problem for cosmologists: a universe apparently younger than its oldest stars (then thought to be between 11 and 14 billion years old) (see Freedman et al. 1994; Jacoby 1994; Flamsteed 1995a and 1995b; Lemonick and Nash 1995; Chaisson 1997; Finkbeiner 1999). In 1999 a team of astronomers led by Wendy Freedman announced the conclusions of an eight-year study, using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and four different measurement techniques, according to which the Hubble constant is 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec, yielding an age for the universe of 12 billion years if expansion is slowing, or 13.5 billion years if there is indeed a force that is accelerating the expansion. A rival research group led by Allan Sandage, also using the HST, proposed a slightly older universe, based on a Hubble constant of 61. (See Finkbeiner 1999.)
In February 2003 came the announced findings (updated in March 2006) of NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), according to which the universe is 74% dark energy and (with a Hubble constant of 71 km/sec/mpc) is 13.7 billion years old (NASA 3/17/06; Cho 2006a; ScienceDaily; Cowen 2003b; Seife 2003a; see "The Cosmologist's Tale," note 30). The most distant galaxy known in the universe as of 2006, 13.23 billion light-years away, thus came into being, by the current estimates, only 470 million years after the Big Bang (Britt 2004b).
7 On the theory, for example, that dust clouds collapse to form stars, the ICR says "the process has not been observed" (DeYoung 1996, ii). On stellar evolution, see Greaves 2005; Kaler 2001; Patel et al. 2005; Jiang et al. 2005; and notes 8, 12, and 18 below.
8 Hartmann and Impey 1994, 385-402; Ferris 1997, 188-189.
9 Lester 1989.
10 See Ferris 1997, 114-115; Parker 1988, 253-266; Cohen 1988, 66-67. In 2002 astronomers reported the discovery of a low-mass star (named HE01017-5240, about 36,000 light-years from Earth) so iron-poor (1/200,000th of the amount contained in the sun) that it could be a second-generation star (the first generation after the Big Bang being almost completely metal-free), and is the oldest known star in our galaxy (Christlieb et al. 2002; Irion 2002d; Whitehouse 2002; Cowen 2002f).
11 On the young-Earth creationist argument that the sun is shrinking (Akridge 1980; H. Morris 1984a, 164; Ackerman 1986, 55-64), see Thompson n.d.
12 On white dwarfs that explode, see Gamezo et al. 2003 and Branch 2003. An exploding star is called a supernova. See Seife 2004a and Smartt et al. 2004. On white dwarfs that evolve into "born-again" giants, for only 10 to 1,000 years, due to an explosive reignition of helium (an event of stellar evolution observed in the star Sakurai's Object [V4334 Sgr] discovered by amateur astronomer Yukio Sakurai in 1996), see Hajduk et al. 2005 and Asplund 2005.
13 On black holes, see Fabbiano 2005; Seife 2004d; Begelman 2003; Carilli et al. 2003; Mirabel and Rodrigues 2003; and Cowen 2002d. It is believed that all galaxies contain black holes, remnants of massive stars, and that most galaxies, including our own, contain supermassive black holes at their centers (Begelman 2003). On gamma-ray astronomy, using gamma-ray bursts from exploding stars in the depths of space to help study the early universe, see NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission; Aharonian 2007; Cowen 2007c and 2006a; Nature 147:845-861; Irion 2004c; and Schilling 2005 and 2003.
14 Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced Sadge A Star), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, emits radiation at radio, infrared, and x-ray wavelengths. See Shen et al. 2005; Bower et al. 2004; Morris 2004; Irion 2003; and Melia 2003. On x-ray astronomy, see Weaver 2005 and Gursky 2002; on radio astronomy, Krieger 2005; on infrared astronomy, Cowen 2004a and Irion 2004a.
15 Puns on Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Gentle Into That Good Night" and Hawking radiation (Hawking 1988, 104-113; Anderson 1989, 542; see Stephen Hawking's Universe). On the unsettled question of whether black holes destroy the information they swallow (the famed physicist Stephen Hawking reversed himself and announced his belief that information is preserved, to be returned in a "mangled form" not easily recognized), see Seife 2004c and 2004d, and Cowen 2004b.
16 On the evolution of the solar system, see Bill Arnett's Multimedia Tour of the Solar System, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Welcome to the Planets.
17 Cohen 1988, 168-169.
18 On observation of stars forming, see Ward-Thompson 2002; Pudritz 2002; Cowen 2002c, Cimatti et al. 1998; Begley 1997b; Lemonick 1995. The hottest and brightest star-forming region now known is the Lynx arc, a galaxy 12 billion light-years away, "the closest we have come so far," in the words of astronomer Robert Fosbury, to seeing primordial stars being formed Fosbury et al. 2003; Cowen 2003f). All such observations present a challenge to young-Earth creationists, to whom "all stars are 'new' stars" (DeYoung 1996, ii), that is, only thousands of years old, and thus could not have been forming for billions of years.
In about three billion years, our Milky Way Galaxy will collide with M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, with such mergers being perhaps "the major drivers of galactic evolution" (Irion 2000b; see also Irion 2005c).
19 Strahler 1987, 126.
20 Eicher 1976, 139. "The Physicist's Tale" discusses radiometric dating. For a book on meteorites, see Bevan and de Laeter 2002.
21 Albee 1989, 259; Eicher 1976, 129-130. On the argument for a young Earth based on the amount of dust that astronauts found on the moon, see Snelling and Rush 1993.
22 In 1999 MIT geologists reported the finding of crustal rocks in northwestern Canada that are over 4.03 billion years old, making them Earth's oldest known preserved rocks (Bowring and Williams 1999).
23 The ICR's late Henry Morris (1967, 63-64) called the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 "the most strategic data" for determining the date of creation, most likely "not more than 10,000 years ago." ICR president John Morris, who considers the Earth most likely about 6,000 years old, says, "The largest figure I've ever seen from a trustworthy scholar is approximately 15,000 years, but even this seems to stretch the Biblical data too far" (J. Morris 1995a). Similarly, AiG's Ken Ham says the Earth is "perhaps only 6,000" years old (Ham 2003a). (The figure of 6,000 years recalls the 17th-century calculation by Archbishop James Ussher that the first day of creation was Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C., with Ussher's contemporary Dr. John Lightfoot determining the exact time of creation that day to be 9 o'clock in the morning [Simanek n.d.].)
24 Hammond and Margulis 1981, 56.
25 H. Morris 1984a, 174. Australian creationist Barry Setterfield sought to get around the billions-of-light-years problem by proposing that light has slowed down and once traveled much faster (see Wieland 2002a). The hypothesis may have been inspired by the idea of "tired light" (light losing energy as it travels long distances) proposed by astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1929 (see Seife 2001c; Ferris 1997, 66, 319). This "decay of the speed of light hypothesis" was rejected by former ICR physicist Gerald Aardsma (1988). In 2002, Paul Davies and two other Australian physicists published a study in Nature speculating that c or the speed of light, despite Einstein's theory of special relativity (which includes the constancy of c), may have slowed down in the course of billions of years (Davies, Davis, and Lineweaver 2002). See also the Varying Speed of Light theory proposed by the iconoclastic physicist Joao Magueijo in Magueijo 2003, and the comments in H. Morris 2003a. On current research in special relativity, see Cho 2005a.
26 H. Morris 1984a, 175; 1985, 210; Moore 1976, 61. The seminal work on creation with the appearance of age was the 1857 book Omphalos ("Navel") by Philip Henry Gosse, who argued that God created Adam with a navel and with partially digested food in his system, and that fossils were created by God to look like once-living creatures that never existed (Ecker 1990, 25). See note 27 below and "The Paleoanthropologist's Tale," note 31.
27 Dobzhansky 1973. AiG's Carl Wieland has written that the notion of apparent age "suffers grievously from the fact that starlight also carries information about distant cosmic events. The created-in-transit theory means that the information would be 'phony', recording events which never happened, hence deceptive" (Wieland 2002a; see also note 26 above and "The Paleoanthropologist's Tale," note 31). Henry Morris acknowledged that the concept of starlight originally created en route is problematic, as "a major difficulty with this assumption is how to deal with post-creation stellar events such as supernovas" (H. Morris 2003a). Morris and Wieland both suggest that an answer to the problem may lie in the concept of a changing speed of light (see note 25 above).
28 Fundamentalism has been defined as "militantly antimodernist evangelical Protestantism" (Marsden 1984, 97). It had its roots in the nineteenth-century orthodox reaction to the "higher" (historico-literary) criticism of the Bible that began with European theologians and was accepted by American "modernists" (Noss 1980, 480). Former Southern Baptist Convention president Jerry Vines has compared higher criticism of the Bible to "tampering with the medicine of a sick man," for it "clips the wings of faith with the scissors of reason" (Warner and Palen 1987). Fundamentalism owes its name to a list of "five fundamentals" of faith--the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth and divinity of Christ, the substitutionary atonement, Christ's physical resurrection, and his second coming--drawn up at a conservative Bible conference in 1895 and endorsed by the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1910 (Bedell, Sandon, and Wellborn 1975, 233; Walker 1985, 517; Kehoe 1983, 7). With their commitment to biblical literalism, fundamentalists, including the leaders of the �creation science� movement (see "General Prologue," note 8), are inalterably opposed to evolutionary theory, described by evangelist Billy Sunday as �pure jackass nonsense� (Seldes 1967, 331) and by creationist Homer Duncan as �the most stupid thought to enter the mind of man� (Kurtz 1985, 42).
29 Gish 1995a, 34.
30 Joshua 10:12-14. The sun was stopped so that an Israelite annihilation of retreating Amorites would not be interrupted by nightfall.
31 See Haught 1999 and Miller 1999. A significant portion of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in America are theistic evolutionists, that is, people who believe in God and accept evolution (Miller et al. 2006; Frye 1983; on Islamic thought on origins, see "General Prologue," note 21). The purpose of the Bible's creation narratives, says Judaic studies professor and ordained rabbi Dr. Frederick Greenspahn (1983, 31, 37), is "to interpret the meaning of the universe rather than to make a scientific statement as to its origin or history." Various mainstream American religious denominations and organizations passed resolutions in the 1980s opposing the teaching of "creation science" in public schools (see Statements from Religious Organizations). In 2002 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church-USA reaffirmed that "there is no contradiction between an evolutionary theory of human origins and the doctrine of God as Creator." For the similar, official Mormon view, see Evenson and Jeffrey 2006. The Episcopal Church (2006) has passed a resolution stating that "God is Creator," and that "acceptance of evolution is entirely compatible with an authentic and living Christian faith." The National Council of Churches (2006) has issued a brochure stating that the creation accounts in Genesis should not be understood as history or science but as "proclamations of basic theological truths about creation."
In 2006, Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams, the leader of the Church of England, said that teaching creationism alongside evolution is "a jarring of categories." He said he worried that "creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it," treating the Bible as if it were "a theory like other theories." "A belief that everything depends on the creative act of God," the archbishop said, "is quite compatible with a degree of uncertainty or latitude about how precisely that unfolds in creative time" (The Guardian 3/21/06).
In a 1996 letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the late Pope John Paul II, calling evolution "more than a hypothesis," reaffirmed the view of Pope Pius XII (Encyclical Humani generis, 1950) that there is "no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man," with the understanding that "if the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter the spiritual soul is immediately created by God" (see Holden 1996). On the Catholic Church and the Bible, see "The Student's Tale," note 2.
In 2005, with the death of John Paul II plus the international influence of the intelligent design (ID) movement, there was concern about a possible rift in the Catholic Church over evolution. This concern arose in July when Archbishop of Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn authored a New York Times essay entitled "Finding Design in Nature," in which he wrote that too much had been made of Pope John Paul II's "rather vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution." Schönborn, who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, said that evolution "in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense--an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection--is not." The cardinal wrote, "Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." Schönborn seemed to making common cause with the ID movement, and indeed Mark Ryland, vice president of the movement's bellwether Discovery Institute, stated that he had urged the cardinal to write the essay (Dean and Goodstein 2005).
Francisco J. Ayala, a distinguished biologist and former Dominican priest, called Schönborn's essay "an insult" to the late pope and said that it seems to see a conflict between the theory of evolution and religious faith "that does not exist"; and Roman Catholic biologist Kenneth R. Miller called the essay alarming, as it "may have the effect of convincing Catholics that evolution is something they should reject" (Dean and Goodstein 2005). (See also "The Philosopher's Tale," note 14.)
A few days after Schönborn's essay appeared, Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick told reporters at the National Press Club that Catholics do not have to believe literally "the beautiful story of Genesis," but that the church cannot accept the belief that "this is all an accident." He said that "as long as in every understanding of evolution, the hand of God is recognized as being present, we can accept that" (AP, 7/12/05). Father George Coyne, who was then director of the Vatican observatory, responded to Schönborn's essay with an article in which Coyne complained of "a nagging fear in the Church" that a universe in which life "evolved through a process of random genetic mutations and natural selection, escapes God�s dominion." The Jesuit astronomer argued that modern science "provides a challenge, an enriching challenge, to traditional beliefs about God," and that "religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God." Coyne sees God "more as a parent" who "speaks encouraging and sustaining words" but allows a child to grow into adulthood and make its own choices. "God lets the world be what it will be in its continuous evolution," Coyne wrote. "He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves" (Coyne 2005).
In October 2005, Cardinal Sch�nborn stated that his article had led to misunderstandings, that perhaps "one did not express oneself clearly enough." Calling Darwin�s theory "one of the very great works of intellectual history," Sch�nborn said, "I see no problem combining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, under one condition�that the limits of scientific theory are respected� (Heneghan 2005). The Vatican's Cardinal Paul Poupard warned against religion falling "prey to fundamentalism," and Monsignor Gianfranco Basti echoed John Paul II by saying, "(Evolution) is more than a hypothesis because there is proof" (Winfield 2005). In January 2006, the official Vatican newspaper L�Osservatore Romano published an article by evolutionary biologist Fiorenzo Facchini, stating that ID "doesn�t belong to science" (Fisher and Dean 2006; Winfield 2006).
In the 2007 anthology Schoepfung und Evolution (Creation and Evolution), documenting a private seminar that Pope Benedict XVI held with his former doctoral students including Sch�nborn, the Pope endorsed theistic evolution. He stated that the theory of evolution "implies questions that must be assigned to philosophy and which themselves lead beyond the realms of science." There is a "rationality" in the evolutionary process, the Pope said, that comes from the "creative reason" of God (Eddy 2007; Heneghan 2007).
32 See Popper 1968; Gould 1984a, 120.
33 Cohen 1988, 2.
34 "There ain't no such animal" (Gould 1984a, 118).
35 Cloud 1983, 139; Cuffey 1984, 269.