Whoa! And a big north-of-the-border howdy to the visitors from Buridan's Ass. And, yes, in between the David Horowitz beatings, we slap creationists around on a regular basis here. So you'll feel right at home.
(In which many people forget the lessons of history and I steal shamelessly from a couple of web sites, particularly this one.)
Once upon a time, most folks thought the Earth was the centre of the universe, kind of like this:
It was a theologically-satisfying bit of vanity except for the fact that, to the curious and careful observer, it didn't explain the behaviour of the heavens, in which astral bodies had the nasty habit of changing in brightness and occcasionally demonstrating retrograde motion. For this problem, there were two possible solutions: 1) abandon the general model (Heavens to Betsy, no!) or 2) try to patch the current one.
Pulling out their cosmological equivalent of duct tape, the ancients jury-rigged the idea of "epicycles", in which planets orbited around a point, which itself orbited around the Earth:
With this quick and dirty fix in place, the Old Ones at least now had a passable explanation for the behaviour of some heveanly bodies:
Sadly, this still didn't fix all the problems so it was back to the duct tape, introducing even more complicated cycles -- that is epicycles on epicycles (yeesh!):
and, even more drastically, having the primary epicycles not even orbit uniformly around the original deferent but around some point displaced from that. Duct tape on duct tape on duct tape and, in the end, utter failure.
The lesson here should be obvious. If you start with a bad foundation for your theory, all the patching, jury-rigging and desperate taping won't salvage it. Put another way, regardless of how much lipstick you put on that pig, it's still going to oink.
Which brings us to the "scientific" creationists and the fact that these people seem absolutely determined not to learn anything from history. It was back in 1961 when Henry Morris, the godfather of modern creationism (a title I can only hope haunts him throughout eternity) proposed that the entire geological and fossil record was produced by a single, massive, worldwide flood (think Earth-centered universe here). The problem? Those same geological and fossil records clearly showed a distinct and progressive structure so, what to do? No problem, suggests Morris. And out comes the duct tape.
First, Morris proposes that the apparent patterns in the fossil record can be explained by "ecological zonation" -- that the layers correspond to which animals lived at which elevations (epicycles version number one). As you can read at that link, no, that doesn't work, but nice try.
OK, then, time for more duct tape, as Morris proposes additionally that the obvious layers can be explained by "hydrologic sorting" (there's your epicycles on epicycles). And, again, no, sorry, but thanks for playing. But Morris is nothing if not determined. Unspeakably ignorant but determined.
So, it's back into the toolbox for that last bit of tape, and the idea that the order of fossils in the fossil record can be explained by "mobility" -- the ability of some animals to flee the rising floodwaters faster than others, ignoring of course even the remote possibility that some of the animals might be ... uh, dead, and wouldn't be able to keep up with their colleagues (which completes the analogy with your epicycles orbiting mythical, off-center points on their respective deferents.)
Tape slapped on tape slapped on more tape. And none of it able to salvage the underlying creationist viewpoint whose fundamental flaw was that, like the Earth-centered universe before it, it was unsalvageable rubbish.
It's not that the creationists can propose such dreck that's so depressing. It's that they're not even capable of recognizing how, in the midst of all this scientific progress, they're still pushing the biological equivalent of the Earth-centered universe.
One wonders how long it's going to take to drag some of them, kicking and screaming, finally, into the 16th century. And, quite frankly, one is not optimistic.
6 comments:
Nice diagrams. I've been teaching the cosmology stuff in World History for some time, and I've never been sure what an "epicycle" was exactly, so I'm grateful.
I would point out, though, that the ID folks (particularly the hardcore creationists) look at evolutionary theory in much the same way. All science, ultimately, is trying to make the best sense possible of the data, and sometimes we adjust and fudge the theories, and sometimes we figure out there's a grander different theory that works better. It's all messy. Doesn't mean that it's all the same, of course, but it does make it hard to make strong points against someone like ID just because the theory is messy.
Perhaps ... perhaps ... but I would argue that there are at least a couple, significant, qualitative differences between the two approaches. Stay tuned.
I agree: I'm not your target audience, though. I'm just trying to keep you from taking stands which can be used against you.
I was prepared to wax eloquent on this topic but, for the sake of brevity, one can dismiss both the epicycles and Morris' apologetics for flood geology in a very simple way -- there's no reason to introduce the additional complexity of either of these when you already have a simple explanation for both of them.
There is no value to epicycles since, in effect, they're a solution to something which isn't a problem. If one just accepts a heliocentric system, all of the alleged issues vanish.
Similarly, one can blow off Morris' apologetics by trivially pointing out that, once one accepts a very old earth, everything becomes explainable.
It's certainly true that science can be messy at times. But that's not the same thing as proposing a messy solution simply because you've taken a perfectly acceptable, simple and elegant solution and deliberately rejected it on ideological grounds.
Now, now ... I deleted the previous comment since I felt it crossed the line of civil discourse. Let's keep it relatively polite here, folks.
I read this discussion of the problem (for devoted fans) of continuity in fictional universes and thought of this discussion.
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