I had a doctor's appointment the other day and knowing how late they can run, I snagged a copy of Robin Briggs' The Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Longman/Harper & Row, 1969). The doctor was late enough for me to read the entire work, only about 110 pages. Earlier I had been reading about Dr. Greg Little's phenomenal work dealing with the Bimini Road, the 1600-foot long remnant in the Bahamas, and his related discoveries of ancient port facilities connected with the Road identical to the remnants of ancient Phoenician harbors uncovered in the Mediterranean and dated to the 6th Century B.C.
Every time I read about the Bimini Road and hear the "scientific" explanation, that it's collapsed beech rock, I have to chortle. Back when the consensus believed the Earth was 6,000 years old, fossils were, if not created in place by God, stones like crystals that grew in the shape in which they were found.
Dr. Little erroneously calls the dimwits that claim structures the ancients produced using beach rock are actually the natural result of collapsed beach rock skeptics. People that, with no investigation or mental effort, fling off-the-cuff explanations for anything that disagrees with their view of reality are not skeptics, they are the people to be skeptical of. The classic definition of a skeptic is one who was skeptical of religious explanations for natural occurrences. Now empirical science uses the word skeptic to describe anyone who comes up with dingbat explanations for anything that disagrees with the consensus view of reality.
When the church disagreed with novel finds dealing with reality back in the 18th Century, it simply excommunicated the one doing the finding or made them retract their explanation for the findings, Empirical science simply substitutes the skeptic for the priest as the gatekeeper to its consensus reality, preserving its dogma in the face of new interpretations through the use of ostracism, pretty similar to excommunication. Tom Van Flandern in the excellent introduction to Dark Matter, Missing Planets & New Comets (North Atlantic Books) says it gradually became clear to him that "a lot of people had a lot to lose if an accepted theory or practice were challenged: the authors of the original theory, whose names had become well-known; all those who published papers which reference or depend on the theory; journal editors and referees who have made decisions or criticized other works based on a theory; funding agencies which have paid for research which presupposes a theory; instrument builders and experiment designers who spend career time testing ideas which spring from the theory; journalists and writers whose publications have featured or promoted a theory; teachers and interested members of the public who have learned a theory, been impressed by the wonder of it, and who have no wish to have to teach or learn a new theory; and students who need to find a job in their field of training." That comes from a very credentialed and formerly very visibly employed member of the empirical community who spent much of his life inside the gates of the Citadel (he now runs Meta Research, http://www.metaresearch.org which studies new theories in the field of astronomy that disagree with the current astronomical nonsense.
Make no mistake, the skeptic is the one that questions the dimwit explanation that discoveries such as the harbor facilities and sunken road in the Bahamas are natural formations of beach rock, not the dimwit effusing the beach rock idiocy.
Galloping through Briggs' book, I was treated to a synopsis of the creation of the narrative that underlies empirical science. The need for a narrative became pretty clear as Briggs first sets up the Aristotelian narrative and then begins to sketch in its downfall in the face of the emerging mathematical model, although Briggs insists that the mathematical model is in reality a mechanical explanation of reality, the result, perhaps, of Newton's mathematical pile of deception being rolled up into Newtonian Mechanics, something that professes to explain the workings of the universe, but because it ignores the mechanical description of any force that causes motion, is not an explanation for anything, let alone a mechanical explanation of anything.
Referring to the work of Marin Mersenne in knitting together a European scientific community, and Sir Thomas Gresham's establishment in London of Gresham College which would host the creation of The Royal Society, Briggs comments that "[a]fter about 1630 there was little chance of any important theoretical or practical contribution to science going unrecognized for long, and this made for a great intensification of the search for a satisfactory alternative to the evidently outmoded system of Aristotle. In the new atmosphere of enthusiasm and open-mindedness any new system-makers were assured of a sympathetic hearing."
I've read some of those "sympathetic" hearings and they were anything but sympathetic. But the point of the statement is, there were holes in the Aristotelian narrative and people were racing to fill those holes in. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, so long as you don't use permanent cement in the process. The problem with empirical science is that, by adopting the essentially religious doctrine of a personified god that prevailed in the England and France of the time, the scientific community produced a rock-solid belief that the universe was operated by laws put in place by a supreme being and that empirical science's task was to us mathematics to uncover those laws. (Interestingly, Van Flandern, a math major in college, says in the same introduction that "equations cannot be made to substitute for the concepts which underlie them.")
When a system of beliefs, a narrative of what reality is like, is based on the belief that reality is fixed by immutable laws, the glue that holds the narrative together is going to be immutable, stronger than the Aristotelian dogma it seeks to replace. It is in essence going to be a religion in which all subsequent doctrines are going to have to be viewed in the light of earlier doctrine simply because earlier doctrine, immutable laws of God, and now, with the author of the laws depersonalized, of nature, control immutably.
This is not productive. Creating a religion to replace a religion is not going to elucidate the nature of the reality in which we exist and if we don't have a clear picture of reality, we are not going to be able to produce a technology that will allow us to survive in that reality.
I kicked off the New Year in the 01-05 column titled Drawing the Battle Lines. In that column, I pointed out that it was not particularly useful for the practitioners of alternate science to question the findings, or as it is in so many cases, the non-findings of empirical science, while using empirical science's narrative as support. Delving into the existence of a worldwide civilization is not going to be effective when those doing the delving buy into the empirical narrative of forceless motion, an Earth whose climate has been immutable for billions of years except when the ice caps mysteriously expanded to cover the globe, and a time frame constrained by the nonexistent evidence for the unexplained retreat of the glaciers, which had been able to climb hill and dale, something no ice flow can today accomplish.
Two recent books, Underworld by Graham Hancock (Crown) and Voyages of the Pyramid Builders by Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D. (Tarcher Putnam) try to make sense of ancient civilizations. Both, solidly embedded in the ice age, come up with diametrically opposed results. Or take Newton's misconception of precession (column 11-04). Schoch uses the weathering of the Sphinx in an effort to date it, In The Message of the Sphinx, Hancock and Robert Bauval refer to Schoch's weathering to claim the Sphinx is older than usual, confine themselves by limiting its age to a period after the ice age, and then use Newton's faulty precession to date it precisely. Schoch, by the way, claims that the massive underwater stone formations discovered off Yonaguni, Japan, clearly manmade, are natural collapsed beach stones.
None of these promoters of alternate science, and the many others diligently engaged in attempting to construct a picture of the past, agree on anything but the existence of the ice age and Newtonian precession, the former being one of empirical science's most easily deconstructed myths, the other, one of empirical science's most egregiously overlooked mistakes.
Any narrative has to start with the most important element of our existence, gravity, the mechanical nature of the force that holds us to the Earth and limits our movements. Aristotle claimed that gravity was the result of the Earth being at the center of the universe, with all objects naturally seeking to come to rest at the center. Newton doesn't do much better, mindlessly claiming that gravity is a property like color or hardness. It's hard to see which one is the more ridiculous, but neither, in any event, provides a mechanical description of the force.
I start out with a physical description of gravity (column 02-05) that is measurably consistent with the physical phenomena of our existence. This results in a dynamic source, cooling, for a dynamic force. Once we realize the Earth is cooling, and as it is doing so, its gravity is lessening along with its temperature and its meteorological environment, we can start, as in did in The Cooling Continuum, to produce a narrative for evolution, for how life formed and how it evolved to become us.
Once we have a dynamic environment in which to reconstruct our history, we can go back and correct some of the egregious myths produced in the past. One of those myths was created for two reasons. The emerging narrative of empirical science was intent on doing away with all biblical influence, even though its basic premise, that a supreme being placed the laws empirical science believes it uncovers in place. One of the most widespread biblical tales is the story of the flood. It made little difference to empirical science that identical flood stories exist in every civilization in every part of the globe. The story appeared in the bible and it had to be done away with.
Of course, it was also difficult to figure out where the waters for the flood might have come from, but creating the myth of the ice age to replace the flood story simply because the source of the water wasn't clear was a fairly ignorant thing to do because empirical science had, and to this day has no mechanism to explain the ice ages. With gravity a product of what matter does rather than simply a property of that matter, gravity diminishes as the planet cools. The reason we see seabeds on the surface of the moon but no water has puzzled empirical science because, with gravity a property of matter, the moon's gravity has never changed and therefore all the water that has ever been on the moon is still there.
With variable gravity, as the moon cooled, its gravity lessened in comparison to the stronger gravity of the larger Earth and eventually, the Earth's gravity caused the oceans of the moon to collect on one side and then lift off and travel the two hundred forty thousand miles to Earth, inundating it, destroying the civilization whose megalithic cities we see the remains of all over the world. The weight of the waters collapsed the Atlantic seabed sending up mountains such as the Atlas and the Andes, it collapsed the floor of the Indian Ocean burying cities beneath the waves and sending up the Himalayas, and it sent the vast continent that filled the Pacific Ocean beneath the waves and raised up the Rocky Mountains in the Western United States, cracking the crust to leave the Ring of Fire open to the molten earth beneath.
The flood remained in the memories of the survivors as the most significant event in the Earth's history, and the narrative of that event has been passed down to us in over 600 similar accounts from virtually every part of the planet. When 18th Century explorers started coming back with tales of finding the northwest sides of mountains scoured with what could only have been water filled with rocks and gravel, when the accounts described huge drifts in the valleys between the mountain that could have only been left from receding flood waters, when evidence emerged that entire islands above the Arctic treeline contained the remains of tropical forests and the remains of tropical animals jumbled together in huge piles, when examinations of the drifts and islands disclosed the remains of animals, insects, trees and plants, some from Asia, others from the Southern Hemisphere, still others from North America and Europe, and actual scientists, people interested in the reality of the world discovered that all the jumble of death had one thing in common, while occupying the same place dead, the life leaving the remains had never occupied the same area of the Earth while alive, the evidence for the actual flood became undeniable.
Because empirical science could not concede anything to the Bible, if it admitted that a single story in the Bible might be correct, then Bible-thumpers would go around shouting that science had proved the creation myth, empirical practitioners had to actually think for once, and think they did, coming up with the ice age joke and maintaining it in the face of further discoveries of the drifts filled with the remains of commingled life shoved deep into the fissures of caves, places they could reach only by the recession of massive floodwaters and the discovery, almost a common event these days, of the remains of underwater cities all over the globe, cities which to the empirical blind eye simply are figments of everyone's imagination, and I imagine, actually dummied up hundreds of feet beneath the wave by evil Bible-belters.
And this sordid story reveals the real discrepancy in the empirical narrative. To Aristotle, the universe was eternal. The Earth may well have been created, but that conclusion was simply the result of it not being perfect like the rest of the cosmos. The Earth was in the process of becoming perfect. But Aristotle needed no creation story.
However, after seventeen centuries of a creation story in the Bible, creation was on the mind of empirical scientists. Empirical science does not attempt to describe reality, its primary goal is to replace religion. Aristotle was smart enough to understand that creation was simply not a part of the task involved in describing reality. Empirical science spends most of its time perfecting its creation myth of the big bang, its creation myth of Darwin's species evolution and its creation myth of a supreme mover for Newtonian Mechanics, a mover who simply vanished from the scene, replaced by perpetual motion in frictionless space.
As I have pointed out in many of these columns, questions of the origin of the universe and questions concerning its size, or its age, are simply non-questions when examining physical reality because the only questions about physical reality that are important are questions the answers to which will help us perfect our technology.
There is no answer dealing with the beginning of the universe, the beginning of time, the size of the universe and the end of time that can ever influence our technology and therefore they are simply not questions we should be dealing with. We can answer them anyway we want because they are matters of belief and as such, elements of the religions we adhere to. The answers to religious questions produce recall so that we don't feel uncomfortable when confronted by these unanswerable questions (see the last two columns). That's why it's called religion, or even philosophy.
As for empirical science and its obsession with producing a narrative that answers these questions, it is merely producing a religion.
And it's a religion that will never be successfully questioned by researchers who find the anomalies that abound around the world until those researchers get a realistic narrative of what's going on in the world.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com