Can the Cosmos Accommodate a Savior?

In an August , 2007, newspaper column, in my article: The Savior Template, I questioned that the Christian God-Man story was even original. I also showed that all the hallmarks of the Christian Savior Jesus were present in a number of pre-dating ancient gods – including Horus, and Mithras. Church Father Justin Martyr, for example, was so incensed at the Mithraic prophesies (which appeared hundreds of years before Jesus Christ’s arrival) that he wrote:

“Which the wicked devils have imitated in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done”


Referencing Mithra’s conversion of water into wine, his commanding the sea to be still, and the Mithraic Virgin birth. Church Father Tertullian also bears this out in his writings, scolding:

“The Devil, by the mysteries of his idols, IMITATES EVEN THE MAIN PARTS OF THE DIVINE MYSTERIES”

Perhaps even then, those Church Fathers might have been wary of future charges of plagiarism should the content ever come to light.

But is that really needed to dispel the Savior myth once and for all? What about simply contemplating the grand scale of the cosmos, and looking at an Earth “Savior” from that cosmic perspective?

The whole point is that the vastness of the cosmos argues against the selective appearance of a cosmic god-man on one minor planet in one of billions of galaxies. The whole concept violates rational principles, as well as common sense.

Consider: the Sun is a type G2 star. The most favorable for the development of habitable zones and planets like Earth. There are more than ten billion such stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. There are more than fifty billion spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, each with ten billion estimated G2 stars.

That is 50 billion (galaxies) x 10 billion (G2 stars/galaxy) = 5 x 10^19 plausible planets for life, including advanced life forms. (Already more than 370 exo-planets have been discovered in The Milky Way alone)

Out of ALL these possible worlds, galaxies WHY would the GOD of the WHOLE cosmos come to one backwater world? It makes NO sense and in fact, reeks of anthropocentrism and human hubris. Kind of like a metaphysical BWAA-AHAHAHA! factor. Boo-hoo-hoo my planet can no longer be the center of the universe geometrically or physically......so.....we will invent a God-man fabrication and make him the center of the universe by being its one and only "Savior"!

Consider another perspective: from red shift measurements and Hubble’s Law the universe had already existed nearly ten BILLION years before Earth was even formed. What was the deity doing all this time? Sleeping? What about all the other millions of worlds with sentient beings that likely existed before us? Weren’t they worth it for the great God?

People need to understand that human thought has evolved dramatically since the original scrolls were written. We now know things that the ancients of 0- 10 CE never could. Such as the fact the universe is expanding, that it is 14 billion years old, that we inhabit a cluster of galaxies amidst billions of clusters, that we know how stars shine and the equations of stellar structure, not to mention what the Earth looks like from space, and the chemical composition of the most distant galaxies.

This dramatically enhanced knowledge (over our pre-scientific and semi-literate forbears) enables us to easily see the Bible for what it truly is: a collection of human fantasies and legends. As a case in point, even a well-taught first year high school physics student should be easily able to show Genesis portrayal of Earth's origin is malarkey.

We read, for example (Gen.:1: 1-5)

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day”

Now, it is clear that the “light” referred to in the last three sentences is none other than the SUN. However, it is clear from reading each line through that the Earth was supposedly made BEFORE the Sun. (E.g. Earth without form, darkness upon face of the deep).

However, this is physically impossible. We know from modern astrophysics that the solar proto-nebula had to collapse first to yield the SUN. (No planets, since they had yet to spin off the collapsing nebular cloud –and it hadn’t cooled enough to allow it- still hot plasma). As the proto-solar nebula collapsed it also began spinning and gained angular momentum. This angular momentum was then transferred to regions of the nebula that cooled and separated from the whole, and these regions became separate clouds of dust and gas that aggregated into the planets.

Under a combination of electrostatic attraction (between larger charged particles) and gravity (attracting the whole mass from the center of the cloud) each planet was formed as what we call a “planetesimal”.

As more angular momentum was transferred – the planetesimal’s (each one) acquired their own spin (in a period of revolution) and specific shapes. The giant planets (e.g. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus) garnered more spin momentum than the more dense, terrestrial planets. Thus Jupiter’s planetesimal ended up as an oblate spheroid with diameter of about 88,000 mile and rotating rapidly with a day of ~ 10 hours.

Earth, meanwhile, ended up as a relatively spherical orb with diameter of ~ 8,000 miles and day approaching approach 24 hrs. Mars ended up in a similar shape to that of Earth and a diameter of 4200 miles and day ~ 24 hours. Thus, the Earth spun off about 1.1 billion years after the solar nebula fully collapsed, and it could not have come BEFORE the Sun. Indeed, the absence of the central mass of the Sun, or ~ 10 ^33 kilograms, would have meant the Earth- if formed with no Sun present- would instantly have been hurled into a direction toward the constellation Hercules at 12 miles per second with no central mass to keep it in check. We can compute this exactly using the basic principles of celestial mechanics.

It is clear from this that Gen.1:1-5 has stated a patent impossibility which violates all known laws of physics and dynamics and is therefore WRONG!

It is clear from this that the Bible, whether Revised Standard Version, King James, or any other.. must be in error, certainly in this one passage – and if here then likely in many other places too. If this is so then it must have been written by flawed humans using limited conceptions of space, time and astrophysics explaining why their accounts are not even correct in their general form.

Conclusion: from this one base example, the Bible cannot be a “divinely inspired” book. Rather it is a HUMAN-inspired work with all the errors we expect to see from a work of humans. (One reason why when we write books, book proofs have to acquired first, and attention made to eliminating as many errors therein as feasible)

Clearly then, to hold human knowledge content to the level or standard of 2000 or 1500 years ago is preposterous, self-defeating and a prescription for massive ignorance. It is as preposterous as asserting we must hold to the flat Earth model despite the fact we have prima facie evidence it doesn’t exist. The unsettling fact for the fundamentalist believer is that knowledge grows, increases over time and becomes more complex ....as more inputs are fed into it. It is a non-linear, synergistic process, not one of simple linear additives. Which may well explain why the intellectually-challenged are driven to find all their answers to life's mysteries in one book - since they are unable to confront or parse it from multiple sources.

In the end, we don’t need flat Earths, nor do we need “Saviors” fabricated for the Age of Flat Earths.