Letter to the Editor: Six thousand years, really?
It was very enlightening to read Bill Kettenhofen”s Letter to the Editor on 10-10-14 having just returned from a three-day trip to the Mono Lake area to do night-time photographs of Indian Petroglyphs, of the Tufa Towers around Mono Lake, and of the oldest trees in the world, the Bristlecone Pines in the White Mountains, all against the backdrop of the milky Way.
Imagine, the Bristlecone Pines are almost as old as the Creationist Earth ringing in at about 5,000 years-the Methuselah Pine is thought to be 4,845 years old but then researchers recently found a 5,062 year-old specimen.
However, as a scientific thinking person who has little knowledge of the intricacies of Biblical interpretation I simply saw the Milky Way as a barred spiral galaxy about 120,000 light-years in diameter and containing roughly 200 billion stars and containing at least as many planets; our galaxy lying about 27,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center. Our huge galaxy is only one of the estimated 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe which is considered 13.82 billion years old.
This makes our sun one out of the 200 billion suns in the galaxy and our galaxy one out of the 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe; our Earth is very, very small. Not in any mood to argue any of Bill”s points all I can do is offer two quotes for him to ponder. The first is from the song by Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”, but I changed one word:
“Now I”ve heard there was a secret cord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don”t really care for science, do you?”
Second from Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (340-405 AD):
“All forms of worship should lead to unity. We gaze up at the same stars, the sky covers us all, the same universe compasses us. What does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for the truth? Not by one avenue can we arrive at so tremendous a secret.”
I”m sorry, but Bill Kettenhofen”s advice in his letter “[w]henever there is a discrepancy between science and scripture, we should always rely on scripture” is just plain hogwash!
Greg Blinn, Kelseyville
