Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Exodus 20:3
"Eddington .... repeatedly stated his
belief in the centrality of time
for naturalistic development. In the
evolution—or the “becoming”—of the universe, he wrote, “Time occupies
the key position” (Eddington, 1933, p. 91).
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| Father Time |
As with Eddington, Carl
Sagan acted not as an originator of chronological thought, but as an
advocate of the primacy of time in evolution. Sagan also described the
evolution of the universe with “time” replacing God as the First Cause:
For unknown ages there were no galaxies, no planets, no life. A first generation of stars was born. In the dark lush clouds between the stars, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth. One day a molecule arose that was able to make crude copies of itself life had begun. Single-celled plants evolved plants and animals discovered that the land could support life. [Some animals] became upright emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, [consciousness] invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some things that hydrogen atoms do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution (Sagan, 1980, pp. 337,338).
If to Sagan time was the “creator” which brought the universe into
existence, planetary astronomer William K. Hartmann has expressed the
same idea, namely, that time is really the only necessity for
evolution—a “long” time:
From all we have just said, we conclude that if planetary surfaces with the necessary conditions—liquid water and the ‘CHON’ chemicals (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen)—exist long enough anywhere, life is likely to evolve (Hartmann, 1991, p. 621).
With time as the evolutionary agent, it is no wonder that the
evolutionary expectation of finding extraterrestrial life has over the
decades gone from disrepute to popular acceptance.
All evolutionary cosmic ages are in the final analysis based on an old
age for the earth, so if this chronology is destroyed for the earth, it is demolished for the cosmos as well.
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| Father God |
age for the earth, so if this chronology is destroyed for the earth, it is demolished for the cosmos as well.
---The sun is thought to be old
because the earth is old, other stars are thought to follow a mode of
operation and chronology based on that of the sun (Bahcall, 1990, p. 56;
Fix, 1999, p. 385), and the Hubble constant and the age of the universe
are adjusted in an attempt to make the cosmos older than the stars
(Goldsmith, 1985, p. 115)." NWCN