Velikovsky nut butter (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 29, 2012, 17:38 (4409 days ago) @ George Jelliss

GEORGE: Just thought I'd take a look to see what you are all doing in this little rock pool again. The arguments still seem to be much the same!-I'm sure I'm not the only one who is delighted to have you join us in the pool again, even if it's just for a brief splash. There can only be a limited number of variations on the argument that there is/isn't/may be a god ... but I'm constantly being surprised by the new discoveries that only deepen the mysteries of life and the cosmos. -GEORGE: I read Velikovsky years ago, and it was evident to me at the time that he was a nut, on the same lines as Danican and his ancient aliens. But of course his stories were colourful and interesting, being based on myths and legends. They just didn't make sense in terms of Newtonian mechanics, for one thing.-Von Däniken apparently fabricated evidence (as well as being convicted of an even less savoury kind of fraud), whereas Velikovsky's catastrophism and predictions ... regardless of whether his explanations are correct or not ... were based on an amalgamation of myth, cosmology and various other scientific disciplines. There are anomalies relating to Venus that have still not been satisfactorily explained ... its clockwise rotation, its comet-like tail ... and of course Velikovsky famously and correctly predicted that Venus would be found to be hot, whereas at the time everyone thought it was cold. He was ridiculed for this, but when it turned out he was right, he was ridiculed because the establishment came up with a different set of reasons for its being hot. Nobody thought of ridiculing the establishment scientists who had insisted Venus was cold. Similarly, his well researched championship of catastrophism against the then prevalent orthodoxy of uniformitarianism hardly justifies the blanket dismissal of him as a nutcase.-GEORGE: Believing something because it makes a good story is just not a sufficient criterion.-I couldn't agree more. Among such good stories I would include the existence of an all-powerful, infinite, uncreated intelligence that has simply been there forever, and the assembly by sheer chance of mechanisms so complex that we still don't even understand how they work. You're right, George, the arguments are much the same ... but we do find different approaches to them!