Author: Robert Sheldon
Located in: Huntsville, AL
Submitted: April 01, 2024
Tell us a little about yourself. Physicist (1991 PhD UMd College Park) and seminarian (1985 MAR Westminster) with a 30 year career in Space Physics building instrumentation for NASA and ESA satellites.
What was your motivation behind this project? To rebuild the relationships between the Bible and Science. To my great surprise, I found that Myth was holding the wedding band.
What do you hope folks will gain from this project? This is the 2nd volume of a 3 volume work. In the 1st work, I show how the first 2 chapters of Genesis can be fit into a chronology that comports with the Big Bang and an "old earth". Noah's Flood was dated by examining the 500,000 year history of the Greenland Ice cores, showing that the 30-degree rise in temperature at 9590BC was caused by a flooding of the Mediterranean basin. This places Eden in the dried out bed of the Med between 11,700BC and 9590 BC. Surprisingly, Egyptian temples were shown to have topographic maps of the bed of the Med, something not available to us moderns until bathymetry maps were done in the 1990-2000 time frame. Likewise, Tolkien's map of "middle earth" (in Latin, medi-terranean) turns out to be a folded map of the Med bed. Even the Norse invasion in 800AD was using an old map of the Med bed. So this book is visual, mapping evidence that prehistoric humans knew this area well.
How were you personally impacted by working on this project? Locating Atlantis (the city), means that we can recover many of the treasures of that Edenic Empire. But more importantly, we can learn the things that destroyed that Empire. Because we are facing them today.
Who are your influences, sources of inspiration or favorite authors / artists? JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton, CS Lewis are all influential. From Tolkien I realized he was piecing together the same story as I was, but from different sources. From Chesterton I learned that the enemies of science and orthodoxy are irrational. And from Lewis I learned that one can teach a lot of theology if one casts it in a story form.
Anything else you'd like readers / listeners to know: When Genesis is put in its historical and scientific context, it does not weaken the message, rather it enriches it. Science does not dilute the impact of creation and prehistory, rather, it turbocharges it, revealing connections between modern culture and ancient civiization that we knew nothing about. We need never fear science, but harness it for good.
