A thought on the ages of kings. If a king had lived 64 000 years, he would have had to have had a civilization to be king of. Dividing 64000 by 60, which I think is suggested in the earlier post, he would have lived for 1066.6 (ah, 666 again!) years and would still have needed a supporting civilization, which would surely have been literate and would have left clay tablets somewhere to prove it, if only to have documented the number of wives he got through (probably more than 7) and his multifarious and no doubt nefarious highly numerous offspring who by now would have populated the entire world. Now, there is no archaeological record of that. There's no problem with floods. Rivers flood, and some of them have 1 000 year floods, which can be massive.And no doubt natural causes can give us the mother of all floods, the 10 000 year flood.

What, no-one burned me at the stke for voting for a multicultural, pluralistic and democratic set of gods? If god is around he surely must have a whimsical and ironical sense of humour about having put us here, in paradise. Which proves my point about the existence of a multiplicity of the Graeco-Roman gods; fascists don't have a sense of humour; the Middle Eastern gods are fascists; therefore having no sense of humour they cannot exist. The Graeco-Roman gods did have a sense of humour.

TurnRightThenLeft,

I'm not religious, and I've never read the bible, but I think a lot of the bible stories are just there to make a point, not to be taken literally. I always get stuck just after Adam and Eve, and think of the incest that must have followed.

Hello to everyone

Contemplating the universe certainly is inspiring given the responses from all - except for he-who-shall-not-be-named, still caught on a track of his own making. And proving that dogma stifles and science inspires, so maybe he does perform a service of sorts.

Enough of the sniping, but hey, I’m only human.

Easytimes, I am aware of the limitations of what we currently know, but I needed to give a figure that is currently accepted to give an indication to others, who maybe haven’t really given much thought to where planet Earth really is and the immensity of the universe.

As for the possibility of other civilisations, well I don’t know. But we are here, the universe is limitless, I find it difficult to believe that, given the infinite possibilities of the universe, that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. And quite frankly, we are not all that intelligent as we like to make out. That is a very geocentric view, something religion is guilty of, and why we really need science to expand our mental maps of where we really are in relation to everything else.

Humbling indeed.

The fact of 150 years of emitting radio signals with no discernable response, doesn’t concern me at all, given the immense size of the universe.

We have to try and see ourselves from a more comprehensive viewpoint. The easiest way to do this, of course, would be to simply jump on a space ship and look back at earth, unfortunately, not readily available to the average schmo. But we have wonderful imaginations, provided we do not limit them by the artifices of dogma – any type of dogma. There are areas of scientific thought that need revising, for example, the big bang theory which creates more questions than it answers. I am not targeting religion specifically, but it IS such a big target and it DOES limit us in so many ways.

Did you know that only as recently as 1993 did Pope John Paul II acquit Galileo, 360 years after his indictment of heresy? Go figure.

I don't care what your name is, nobody walks on the water where I'm fishing!

I concur whitty and you're right - sensible Christians put their faith within a framework of science and common sense.

Unfortunately, there are literalist Christians. Take Ken Ham for instance, a former Queensland teacher who founded the 'creation' museum in the US, which now attracts thousands of visitors.

In there, they have dinosaurs alongside people and have taken an excerpt mentioning 'behemoth' as proof dinosaurs and man co-existed.

In interviews, Mr Ham says that it doesn't make sense just to pick and choose bits of the bible, you've got to believe everything.
The problem is, that this is spreading - the real indicator, is the number of people opting to believe that the world is only about 6,000 years old.

This is a denial of well grounded science in favour of passages from a book written thousands of years ago, by people with little knowledge of science.

It it was just Mr Ham and other rabble, I wouldn't worry. But it isn't.

I suspect boaz believes is among those who believe the world is less than a million years old, but if I'm wrong here boaz, by all means, correct me.

This attitude worries me - in another recent OLO article by Alan Matheson, he mentions that the Creation Bus is touring schools in Victoria, teaching a view of the world based around the creation myth - not as a fable, but as fact.

That scares the crap outta me. It's reminiscent of the Dark Ages where dogma is placed above reason, with the more shrewd dogmatists attempting to cloak faith as reason, when the truth is, never the twain shall meet.

Didn't you guys know that earth was created by little green men/women and we are just one big science project? No dogma- just pure science:)