Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site imsvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!elsie!imsvax!ted From: ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) Newsgroups: net.origins Subject: The Rock of Ages and the Ages of Rocks Message-ID: <430@imsvax.UUCP> Date: Sat, 12-Oct-85 18:27:50 EDT Article-I.D.: imsvax.430 Posted: Sat Oct 12 18:27:50 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 15-Oct-85 04:50:52 EDT Organization: IMS Inc, Rockville MD Lines: 233 My apologies to anyone who has seen this article more than once. We've been having major problems with usenet in the D.C. area. Since Sept. 15, when the CVL computer at U. Md. was taken down with no warning to anyone below it on usenet (which is most of the D.C. area), very little has gotten through one way or the other. For awhile, it will be difficult to tell what has gotten through and what hasn't. The Rock of Ages This article deals with the major point on which most Velikovskian catastrophists like myself concur with creationists: the question of "how old is the earth, it's life forms and so forth". I have been accused of "helping" the creationists before by other net.origins contributors. I am no creationist. The creationists, like traditional scientists, are SURE of their position. I regard the question of creation versus evolution as one of life's unknowables. I am certain that traditional (slow and imperceptible) evolution could account for the difference between, say, a wolf and a collie, but for no changes larger than that. I am certain that Velikovskian (catastrophic) evolution could explain the transmutation of species, ONCE YOU ALREADY HAVE COMPLICATED LIFE FORMS ON OUR PLANET TO BEGIN WITH. I am uncertain as to whether even catastrophic evolution could explain the rise of our present complicated life forms from single-celled animals. I myself believe in God, but am not a Christian, mainly because I cannot buy the Christian notion of SIN and REDEMPTION FROM SIN being the primary problems of our life here on earth. I respect Christians, however, other than for flagrant clowns like Falwell. And, from what little I have seen of the emerging science of creationism as evidenced by the articles of Kukuk and Brown on the net, I am convinced that it is a bad mistake on the part of scientists not to take them seriously. These guys are essentially correct in challenging the notion which modern science has of the age of the earth. The funny thing about the creation/evolution debate is that, on this one critical and all important point, it is the scientists who are dealing from a position of AXIOMATICS, and therefore dogma. This is what makes me believe that, if things continue the way they are going now, traditional scientists sticking to their present beliefs, the creationists will eventually win this struggle. The Ages of Rocks Anybody who has ever read or listened to modern scientists discussing ANYTHING pertaining to origins must perforce have gotten used to thinking BIG. Big expanses of time involved in EVERYTHING, big expanses of space BETWEEN everything. And, in a pernicious way, the parts of this whole scheme which are wholly believable tend to reinforce the parts which aren't, so that most people, scientists included, have just gotten used to the whole thing and never question any of its parts. There is no reason to doubt the measurements of stellar distances which modern scientists work with. There is likewise, no reason to doubt that they are at least in the ballpark with their ages FOR THE UNIVERSE AS A WHOLE, which are based on knowledge of stellar distances and properties of light. But the ages which traditional scientists give for our own solar system, for this planet, for the various geological epochs this planet has undergone, and, generally, for every kind of an ORIGENS related timeframe, are not based on any such solid ground. There are good reasons for doubting these schemes. Beginning around 1800 or so, Lamarck and Lyell and other scientists developed what came to be known as the doctrine of uniformity, upon which nearly all of our present natural sciences are based. This doctrine states that the conditions we observe in the present can be assumed to have prevailed in all past ages, that all changes which ever occurred in geological and biological forms occured in slow and minute, nearly inperceptable steps, the way they do now. This amounts to an axiom, or an article of faith; it is not something which anyone has ever proved, yet this basic assumption stands squarely at the bottom of virtually every scheme by which scientists try to estimate ancient time frames. Darwin based his theory of evolution on this concept, because the notion of CATASTROPHIC evolution, or macro-evolution, had not occured to him. He believed that huge time spans were needed for any reasonable theory of evolution, and that the standard creationist theories of HIS time didn't give him any more than the 6000 or 7000 years which Bishop Usher and like minded folk believed in. In taking this route, these scientists adopted what amounted to an AXIOMATIC approach to an emperical science. When you date geological strata using the assumption that sedimentation always occurred at present rates, never mind how quickly a global disaster which involved large scale flooding could put down layers of sediment, when you use radio-carbon dating and assume that present ratios of radio to ordinary carbon have always held good, when you use similar assumptions on every other scheme for dating ancient time-frames, and when you finally begin to use circular logic in which fossils are dated by strata and strata are dated by fossils, then you run the risk that, if any of your axioms are wrong, you may have just spent the last 180 years building a house of cards. In real life, outside the ivory tower, when you take a wrong turn at the crossroads, the distance you have covered since the wrong turn is not called PROGRESS. That distance is merely the measure of how far you have to go BACK. The scientists who developed the principal of uniformity, aside from commiting themselves and future scientists to an axiomatic approach to what should be emperical science, committed themselves to defending in perpetuity a series of propositions which, taken together, amount to a variation of the BIG LIE: namely that our ancestors were all idiots. In ancient literature, there are numerous stories which clearly describe cosmic violence on a global scale, something which nobody could take seriously while taking uniformitarianism seriously at the same time. The Big Lie 1. The big lie: Man has been on this planet for at least a million years, but only learned to read and write within the last few thousand years. The reality, as stated by an Egyptian priest, speaking to the Greek sage, Solon, in Plato's dialogue, "The Timaeus": "Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like chilodren, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either amongst us or amongst yourselves. As for those geneologies of yours which you have just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place, you remember a single Deluge only, but there were many previous ones;..." 2. The big lie: The ancients saw the world as a small flat place, and typically knew little of the world beyond their own back yards. The reality, from Ovid's "Metamorphoses: "When God, whichever God he was, created The universe we know, he made of earth A turning sphere so delicately poised That water flowed in waves beneath the wind.... God made zones on earth, the fifth zone naked With heat where none may live, at each extreme A land of snow (the poles), and, at their side, two zones Of temperate winds and sun and shifting cold." 3. The big lie: Stories of global floods and disasters really amount to some imaginative primative hyping a story about a flood in his back yard, or the local river overflowing its banks, as in the words to "Zorba the Greek", thus: "I gotta bigga creek, a shee'sa runnina thrua my backa yard, awhat'll I do?..... You takea bigga spongea, an you putta da bigga spongea inna da backa yard, an it'll abZORBA DA CREEK." The reality: Amos n Andy have been off the air for some time now. Nobody could get away with portraying Blacks or LIVING Italians and Greeks this way anymore, and I HATE to see "scientists" get away with portraying Plato, Ovid, Hesiod, Solon, Socrates, the authors of the Old Testament, and, generally, every ancient author who ever wrote anything about origins in this manner, because they are dead and thus unable to defend themselves. The Old Testament describes only one global catastrophe, the flood of Noah's day, in any detail; it describes meteorite storms and near misses by other celestial bodies in numerous other places, mainly the books of Isaiah, and of Joshua, although these descriptions are laconic. Ovid's "Metamorphoses", however, provides lengthy descriptions of the flood as well as another global disaster, the legend of Phaeton, which goes on for several pages. This is the Greek and Roman legend of the near destruction of the world by fire, and Ovid specifically recites devastation wrought in every corner of the Earth of which he had any possibility of knowledge, other than China, Siberia, and the Americas. In Plato's dialogue, "The Timaeus", The Egyptian priest from the temple at Sais speaks these words to Solon concerning the Phaeton legend: "...There is a story which even you (Greeks) have preserved, that once upon a time, Phaeton, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds of his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies (planets) moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals;...". Plato and Ovid were very definitely not talking about the woodshed burning down last Tuesday night. It is not Plato and Ovid, but rather the scientists and scholars who perpetuate this kind of notion who deserve to be treated like idiots. Generally, I believe that the entire view of origins which science has concocted over the last 180 years or so, deserves to be exposed to the world as the hollow sham which it actually is. Recent books on financial planning are telling people under 40 to plan their lives as is social security doesn't exist; that by the time they get there, one way or another, it won't. My advice to young scientists is similar: "Plan your lives as if the constant prattle about millions and billions of years which you hear in every conversation regarding ORIGINS didn't exist. In twenty years, those millions and billions of years will no longer exist."