‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’
The period during which we have learned to walk upright and have developed such large brains that our Mothers risk their lives in giving birth to us, is miniscule in terms of the period the Earth has existed. It has taken us only a couple of million years in total. The amount of time we have been bright enough to look with knowing eyes at our world has been much less than that, merely a few tens of thousands of years. We learned how to hunt and to survive from the bounty of nature and eventually we became farmers, living fixed lives and establishing villages that became towns and eventually cities.
Maybe six or seven thousand years ago something remarkable may have happened. Whoever or whatever had manufactured the Moon returned. In an operation that possibly involved a whole series of ‘visits’, the cipher necessary to crack the code of the message, that had been so carefully encapsulated into the Moon, was given to humanity. This ‘key’ was the Megalithic system of measurement and geometry and specifically the Megalithic Yard. The Moon’s creator must have been aware that if the Megalithic Yard was written into the stone circles and avenues of what is now Britain and France, someone would eventually recover the information and rebuild the entire system in all its splendour.
This was clearly not enough. Another series of visitations took place, not long after the first but this time to another proto-civilization far from the first, between the rivers Tigress and Euphrates, in what is today the area known as Iraq. Here a second system of mathematics and geometry was seeded, this one less related to the mathematical certainties of the Earth and its relationship with the Moon but more closely tied to everyday life. It was the forerunner of much that was to follow and when the rise of science came along, humanity invented the metric system, which almost eerily reflected what the Sumerians had been so carefully taught. The astronomer priests of Sumer were shown that the whole world, its size, mass and volume, could be derived from the most humble source possible – a single seed of barley. (See Appendix Five.) This plant had clearly been genetically engineered not only to be of fantastic use to humanity but also to lock into the dimensions and mass of the Earth in an almost unbelievable way.
Mythology and folklore tells us time and again that ‘messengers’ were sent in the remote past to teach humanity the rudiments of civilization and we now know why. None of this is beyond the capabilities of God and it is likely that a percentage of readers will already be convinced that this must be the solution to the message contained in the Moon.
God could quite easily have created the Moon and done so well within the laws of physics He had ordained. It would have been His deliberate intention that the life He seeded on the young Earth would eventually give birth to a thinking, rational species that was, in some way, made in His own image. His interest in humanity, when it eventually evolved, remained as He had quite clearly intended. We can see a situation in which the Deity sent messengers to lay the foundations of an eventual recognition of the message which would lead to the first tangible proof of the existence of a Creator.
Nothing is beyond the mind or capability of God. We have endowed Him with unparalleled power and timelessness. But for countless generations the reality of God has resided in ‘faith’ rather than ‘proof’. Perhaps those with religion will resent the suggestion that God has removed the need for faith.
The humorous and thought-provoking writer, the late Douglas Adams, played with this notion in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.37 Adams created a remarkable creature known as the Babel Fish, that when placed in anyone’s ear could act as an inter-galactic speech translator. So remarkable was the existence of this little fish that people said it must stand as irrevocable proof of the existence of God because nothing so amazing could possibly come about by chance. However, it was pointed out that since God existed by faith alone – and not by proof – the absolute proof of his existence meant for certain that he could not exist.
‘I never thought of that,’ said God, and disappeared in a puff of logic.’
It is clear that if we accept that God was responsible for creating the Moon and that He specifically incorporated within it proof of what He had done, we must begin to look at Him in a very different light. In a world in which religion has been diminishing in importance, and particularly in the technological West, an acceptance of God’s direct intervention in our part of the solar system might see thousands or millions of people flocking back to Church. The most fervent creationists may abandon their insistence that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and might accept that God did indeed work his magic through evolution. The recognition of God’s special pact with life, and especially with humanity, might fund a push towards ecumenicism and a coming together of the world’s fractious religions.
Unfortunately it is equally likely that the reverse would happen because power-bases, religious or secular, have always shown a reluctance to diminish in importance. Clearly, if we are looking at God’s true covenant with humanity through his intentional creation of the Moon, with its attendant and obviously deliberate messages, no existing belief pattern can be any more important than another and the whole basis of religious dogma is in doubt.
We could not criticize anyone who wishes to attribute the message to God. But neither could we argue with anyone who says that God does not need to leave messages coded into ancient stone circles that He already knows will eventually be recognized by humanity. If we are ultimately left in no doubt as to his existence, the whole procedure has been somewhat unnecessary. God is capable of showing Himself to humanity at any time He chooses, with absolutely no ambiguity or the remotest uncertainty.
Everything about the Moon and its addition to the solar system seems to speak of a message that ‘must’ be imparted one day and of a series of deliberate ‘humanlike’ interventions that would ensure this was the case.
Further to this, we might argue that the Moon was almost certainly added to our part of the solar system as an afterthought. It had to be, because the very material from which it was made came from the already existent Earth. God could quite easily have made the Earth a haven for life in its own right. It has to be remembered that it was the ‘shortcomings’ of the Earth that necessitated the addition of the Moon to the planetary system. Surely the God of the human imagination is all-powerful and has no shortcomings.
We cannot deny that a world in which humanity was certain of the existence of God, and in which there was no longer any doubt about what He represented, ‘might’ become a more cohesive and peaceful place and we did not turn away from this possibility lightly. However, we have tried to approach our research from a genuinely scientific point of view (we would argue that our approach is more scientific and less based on enshrined belief than that of many so-called scientists.) This being said, we felt ourselves obliged to look at other possible solutions to the questions raised by the evidence we had amassed. Those who wish to attribute the creation of the Earth– Moon system to God will continue do so, though we felt it impossible to stop searching. We are cognisant that by His sheer timeless power God can be used as a cure-all to answer any question. That has been the pattern of humanity across the ages and it is not one we feel constrained to follow.
In short, there are other possibilities that might prove to be just as surprising but considerably more plausible.
Postscript to this chapter
This chapter was completed during the closing days of 2004. On the morning o
f Sunday December 26th an Earthquake five miles beneath the ocean floor, west of Sumatra, produced a tsunami with the power of more than 10,000 atomic bombs. Travelling at speeds of up to 800 kilometres an hour it tore into coastal areas all around the Indian Ocean causing devastation that was as sudden as it was terrible. Many tens of thousands of people died within minutes and millions more were left to grieve for their lost loved ones and to struggle against hunger, thirst and the threat of consequential disease.
The event was so powerful that the entire Earth moved.
Geologist Kerry Sieh of the California Institute of Technology said ‘It caused the planet to wobble a little bit.’ As the Indian Ocean’s heavy tectonic plate lurched underneath the Indonesian plate there was a shift of mass towards the planet’s centre, causing the globe to rotate faster and shortening the period of our planet’s rotation by some three microseconds. A team of researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California also found that the incident caused the Earth’s tilt to be increased by 2.5cm.
The mobility of the Earth’s crust was central to the emergence of life and now the residual shifting of tectonic plates causes death and destruction to those too near to the event. If the careful design of the Earth and its Moon were the work of God, His life-bringing mechanisms are, in this instance at least, working against the interests of His chosen species.
The events in the Indian Ocean horrified the world. In Britain the Archbishop of Canterbury, who leads the Church of England, was deeply troubled. Dr Rowan Williams, writing eight days later in the Sunday Telegraph questioned the nature of God’s interaction with humans:
‘The question: “How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?” is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren’t – indeed, it would be wrong if it weren’t. The traditional answers will get us only so far. God, we are told, is not a puppet-master in regard either to human actions or to the processes of the world. If we are to exist in an environment where we can live lives of productive work and consistent understanding – human lives as we know them – the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own. Effects follow causes in a way that we can chart, and so can make some attempt at coping with. So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous. How dangerous do they have to be? How many deaths would be acceptable?
So why do religious believers pray for God’s help or healing? They ask for God’s action to come in to a situation and change it, yes; but if they are honest, they don’t see prayer as a plea for magical solutions that will make the world totally safe for them and others.
All this is fair enough, perhaps true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far in helping us, one week on, with the intolerable grief and devastation in front of us. If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God? Wouldn’t we feel something of a chill at the prospect of a God who deliberately plans a programme that involves a certain level of casualties?’
If a single entity that we could reasonably call God did indeed establish the Earth and its Moon so that we might evolve, He might be obliged to work within His own rules of the Universe. Creating a life-bearing planet required a ploughing of the surface and this is a process that cannot be switched on and off like a light switch. Dr Williams presumably has a problem because he believes in a God who is in on-going contact – a God who can choose to respond to individual prayers. But maybe the situation is not like that.
The title we chose for this chapter is ‘Childhood’s End’. This seemed to be a fitting summation for the discussion of the possibility that God had made the world and had, from the outset, built into it a message that we would understand when we were sufficiently emotionally and intellectually mature. We were aware that Arthur C Clarke had written a novel with this title more than half a century earlier with a very different but not unconnected theme.
Sir Arthur is an inspired writer and his ideas expressed in 2001: A Space Odyssey, have been discussed in this book. When we realized that the Indian Ocean tsunami had caused a massive loss of life in Sri Lanka, we were concerned for him, because we were aware that he is wheelchair bound in his home near the beach in Colombo. Thankfully Sir Arthur was not hurt and was able to write an account of what had happened in his adopted country.
He wrote: ‘I have no idea if God had any scenario in mind when this happened. In a way, the disaster was a random event, but at the same time nothing in this world is totally random, there is always cause and effect.’
All of this could very much describe a God who has a working plan that appears to be less than perfect. Tectonic plates were necessary to create us but their current movements are simply a small, incidental effect of a far greater cause. Are we to believe that in the mind of God the ultimate end justifies the sometimes very painful means?
Chapter Twelve
Extra Terrestrials
‘…it’s entirely possible, in my view, that we could retrieve a message from another world within just a few decades…’
Seth Shostak – Senior Astronomer, SETI
The idea that intelligent creatures might exist somewhere else in the cosmos has fascinated humanity ever since the invention of the telescope revealed that our world is but one amongst countless others. At first some people wondered if there were people living around the supposed seas on the Moon and others feared invasion from near neighbours, particularly Mars.
In 1858 an Italian astronomer called Secchi announced that he had seen ‘canali’ on the surface of Mars, and in 1877 Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, an astronomer at the Milan Observatory, produced drawings of these features. Though the most accurate translation of the Italian word ‘canali’ would have been ‘channels’, it was translated into English as ‘canals’. With the completion of the Suez Canal fresh in people’s minds, the interpretation was taken to mean that huge artificial waterways had been discovered – which amounted to evidence of intelligent life.
Debate raged over the findings, with Schiaparelli himself stating that there was no reason to suppose that the canals were artificial. The discovery sparked the imagination of a young man named Percival Lowell who was at the beginning of what was to be a distinguished career in astronomy. He was one of the first to realize that it was far more sensible to site observatories in out-of -the-way places, such as deserts or on mountaintops, where smoke and light spillage from cities would not diminish the astronomers view of the heavens. He was the driving force behind the creation of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894.
Professor Lowell studied linear features on Mars with his twenty-four-inch telescope and developed theories about the habitability of Mars, based on his estimate that the planet had an average temperature of 48°F. The Lowell Observatory made consistent observations of the Martian canals and Lowell personally maintained that the linear features were indeed of artificial origin.
When spacecraft reached Mars, scientists expected to discover what the canals really were but they found that there were no canals and almost no straight lines on the planet at all. We have to conclude that either the Martians have camouflaged them rather well over the last century or, infinitely more likely, a generation of astronomers were imagining things at the limits of their optical telescopes.
The idea that there could be real Martians was a popular worry that was brilliantly used as the plot by H G Wells in his novel War of the Worlds.
A wave of mass hysteria gripped thousands of radio listeners in October 1938, when a dramatization of this book was broadcast and led unsuspecting listeners to believe that an interplanetary conflict had started, with invading Martians spreading death and destruction across New Jersey and New York.
The next day the New York Times reported on the scare:
‘A weather report was given, prosaically. An announcer remarked that th
e program would be continued from a hotel, with dance music. For a few moments a dance program was given in the usual manner. Then there was a “break-in” with a “flash” about a professor at an observatory noting a series of gas explosions on the planet Mars.
News bulletins and scene broadcasts followed, reporting, with the technique in which the radio had reported actual events, the landing of a “meteor” near Princeton N. J., “killing” 1,500 persons, the discovery that the “meteor” was a “metal cylinder” containing strange creatures from Mars armed with “death rays” to open hostilities against the inhabitants of the earth.’
By far the majority of experts now accept that if advanced life of any sort does exist in places other than the Earth, we will almost certainly have to look towards interstellar space in order to find it. But our greater knowledge of outer space has not quelled the public’s appetite for close-encounter stories.
The famous Roswell incident is believed by many to be an extra-terrestrial encounter. It is said that a UFO crashed in the New Mexico desert in July 1947 and the debris was removed to an army base in Fort Worth, Texas.
A US government cover-up is said to have tried to pass off the event by stating that the debris was actually part of a radar unit from a weatherballoon.
Rumours about the existence of secret alien bases located in various places, such as the Moon, under the ocean, or in a tropical rain forest have persisted. Some people have gone so far as to claim that they have worked on secret UFO projects for the government and seen UFOs at military installations.
Who Built the Moon? Page 17