Back in the Sixties, when every day was war in Indochina, every now and then you’d hear something about a “Plain of Jars” in Laos. I always wondered “What’s that?”, but the nooze reports never bothered to explain it.
So it’s still a bit of a mystery today. Just like it’s a mystery where the deuce my link went. Ah, there it is.
https://wordpress.com/post/leeduigon.com/59629
The plain is covered with these great big stone jars, which tend to contain human bones and grave goods. Archaeologists guess they date from around 500 B.C. to 500 A.D., but that’s just a good guess. It’s hard to study a place full of unexploded ordnance waiting to go off and blow an archaeologist to kingdom come.
I wonder what’ll be left of our alleged civilization, fifteen hundred years from now. What will people say about us?
“Oh–them!”
I would love to learn the true history of the world. There are many unexplained things in this world and little in the way of recorded history to explain them. What happened in the Indus Valley? What happened to the vast civilizations in Central and South America? For that matter, I recall reading that there was once a vast city near what is now St. Louis, MO, but it is long, long gone.
Answers In Genesis has been doing a series on this written by geneticist Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson. His conclusions are fascinating, to say the least. He uses DNA evidence to link people groups and comes up with surprising conclusions. It’s a fairly extensive series of videos, but I find them quite worth my time. If he is correct, then Henry Ford was quite justified in say8 g history is bunk.
One other aspect of this is Flood Geology. Bible believing scientists have interpreted the geology according to the belief that there was a global flood circa 4,000 years ago, and that drastically affects how both geology and history are perceived. According to this line of thinking, the Ice Age was a reaction after the Flood and fairly recent.
This means that much of the water now in the seas was at one time frozen and inert. This would mean that sea levels were lower in the past and that land bridges may well have existed which made migration easier. That may well be the reason God wanted people to spread out and fill the earth and why He confused the languages at Babel. Had they waited too long, the opportunity for migration to far distant lands would have been reduced, as the ice melted and the seas rose.
According to Dr. Jeanson’s research, central Asians figure prominently in the ancestry of many people today, including many people whom would not appear to be from that background. Ultimately, Dr. Jeanson’s research shows that the history of civilization probably has happened on a fairly short time scale, with changes happening rapidly enough to surprise even Young Earth creationists.
So the people that created the jars for which the plain is named, may have been quite different from the people that live in the area today. Far flung islands of the South Pacific may have been more readily accessible when the seas were lower and the inhabitants of those islands today might be ethnically far different from the inhabitants thousands of years ago.
One interesting thing I’ve learned about history in general, is that many people groups have a flood legend, usually which bears at least some resemblance to the biblical Flood and many people groups believe that their is an absolute Creator God that is superior to all other gods. Even if they worship various false gods, many acknowledge the absolute superiority of the Creator.
History is a lot harder to do than people think. Thucydides participated in the Peloponnesian War as a general of Athens (and he caught and survived the Athenian plague). After the war, wanting to write its history, he toured Greece and interviewed many other participants.
His conclusion was that he’d done the best he could, but there was really no way to discover and report what had really happened.
These explanations make rational sense to me. The Bible account makes them truth to me (Creation, the Flood, Babel, etc.).
I have never believed in biological evolution, but for a time was somewhat accepting of the notion of planets accreting from dust in space. I no longer hold this view and take the Bible quite literally in pretty much everything, unless it is clearly stated to be symbolic, such as the book of Revelation.
Taking the Flood into account makes much more sense than the secular view of geology. I can see evidence of the Flood all around me. There is a location in Tucson where it is obvious that you are on an ancient lakebed. There are all sorts of places where the effects of the Flood are obvious and it would appear that the surface of the earth was entirely reshaped by the Flood. It was a lot more than a long rainstorm, the fountains of the deep opened up and Bible believing geologists have concluded that the Flood was probably as much a seismic and volcanic event as a meteorological event, with the sea being heated by volcanic activity, which triggered 40 days and nights of rainfall.
It is also believed that the tectonic motion of the continents was a rapid process and that water soaked layers of sediment which spanned continents account for the rock layers. Tectonic motion and collisions of land masses raised mountain ranges from these still wet layers of sediment and account for marine fossils found high in the Himalayas.
Babel happened sometime thereafter. The Septuagint would place it somewhere around 800 years later while the Masoretic would subtract about 650 years from that figure. Either way, the earth’s population spread, taking traditions and beliefs around the globe, yet carrying some common threads, such as legends of the a Flood preserved in many far flung cultures; even those without the Bible.
Huh! The planets were formed by Science!
When I was growing up, it was unheard-of to question Evolution. No one did. So of course I accepted it, too.
It’s amazing how flimsy the evidence actually is. They present these theories as water tight, but they are actually pretty fanciful and leave all sorts of a unanswered question.
What hooked me was Hubble’s red shift explaining the expansion of the Universe. It makes a lot of sense and if it was consistently proven true, it would be an all but unassailable explanation of the Universe and would confirm the Big Bang. But there are serious gaps.
You see, if the Big Bang model worked perfectly, rotation would have long ago obliterated the shape of spiral galaxies, but it hasn’t. So they decided to introduce Dark Matter, which would provide the necessary mass to keep the galaxies glued together.
Now dark matter is some interesting stuff, because it doesn’t interact with normal matter. Light isn’t affected by it, no one knows what it is made of and the only thing we know about it is that it must be there, because without its gravitational effects, the galaxies could not possibly look the way they look. Dark matter has to exist, because without it, the Big Bang doesn’t make sense.
OK. For the moment, we’ll concede the existence of dark matter and see how things work out. I’m more than willing to believe that there are mysteries to the Universe and maybe there’s a lot of “stuff” we don’t know much about. After all, untold billions of neutrinos are passing through me as I right this and I barely notice them, except for when they make my nose itch. 🙂
So the Universe expands and, that’s actually a very good thing. Just as motion makes it possible to balance a bicycle, motion stabilizes big things, such as universes. If everything was absolutely static the first time someone sneezed there would be real problems, and with neutrinos tickling people’s noses, it would be only a matter of time before there was a very serious problem. 🙂
In the ‘80s, there was a question as to whether expansion would continue, or if at some point or another, the Universe would begin to contract, which would result in a “Big Crunch”. That is a serious problem. If you were out in the back yard, and Neptune landed on you while you were distracted (because you were scratching your nose), that could ruin your entire day.
But seriously (pauses to scratch nose), it was a fair question. If every bit of matter emanated from one source and blew apart with great force, would it have enough energy to maintain that expansion, or would it reverse. In my humble opinion, that is truly a great question. So they looked into this, and a while back, they did some calculations involving a special type of star known as a cepheid variable and came to the startling conclusion that the Universe was expanding faster than they could account for.
This would be problematic, except for the fact that they could go to the well of theory and came up with Dark Energy.
Now dark energy is some interesting stuff, because no one knows where it comes from, or how it works. The only thing we know about it is that it must be there, because without its energetic effects, the Universe could not possibly look the way it looks. Dark matter has to exist, because without it, the Big Bang doesn’t make sense.
Even in the scientific community, dominated by atheists, this raised some eyebrows and one scientist was said to have remarked that you can only invoke the Easter Bunny once. I tend to agree. I was willing to concede dark matter, because there are limitations to our understanding, but going back to the same mystery well for more dark stuff that can’t be observed, but we know it’s there because we can see its effects sounds a bit fishy to me.
Are these theories based upon any real, observable, repeatable evidence? If we can’t interact with dark matter in any way, but can only detect its gravitational effect, how do we know which side of the equation is in error. Maybe our understanding of gravity is somehow incomplete and our ability to calculate the mass of galaxies is not quite as accurate as we had thought.
One other possibility is that the galaxies were created in place and that they are bound together as they are because they are part of a purposeful creation. I’m not knocking gravity, I’m just saying that God knows how to create according to His purposes and His abilities are far beyond our comprehension.
If you look at this page: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/stretch.html you will see 11 scriptural references to God stretching out the heavens. I don’t know exactly how God stretches out the heavens, but the book of Job is quite possibly one of the oldest manuscripts in the Bible and it predates Edwin Hubble by a significant margin. Whether he would have liked it or not, Hubble’s work was confirming something already established in scripture.
The astrophysical community has found itself on the horns of a dilemma. What do I mean? Well, they have come up with an explanation of the Universe which seems plausible, but further research has shown that they can’t explain matters without invoking dark matter and dark energy, neither of which they can explain. But there’s even more to it; it turns out that, according to their theory, only 4% of the Universe is made from matter as we know it, with 23% being dark matter and 73% being dark energy.
Let me step back and rephrase that; the theories dominant in cosmology, can only explain 4% of what they believe constitutes the Universe. Dark energy and dark matter are unproven, they exist in theory and could very well be imaginary. Pardon my flight of fancy, but I imagine The Big Bang as having become a god in its own right, demanding that scientists adopt a belief system which invoked imaginary matter and energy as constituting 96% of the Universe. No matter what, many scientists have decided that The Big Bang must be pleased at all costs.
I’d write more, but my nose itches. 🙂
(Now let’s see them explain away the Edsel. And Marve Throneberry.)
Seriously, though–if you can’t observe and study real things, you don’t have science.
I doubt scientists have any idea of how much they’ve damaged their credibility in recent years.
That’s the whole thing. Science must be observable and repeatable. A lot of what is said to explain evolution reduces to being a tale to explain something, but there’s no real proof.
“How the Elephant Got Its Trunk and other Just-So Stories”…
The picture doesn’t do them justice – there are thousands of them, so in clusters of hundreds. A tourist town has grown up around them so maybe we start a Go-Fund Me site to raise money so we can all go as a group. 🙂