In
the first episode of the X-Files
(Sep. 10, 1993), special agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) said this about
alternate explanations,
J.
Harlen Bretz proposed a huge flood through Montana, Idaho, Oregon and
Washington that formed the Channeled Scablands.
The flood cut canyons up to 900 feet deep‼ For decades, Bretz suffered ridicule for his
radical views. However, in 1963, the
International Association for Quaternary Research sent a telegram to Bretz
ending “We are now all catastrophists.”
Bretz received the Penrose Medal (highest geology award) and claimed,
"Perhaps, I can be credited with reviving and demystifying legendary
Catastrophism and challenging a too rigorous Uniformitarianism." [1]
Should
we always trust the experts? Sometimes
they are dead wrong. Two intriguing
books highlight this fact:
Consider
the great Life-on-the-Moon hoax of 1835.
The New York Sun reported
about research claimed to be from the Edinburgh
Journal of Science that claimed that sentient beings were seen on the moon.
[2] This discovery was allegedly made by
the very real mathematician, astronomer and chemist Sir John Herschel (son of William Herschel
who discovered Uranus ♅).
Scientific
fraud is real. In 2005, it was revealed
that anthropologist Reiner Protsch von Zieten had fabricated false dates for
ancient human fossils for decades. [3]
If the common dating methods are wrong and most of the rock record was
formed catastrophically, then Young Earth Science (YES) is plausible.
Are
members of the academic elite ever willing to challenge ensconced
conclusions? Former Editor-in-Chief of
the journal Philosophy of Science, Philip Kitcher, boldly declared that, “it is not necessary, and it may not even be
true, that all species are historically connected.” [4] If our favorite planet is young, evolution is
left out in the cold.
Notes:
1) YES - Young Earth Science by Jay Hall
(IDEAS, Big Spring, TX, 2014), p. 93.
2) Regret the Error by Craig Silverman
(Union Square Press, NYC, 2007), pp. 30-35.
3) Wrong by David Freedman (Little, Brown
& Co., NYC, 2010), p. 256.
4) see
the bottom of p. 347.
