Letter from Rev. William Comfort, Pastor of the New Covenant Church (Eastern Shore)
to the Editor of TIME Magazine, November 25, 1980

To the Editor:

On the cover of TIME Magazine, October 20, 1980, is the picture of 45-year old astronomer Carl Sagan, Showman of Science. This very photogenic Brooklynborn man has attracted more than an estimated ten million viewers on each of his first two of thirteen weekly episodes of COSMOS. With a budget of $8.5 million and a professional staff of 150 people, this PBS series was filmed at forty locations in twelve countries, taking three years to produce.

Carl Sagan religiously believes that evolution is a fact, not a theory. His dynamic, colorful presentation of his evolutionary interpretation of scientific data will make an immense impression upon the viewing audience. His book, COSMOS, printed by Random House, is currently the number one best seller. Carl Sagan is so appealing that he has been called “the prince of popularizers,” and “the nation’s scientific mentor to the masses.”

Though the material is well presented in flowing lyrical language, yet underneath all the glamour is the underlying premise that the biblical Genesis account of creation is false. God is ignored, and a mechanical, materialistic cosmology prevails. One is left with the impression that Sagan’s case for popular Darwinism is shared by all leading astronomers.

The July 1980 edition of Reader’s Digest, pages 49-53, published a condensed version of Robert Jastrow’s New York Times Magazine article, “Have Astronomers Found God?” Warner Books published Jastrow’s book, entitled God and the Astronomers, in April 1980.

Robert Jastrow, age 55, is the director of N.A.S.A. Goddard Institute for Space Studies and professor of astronomy and geology at Columbia University. He is the author of Red Giants and White Dwarfs, Until the Sun Dies, plus God and the Astronomers. Paddy Cheyevsky has called him “the greatest writer on science alive today.”

Astronomer Robert Jastrow tells us that the universe had a sharply-defined beginning – that it began at a certain moment in time. We live in an expanding universe, in which all the galaxies around us are moving away from us and one another at enormous speed. These facts suggest that we are observing the results of an immense cosmic explosion. By retracing the motion of these receding galaxies backward in tie, astronomers find that they all come together roughly twenty billion years ago.

The “big-bang” theory teaches that all matter in the universe was condensed into one immense mass at temperatures astronomically hot. Radiation of this condensed mass of matter being incredibly hot suggests the explosion similar to a hydrogen bomb. When this cosmic bomb exploded, the universe was born.

Dr. Jastrow informs us that the findings of astronomy are essentially identical to the biblical Genesis account of creation. He also points out that astronomers are forced by the evidence to admit that the “big-bang” did occur.

In 1913, astronomer Vesta Melvin Slipher discovered the first hint that the universe was expanding. At the American Astronomical Society in Evanston, Illinois, in 1914, Slipher presented evidence that approximately a dozen galaxies in our vicinity were moving away from the earth at around 12 million miles per hour. Professor John Miller said, “Something happened which I have never seen before or since at a scientific meeting. Everyone stood up and cheered.”

Dutch astronomer Willem deSitter played a key role in the sequence of events that established the expanding universe as an accepted fact. In 1916, he studied Einstein’s equations on general relativity, which had an expanding universe solution. This triggered a series of events that made Einstein the best-known scientist in the
world.

Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953) built upon Einstein’s theory of relativity with his discoveries at Mount Wilson Observatory. What became known as Hubble’s law stated, “the farther away a galaxy is, the farther it moves.”

British physicist Edmund Whittaker’s book on “The Beginning and End of the World” states, “it is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo – Divine will constituting nature from nothingness.” Mathematician Edward Milne concluded his treatise on relativity by saying, As to the first cause of the universe, in the context of expansion, that is left for the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him.”

Sagan’s omission of God runs counter to astronomers Einstein, Eddington, Ehrenfest, deSitter, Lorentz, Jeans, etc., etc. Jastrow tells us that for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story of the origin of the
universe ends like a bad dream. “The scientist has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for
centuries.”

A final word from the great astronomer Kepler reinforces Jastrow’s statement: “Truly the undevout astronomer is mad.”

Pastor William Comfort, M.A. , F.I.B.A.

Newspaper Article from The Banner, Dated February 14, 1979,
Written by Kevin McKean, Science Writer for the Associated Press

Linking Modern Astronomy With Legends

EDITOR’S NOTE – Linking a discovery of modern science with legends recorded in the ancient Sumerian language has caused one scholar to reinterpret a number of familiar Egyptian symbols – including one in King Tut’s royal emblem.

NEW YORK (AP) – Some 8,000 years ago, not far from the Earth, a dim and unremarkable star suddenly exploded into the violent fireball that modern astronomers call a supernova.

On earth it would have looked like a new star, brighter than the moon and visible even in the daytime for months.

Among the early peoples who saw it were the Sumerians – Persian Gulf farmers and fishermen poised at the brink of civilization. They recorded the event in their myths and gods.

Now the scholar who first identified their record says the legend linking the star to the origins of civilization has turned up in Egyptian hieroglyphs, written thousands of years later.

George Michanowsky, a New York linguist, author and historian, believes the legend was passed along in Sumerian symbols borrowed by the Egyptians.

If so, it would force a reinterpretation of such familiar hieroglyphs as the “ankh” – or symbol of life – and King Tut’s royal emblem.

Some other scholars of the ancient Near East disagree with the theory. But Michanowsky, a self-described “lone wolf’ who works without support from institutions or foundations, counters that his critics do not understand astronomy.

“He does careful work and he’s not unskilled at languages,” one museum curator concedes. “Cataclysmic things happen and I could believe some of them may be carried in oral tradition.”

Astronomers believe the supernova may have been the most cataclysmic sky event ever witnessed by man.

A radio telescope has detected the remnant of the explosion. It is a fast-spinning dense star called a “pulsar” in the constellation Vela of the southern hemisphere.

By timing radio pulses coming from the object, astronomers estimate that it erupted between 8,000 and 4,000 B.C. It was toward the end of that period that the Sumerians, living on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf, developed the world’s first astronomy, mathematics and writing.

The Sumerians had a legend that they were taught these arts by a god called Ea, linked to a special star in the constellation Vela.

The reference has puzzled scholars because there are no bright stars today in that part of the sky.

But Michanowsky believes the reference was to the Vela supernova, a theory he propounds in a 1978 book, “The Once and Future Star.”

The Vela star was two or three times closer to the earth than the famous supernova seen by Chinese astronomers in 1054. The Sumerians would have seen it rise and set each day low over the watery southern horizon, and Michanowsky
believes the sight so impressed them that it was anthropomorphized into Ea and supporting legends and deities.

He also believes it fired the Sumerians’ curiosity and may have sparked their investigations of nature.

The symbolic record of the Vela star, he says, can be traced from its Sumerian origin to Egyptian hieroglyphs by “one unified train of imagery.” For example, the Egyptian ankh, or looped cross, is usually thought to represent a sandal thong. But Michanowsky suggests its loop could represent the star, its cross bar the horizon of the Persian Gulf, and its descending bar the reflection of the star on the water.

And, he says, the Egyptian goddess Seshat, patroness of scribes, may derive from a Sumerian goddess called Nidaba who was patroness of mathematics, writing and astronomy.

Seshat is pictured with a seven-pointed headdress often interpreted as a flower. But Michanowsky thinks the headdress comes from a seven-fronded Sumerian palm tree symbol linked both to Ea and to the Vela star, and may represent the star itself rather than a flower.

He also believes the Vela star figures in one hieroglyphic symbol from Tut’s cartouche, or royal emblem.

The symbol, a pillar, is among the last three in the cartouche. It usually is taken to refer to a southern Egyptian city, and the three symbols together are translated, “Ruler of Southern Egypt.”

But the translation has troubled Egyptologists since it seems to slight the northern part of Tut’s kingdom.

Michanowsky believes the pillar is adapted from the Sumerian palm tree symbol and the cartouche reads, “Ruler of the Southern Star.”

“It’s a sort of powerful evoking of a stellar event that signified a Golden Age at the beginning of civilization,” Michanowsky says.

The new interpretation also squares with the conventional view that Tut, who lived about 1330 B.C., was a conservative figure in Egyptian religious history and harked back to earlier gods and beliefs.

Sumerian legend had it that this Vela star would return one day and bring back the Golden Age.

And in a sense, the Vela star has been seen again. Astronomers in 1977 used special instruments to pick up faint light pulses from the supernova remnant after pinpointing its location by radio telescope.

“Indeed, heaven has been pregnant with this once and future star for a very long time,” Michanowsky wrote in a summary of his theories in the “Explorers’ Journal.” “It is now, at long last, slowly giving up its secret.”