Posted on 04/19/2002 12:33:06 PM PDT by vannrox
I don't think it was so much the bible versus science...Maybe not so much, though we do know there was quite a bit of animosity there. The scopes trial was only a generation earlier to Worlds in Collision's publication.
...as the whole question of uniformity and evolution and the kinds of time requirements such doctrines have, and what Velikovsky's theses did to the dating methods which such time estimates are based on.I remember that argument being proffered at the AAAS (in 1974?) hearing for Velikovsky. But the uniformitarian criterion for strict Darwinian evolution was already being questioned then, so the Establishment had other internal opponents to that over which they wasn't quite so much hostility. And the normal behavior that IV's thesis should have brought to bear would have been a healthy, albeit partisan and vigorous, questioning. Interdisciplinary synthesis wasn't exactly in its infancy, as it was getting quite a bit more attention outside America. Especially given the enormity of so many of IV's predictions (occurring in concert with so few misques), wouldn't the rational course have been for the best minds to inquire as to HOW he arrived at the predictions rather than attempt to leave the public (and presumably they as well) ignorant of the process?
Look, it just seemed and still seems odd. Maybe there's nothing to my conjecture -- that's why I'd like to know if anybody else tried to add beef to the idea. What raises my skepticism here was that the very nature of the opposition to I.V. Given several misrepresentations of his printed words and what appeared to be hostile ridicule by several renowned scientists, a rational review of what was going on specifically regarding Velikovsky, leaves one figuring there was some more visceral less cerebral undercurrent driving those theatrics.
Well, for what it's worth, that was my gut reaction to what I witnessed. I recall commenting: "the conduct of that inquiry was not comforting." As I still have heard (and I've heard quite a few) no sound and cohesive explanation for what transpired, my skepticism remains.
Extremely! I am wading through this sea of information and have not completed the journey, but from what I have read, it appears as if Darwinian logic is not exclusively in the domain of biology. Imagine grave robbers inserting new pottery into old digs, illiterate "peasants" keeping writings as heirlooms.(obviously illiterate, they produced no writings of their own since they kept none)
His excellent paper on the archaeology of Hazor (C&CR 1996:1) revealed some important anachronisms. For example, two cuneiform tablets written in Old-Babylonian Akkadian and two more written in the Akaddian of the Amarna era were found in the upper layers of the site. Heinsohn asks 'How did tablets from the early second millennium end up in a stratum reaching its peak in the period of the Persian Empire (550-330 BC)?'. The tablets were, of course, immediately labelled 'heirlooms' by their finders. But, as Heinsohn pointed out, it seems strange that the later Hazoreans kept tablets for over 1000yr as heirlooms from the MBA or LBA, yet were apparently incapable of producing any texts of their own. ---- Darwinian evolution---Archaeopteryx 150my old, Velociraptor 80my old
I'll keep reading, this is very entertaining!
As a result, the pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty (D18), which most famously include Queen Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun, are made too ancient by around 500 years.
A line of reasoning that actually has some evidence behind it says that Hat and Tut have been made too recent by maybe 200 years. In particular, the Nile delta ashfalls from the volcanic explosion of Thera contain artifacts from about the reign of Hatshepsut and her successor Thutmosis III.
The conventional dating of this event is circa 1450 BC, but California bristlecone pine tree-ring data--a pinched ring from a very dark, cold year--says the likeliest event to be Thera was in the 1600s BC. One caution in the above: I'm remembering from Charles Pellegrino's Unearthing Atlantis, a book I gave away some years ago.
Nah! Look up "contra." This guy's a piker.
Heinsohn is a psychoceramic's psychoceramic. The Sumerian language is of a completely unknown family and was only deciphered because the conquering Semitic Akkadians--illiterate nomads who depended at first on the conquered Sumerians for record-keeping--made dictionaries to train their own scribes.
The Chaldeans, by comparison, are late-comers to the region. The biblical term "Ur of the Chaldees" is anachronistic, evidence for a late writing.
As a general point, we have here examples of a problem of the extension of scientific knowledge and education of the public. As information is obtained, theories are derived to explain them. Those who derive these theories have an interest in maintaining them, making scholarship naturally conservative, which is a good thing -- you don't want to throw out everything you know because of a single new datum. As new information accumulates, eventually a new way of explaining the total sum of material comes to be accepted, this phenomenon is Alvin Toffler's famous 'paradigm shift'.
At the same time there is a need for the public to be educated in the various fields of knowledge, and naturally this education should be the best accepted information. The problem is that often an exaggerated authority is given to the material presented, that what is the current theory is presented as if it had been proven definitively, that alternative ideas should be considered as believing in a 'flat earth'. Perhaps it is because of the similarity in background of the sorts of people who would have been educated to be preachers in the past and are now trained as scientists.
To be specific about this material, I think that a lot of it plays a little fast and loose with what has been observed in physics and astronomy. It does seem clear that there are severe problems with chronology in history earlier than the classical period, but think that disposing of the Sumerian civilization and the Hittite Empire will require a lot more evidence than is presented here.
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WHy didn't you invite us to read the book instead of taking up so much bad width?
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Thanks again, vannrox. |
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