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Friday, February 20, 2004
A new "proof" of God's existence?
In Love, Power and Justice: the Dynamics of Authentic Morality, as well as in several earlier works, Dr. William S. Hatcher outlines a simple logical proof for the existence of God, an accomplishment made possible, he said, by reexamining a classic proof of God offered by the great Muslim philosopher Avicenna (ibn Sina, 980-1037) and applying to it some new logical tools derived from recent developments in mathematics.
"Up until the modern period, the logic that was used in philosophy was Aristotelean logic, which is the logic of attributes," said Dr. Hatcher in a recent interview. "In the late 19th century, however, there was an explosion of logical and mathematical ideas and discoveries." Among these new ideas is the logic of relationships.
"The use of Aristotelean logic in the many previous proofs of God is a major limitation," he said. "You can't really prove God logically with just the logic of attributes. If you try, you end up with the ontological proof, which is not really convincing."
"The logic of relations, I feel, is the single greatest intellectual advance in the history of humankind," Dr. Hatcher added. "To give an example: the whole field of computers is based on the logic of relationships."
By applying the logic of relations, Dr. Hatcher has been able to update Avicenna's proof, which is in some ways itself based on Aristole's "first cause" argument. The updated proof, Dr. Hatcher says, is now something a modern logician would find incontrovertibly true, given its three assumptions, which are:
1) Everything in the universe is either preceded by a cause or else contains within itself a sufficient reason for its existence.
2) For every system or composite phenomenon, any cause for the system is also a cause for every part of the system. (Every material thing, except possibly the elementary particles of quantum physics, is composite.)
3) The existence of a whole system cannot precede the existence of its components (or, he writes, "the constitution of a whole obviously supposes and depends upon the prior or simultaneous existence of its components.")
The proof applies modern rules of logic to these three assumptions, which Dr. Hatcher says are nothing more than obvious formulations of the scientific method. The reasoning can be summarized as follows: First, no composite phenomenon can be self-caused, because of the second and third assumptions. Second, since the entire universe is composite, it cannot be self-caused. It must be caused by something else, according to the first assumption.
Further reasoning proves that this something else "is a unique, non-composite, uncaused universal cause and thus the cause of everything that exists - and that is God," Dr. Hatcher said. "Moreover, granted the three premises, the denial of which would lead in each case to a highly unreasonable proposition, the entire proof is as incontrovertible as one plus one equals two."
In particular, humans have the positive qualities of consciousness, intelligence, feelings, and will. Moreover, although each human soul has these qualities to a specific, finite, and limited degree, there is no limit to the degree that these qualities can exist generally in human beings. (For example, no matter how intelligent a given human being may be, it is possible for another human to be more intelligent.) Since God is the unique cause of every human being, God must have these positive qualities (and undoubtedly others) to a degree greater than every limited (finite) degree, thus to an unlimited (infinite) degree. Hence, God is infinitely conscious, infinitely knowing, infinitely loving, and infinitely willing (all-powerful). In fact, since God is the only Being whose existence is absolute (i.e., uncaused), God has these qualities to an absolute degree.
Thus, the logical answer to the question "what is God's nature?" is to say that "God is like us except for possessing none of our limitations and all of our positive qualities to an infinite degree." Of course we cannot really imagine what it means to possess such qualities as consciousness or will to an infinite degree, but the refinement principle does nevertheless gives us at least a minimal, purely logical notion of God's nature.
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Thursday, February 19, 2004
UFO photographed over St Budeaux
Plymouth - UK - This amazing photograph (Click Here) snapped over Plymouth is being called one of the best pictures of a UFO ever taken.
A city-based amateur photographer captured this image when he was trying out his new hi-tech digital camera at night. It shows what can only be described as an 'unidentified flying object' hovering above St Budeaux.
Another, equally stunning, snap shows the same brightly-illuminated object tilted at a different angle.
UFO experts are highly excited by the pictures and the Royal Navy today asked the Herald to supply them with the photos - because they want to study them.
Plymouth-based UFOlogist Bob Boyd has called the snaps among the 'best five' pictures of a UFO he has ever seen - in 25 years of spotting the phenomena. Mr Boyd, chairman of the Plymouth UFO Research Group, said: "It's the real thing."
He claimed the picture had been examined by a photographic expert who confirmed it was genuine.
The man who took the photograph, a dockyard worker living in St Budeaux, didn't realise what he had snapped until he got home and inspected his pictures.
A Plymouth City Airport spokesman said it was 'highly unlikely' it was a commercial flight. Mr Boyd does not know of anybody else reporting the UFO, but said: "That doesn't mean nobody saw it."
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Ike and the alien ambassadors
Ike and the alien ambassadors
By Peter Carlson
Fifty years ago tomorrow -- on Feb. 20, 1954 -- President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to a nearby Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens.
Or maybe not. Maybe Ike just went to the dentist. There's some dispute about this.
The Ike-met-with-ETs theory is advanced by Michael Salla, a former American University professor who now runs the Peace Ambassador Program at AU's Center for Global Peace.
The Ike-went-to-the-dentist theory is advanced by the folks at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan. And by James M. Mixson, a dentist, professor of dentistry and historian of presidential dental work.
Just to make things more intriguing: On the night in question, the Associated Press reported this: "Pres. Eisenhower died tonight of a heart attack in Palm Springs."
Two minutes later, the AP retracted that bulletin and reported that Ike was still alive.
Some facts are beyond dispute: Eisenhower was on a golf vacation in Palm Springs on Feb. 20, 1954. After dinner that night, he made an unscheduled departure from the Smoking Tree Ranch, where he was staying. The next morning, he attended a church service in Los Angeles. Also that morning, his spokesman announced to the press that Ike had visited a dentist the previous night because he'd chipped a tooth while eating a chicken wing at dinner.
Salla, who has a PhD in government from the University of Queensland in his native Australia, doesn't believe it. He figures the dentist trip is just a cover story. He believes Ike went to Edwards Air Force Base, where he met with two ETs with white hair, pale blue eyes and colorless lips.
These aliens -- nicknamed "Nordics" in UFO circles because they resemble Scandinavian humans -- traveled to Edwards from another solar system in a flying saucer and, Salla says, they spoke to Eisenhower.
"There was telepathic communication," says Salla, 45, as he sits in his suburban Falls Church living room. "It's as though you're hearing a person but they're not speaking."
The "Nordics" offered to share their superior technology and their spiritual wisdom with Ike if he would agree to eliminate America's nuclear weapons.
"They were afraid we might blow up some of our nuclear technology," Salla says, "and apparently that does something to time and space and it impacts on extraterrestrial races on other planets."
Ike declined the ETs' offer, Salla says, because he did not want to give up the nukes.
Abduction deal
Sometime later in 1954, Ike reached a deal with another race of extraterrestrials, known as the "Greys" -- allowing them to capture earthling cattle and humans for medical experiments, provided that they returned the humans safely home. Since then, Salla says, the "Greys" have kidnapped "millions" of humans.
Salla, author of "The Hero's Journey Toward a Second American Century," published his ET theories in his new book, "Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence" and in an article on his "Exopolitics" Web site (www.exopolitics.org).
He taught at the School of International Service at American University. In 2003 he founded the university's Peace Ambassador Program, described on the AU Web site as a "summer program that combines study, meditative practices, and prayer ceremonies at selected Washington DC sites aimed at promoting individual self-empowerment and Divine Governance in Washington DC."
Salla stresses that his ET research is not connected with his work at AU's Center for Global Peace. The folks at the Center for Global Peace are also quite eager to stress that fact.
"The research that Michael Salla is doing is not research that he is conducting on behalf of the center or in collaboration with the center," says Betty Sitka, associate director of the Center for Global Peace. "This is his own personal research."
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Monday, February 16, 2004
Astronaut Ed Mitchell speaks about UFOs
PALM BEACH POST INTERVIEWS EX-ASTRONAUT DR EDGAR MITCHELL / MITCHELL WEIGHS IN ON VARIOUS CONTROVERSIAL MATTERS / EX-ASTRONAUT'S CURIOSITY CONTINUES -
By Eliot Kleinberg, Palm Beach Post
Sunday, February 8, 2004
Somewhere in deep space, Ed Mitchell experienced a cosmic awakening that changed his life.
"I got to look out the window a lot," he recalled about his return trip from the moon 33 years ago this week. "I had a powerful insight looking at the heavens. Suddenly, it became damn personal."
Since then, he has founded an institute to study the unexplained, has written two books and keeps busy on the lecture circuit. He asserts that very many people are like him: questioning, challenging, keeping an open mind about the unexplained. This is fact about Edgar Dean Mitchell. He has a doctorate. He served 20 years in the Navy. He helped rescue the crippled Apollo 13 in 1970. And on Feb. 5, 1971, he became the sixth man to walk on the moon.
While many of his fellow 1960s "right stuff" astronauts lead quiet, sometimes reclusive lives, Mitchell, 73, stays in the public eye. But he fiercely protects his home life on a spread hidden among the nurseries west of Lantana, scattered with pine trees and boasting its own corral and pond. Developers have come knocking, but he's not interested.
His sprawling ranch house is cluttered with books, sculptures and paintings, as well as photos, plaques and memorabilia of his NASA career. Also on one wall: A Kurdish tapestry he bought in Turkey in 1982 while on a scientific mission to find documents and artifacts of the Nestorians, an ancient Christian sect. It symbolizes his life: always
searching.
Ed Mitchell was on a Navy ship in the Pacific Ocean in 1957 when the Soviets shocked the world by flinging Sputnik into space, beating the Americans and starting the space race. He decided then, at age 27, that he wanted to be a part of the fledgling U.S. space program.
"I knew at that point that humans wouldn't be far behind," he said. "My motivation was like the bear that went over the mountain: to see what he could see."
Born in the Depression era in west Texas, he grew up on a ranch in Artesia, N.M. As he walked to school in nearby Roswell, he sometimes saw Robert Goddard, the godfather of modern rocketry, launching rockets into the sky. Around the time Mitchell was a senior in high school, Roswell became a household word as the site of an alleged crash of an alien spacecraft.
He started flying at age 13 and got his pilot's license at 16. After college, he enlisted in the Navy and flew combat missions in Korea. He earned two undergraduate degrees as well as a DOCTORATE FROM MIT; his THESIS DESCRIBED A MISSION TO MARS.
Mitchell joined the astronaut corps in 1966. A year later, three of his colleagues were vaporized in a fire on the launch pad aboard Apollo 1. "It was a risky business and we knew it," he said. Then he stops. His voice grows thick. "You can't lose your friends and not be affected."
The space program continued and Mitchell eventually specialized in the lunar module. He was set for the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, but crewmate Alan Shepherd, who'd been sidelined by inner-ear balance problems, needed more training. So his team -- the third was command module pilot Stuart Roosa -- was rescheduled for Apollo 14.
As in the dark days after the Columbia and Challenger shuttle disasters, missions were delayed more than a year by the Apollo 13 crisis. Mitchell said his Apollo 14 crew knew that if that mission was anything less than a spectacular success, NASA would have difficulty restoring public and government confidence in the space program. By the time Apollo 14 finally went up, budget cuts already had scrapped missions 18, 19 and 20, and everyone at NASA knew Apollo 17 would be the last -- which it was.
Despite the years of preparation and anticipation, Mitchell said, "You suppress your exhilaration and emotion and go do the... job," he said.
A REVELATION IN SPACE
Mitchell and Alan Shepard spent 33 1/2 hours on the moon. Shepherd hit the famous golf shot. Mitchell threw a javelin, which got less press.
His crewmates and NASA superiors didn't know that Mitchell had MADE SECRET ARRANGEMENTS TO CONDUCT SPACE EXPERIMENTS on extrasensory
perception, the ability to send and receive thoughts. "I was well aware as far as science was concerned this was not mainstream," he said.
Four times on the flight, he focused on sets of numbers. He'd alerted colleagues when he would be sending those thoughts. But the mission was delayed by 40 minutes, so each experiment occurred 40 minutes after it was supposed to. He found out later he'd been successful 35 of 400 times. He said that's too many to attribute to chance.
After his return, one of the participants leaked the tests to the press. "I didn't expect it to hit the news the way it did," he said.
But it was ANOTHE EXPERIENCE HE'D HAD during his return voyage that CHANGED HIS LIFE. Mitchell wrote about it in his 1996 memoir, The Way of the Explorer: "What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an OVERWHELMING SENSE OF UNIVERSAL CONNECTEDNESS. I actually felt what has been described as an ECSTASY OF UNITY."
Mitchell wrote that he felt "a sense that our presence as space travelers, and the existence of the universe itself, was NOT ACCIDENTAL, but that there was AN INTELLIGENT PROCESS AT WORK. I perceived THE UNIVERSE AS IN SOME WAY CONSCIOUS."
A year and a half later, in 1972, Mitchell left NASA and the Navy. The Apollo program was done, the shuttle was a decade away and "I didn't want to fly a desk," he said. The more he thought about the epiphany he'd had in space, the more he felt he had to do something with it.
"I had to find out. What's it all about? It led me to think: What we in science are modeling is incomplete and possibly flawed. Let's go find out."
He began researching mystical literature, including that of the Hindu and Buddhist religions. There, he came across SAMADHI. The Sanskrit word refers to a STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND TOTAL UNITY; an individualism but also a ONENESS. He found what he had experienced is discussed in virtually every culture and religion. Mitchell argues that ESP, clairvoyance -- getting thoughts from nature -- and other supposedly supernatural feats are WITHIN THE CAPABILITIES OF EVERY
PERSON.
"It would appear most of the so-called mystical and spiritual experiences these people have been having forever are PART OF THE QUANTUM PROPERTIES OF EVERY LIVING ORGANISM," he said. So in January 1973 he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California (noetic is from the Greek word for mind). The nonprofit
organization, which numbers among its members scientists, philosophers and religious scholars, explores the scientific foundations of psychic and spiritual events. He still serves as an adviser and sits on its board of directors.
His goal was to take such concepts out of the realm of the far-out and "bring them into scientific perspective."
PERSONAL TURMOIL
Even as Mitchell seeks spiritual peace, his personal life at times has been anything but peaceful.
Just before leaving NASA, Mitchell, in the middle of divorcing his first wife, Louise, met Anita Rettig, a publicist at Walt Disney World. They married in 1972 and he adopted her three children. Later, they moved to Palm Beach County, where Anita had friends. Mitchell hooked up with Generoso Pope, publisher of The National Enquirer and other tabloids based at the time in Lantana. Mitchell's job was to coordinate with his connections in the psychic world. "It didn't last too long," he said.
Mitchell's marriage to Anita ended in divorce in 1984 after he had an affair with Sheilah Ledbetter, a former Playboy model. Ledbetter filed a paternity suit against Mitchell which proved in 1986 that he had fathered a son with her. They married in 1989 and divorced 10 years later. For now, Mitchell lives off his naval pension, his book
royalties and his lectures. He also stays in touch with his colleagues.
"For 3,000 years, we've been asking: Who are we? How did we get here? Where are we going?" he said. "Space exploration is about that. And we'll keep doing it."
........
ED MITCHELL ON:
THE CHALLENGER AND COLUMBIA DISASTERS:
Over the last 20 years, NASA settled into workaday space missions: important, but not exciting. Ground the shuttle, after it's finished building the International Space Station. But then, do new manned missions to explore the moon and Mars.
NASA THEN AND NOW:
"When I was working with NASA in the early 1960s, this was the most dedicated, driven, together, 'Gonna do it,' motivated team of people you're ever going to encounter. That high motivation lasted up through the beginnings of the Apollo program... We weren't ready scientifically yet to go out into deep space.
But we did it because it was a political imperative. And it worked. But once we'd done that, it's, 'Ho, hum, what have you done now?' And by the early 1970s, when we were halfway through the lunar landings, the climate in NASA was becoming bureaucratic. I've said facetiously we had to fill out forms in triplicate just to go to the bathroom."
PRESIDENT BUSH'S RECENT MARS MISSION PROPOSAL:
"I'm sure we will (go) in due course. I personally think this current initiative is an election year ploy. I don't want to diminish the notion of going to the moon and Mars. It's a powerful notion and we will do it sooner or later. The question is timing and motivation. The budget isn't near what it's going to take." Also, must be an international effort "and we're not anywhere close to doing it."
LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS:
It would be far more IRrational to believe Earth is the ONLY SPOT in the universe with intelligent life. Life elsewhere in this solar system, now or ever? No. We know enough about those planets to make it highly unlikely they supported anything more sophisticated than the equivalent of algae.
WHETHER ALIENS HAVE VISITED EARTH:
Has no first-hand experience but is convinced.
Hostile? "Not that I'm aware."
People who claim they were abducted by aliens? "Something has happened to them. The jury's still out about what happened." CAN'T dismiss one theory that aliens are collecting terrestrial DNA for research.
A GOVERNMENT COVER-UP OF UFOS:
"That's putting it mildly. We've BEEN LIED TO AND COVERED UP. It was a military rationale 50 years ago. Now it's a bureaucratic morass. I doubt if higher-ups even know what the right answers are."
WHY a cover up at the beginning? "It would RATTLE OUR FOUNDATIONS."
AREA 51, the secret military base in Nevada where scientists study crashed alien spacecraft and their crews: Was briefed, even recently, by "old timers" who were there, "but I can't say by whom."
The ROSWELL INCIDENT, in which aliens, some alive, were recovered after a July 1947 crash:
"IT WAS VALID. I'VE BEEN BRIEFED."
ERICH VON DäNIKEN, whose many books theorize early Biblical passages and folk stories actually described visits by aliens:
"It's pretty far out. There MAY BE A KERNEL OF TRUTH."
Was mankind genetically engineered by other civilizations or originally immigrants from another planet? "I have not seen validation for that."
WHETHER SPACE FLIGHT WILL EVER BE AS WORKADAY AS IN STAR TREK:
"It's inevitable. Yes. By the end of this century. Out of our solar system. PROVIDED WE DON'T DESTROY OURSELVES."
------
MORE ON EDGAR DEAN MITCHELL:
Born: Sept. 17, 1930, Hereford, Texas. Raised in Artesia, N.M.
Education: Bachelor of Science, Industrial Management, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1952. Bachelor of Science, Aeronautical Engineering, U.S.
Naval Postgraduate School, 1961. Doctor of Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1964. Military:
U.S. Navy, 1952-1972.
NASA: 1966-1972. Lunar module commander, Apollo 14, Jan. 31-Feb. 9, 1971.
Feb. 5: became sixth of 12 men to walk on moon. Crewmates: commander Alan B. Shepard, Jr. (died 1998); command module pilot Stuart A. Roosa (died 1994).
Awards: Presidential Medal of Freedom, Navy Distinguished Medal, three NASA Group Achievement Awards. Inducted to Space Hall of Fame, 1979, Astronaut Hall of Fame, 1998. Founder, Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Co-founder, Association of Space Explorers. Author, Psychic Exploration, 1974; The Way of the Explorer, 1996 (revised 2001).
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Sunday, February 15, 2004
New Book on UFO sightings in Taiwan and China
Hundreds of people still trawl the skies with high-powered telescopes daily hoping to catch a glimpse of the unexplained. They send their reports, whether credible or not, to TUFOS (Taiwan Ufology Society). Now boasting 500 members, the group is the nation's sole Ufology society and is a sorting house for dozens of reports that come in annually regarding UFO sightings in Taiwan.
Since Taiwan's first officially recorded sighting of a UFO by Tsai Chang-hsien on March 5, 1956, there have been upward of 54 feasible sightings and countless false sightings of unidentified flying objects cruising the skies above Taiwan. All these reports have landed on the desk of Ho Hsien-jung, TUFOS' chief investigator.
Affectionately known as "Ufo Ho" to his friends and colleges, the articulate Ufologist spent months wading through pages of reports filed by Taiwanese citizens over the years. Realizing the information his organization had gathered was wasted sitting in his computer, Ho decided to publish a complete record of Taiwan's UFO sightings.
"There's certainly no shortage of books touching on UFO sightings, but there was nothing specific to Taiwan," he said. "No one had ever set out to catalog the nation's UFO sightings and publish all the written and photographic evidence in a single publication before."
It took Ho almost a year to sift through information and contact and re-interview the people who had reported the sightings, to ensure there were no discrepancies. Entitled On the Trail of UFO Sightings the book, which was released last week, details 54 of the most important UFO sightings ever to have been reported in Taiwan, as well as the countless sightings TUFOS had been informed of in China.
The results of Ho's book point to a drop in UFO sightings in Taiwan in recent years, with only two recorded incidents taking place last year, and an increase in the number of sightings on the opposite side of the Taiwan Strait.
"Obviously there are more people in China than anywhere else, so I'm not surprised at the increase in sightings there. The recent drop in UFO sightings can be put down to several things," he said. "There are now more diseases than ever before, and anything landing here would be susceptible to falling victim to them. And secondly, I think the military use of lasers means that fewer extra-terrestrials now dare to enter the Earth's atmosphere in case they are shot down."
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