The War of Uniformitarianism on Catastrophism

Written by Martin Sieff on December 22, 2022. Posted in Current News

This is the kind of obvious observation so important and true that it is always forgotten because it is so obviously true. One does not have to be a Keynesian at all to acknowledge that.

In the same, all our assumptions about the geology, archaeology and even relatively modern recorded history of the world are based upon a theory so universally believed and accepted that it is never questioned, tested or debated: The theory of uniformity.

This is the assumption that the only forces to shape our world long, slow, gradual and gentle and that they have been going on, in the time-worn, ever-repeated cliches of Carl Sagan for “millions and millions and billions of billions” of years yet everything about these assumptions us false, untested, easily disproved – in fact blatant and actually ridiculous lies.

The theory of uniformitarianism is not ancient, it has never been proven. Literally mountains of evidence to disprove it cover the surface of our globe from trillions of remains of sea creatures fossilized atop our highest mountains to hundreds of megalithic cities discovered all around the world from Japan to the Caribbean over the past 60 years at the bottom of the seas.

The most important elements of this evidence are not even new. They were observed, recorded, documented and analyzed by the first great generation of observational European scientists 200 years ago Louis Agassiz, Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt. They were acknowledged by Charles Darwin himself.

But Darwin, who openly admitted that his vague sloppy and unscientific fantasies of evolution through only the mechanism of natural selection required those “millions and millions and billions of billions ” of years acknowledged the abundant evidence of global geological evidence he saw with his own eyes on the Voyage of the Beagle.

Far from being one of the greatest voyages of scientific discovery and enlightenment in human history, the Voyage of the Beagle proved to be in reality its exact opposite, – an obsessive denial of the evidence of the real violent and recent catastrophic history of our planet available, obvious, observed and recorded on every side.

Why did Darwin do this? The cynical, humanly repulsive but personally exceptionally cunning and shrewd auto magnate and billionaire Henry Ford famously observed that every person has two reasons for saying or doing something – A good reason and the real reason. The real reason why so many generations of scientists shaped and dominated by the worship of Darwin and the theory of evolution by natural selection

The good reason is even more revealing and compelling. By the time Darwin published his “Origin of the Species” in 1859 in confident, globally supreme Imperial Victorian England, the theory of uniformity had already displaced catastrophism for the previous 30 years.

Like Green environmentalism today, it was in fact a secular religion.

It was embraced by political liberals who believed it was the rational scientific spear through the heart of the benighted religious Christian obscurantism, based on a literal reading of the Bible that had held humanity in darkness for thousands of years.

But here we come to the extraordinary paradox and conundrum at the heart of the theory of uniformitarianism. It was developed by an English lawyer and energetically popularized with relentless energy and productivity by another one Charles Lyell in his massive “Principles of Geology”, published in three volumes from 1830 to 1833. Lyell lived another 42 years and spent all of them actively propagating his cause. That cause was never objective scientific inquiry:It was the propagation of political liberalism through banishing any evidence of catastrophic, or supposedly divine violent intervention in the geological history of the earth.

In the model of every significant scientific revolution since, Lyell’s cause was then taken up by a small inner circle or cabal of politically motivated enthusiasts and influential opinion makers through the geological society of London which then metastasized into the national geological society of England.

On what field evidence did Lyell base his mountain of conclusions? On none whatsoever: For he was a lawyer, not a geologist. He never did any field work in his life. He simply, as a good lawyer does, interpreted and distorted and suppressed all available evidence to make the strongest case for his brief possible., Fair mindedness and any dispassionate quest for “the truth” never came into it.

Yet neither James Hutton, the pioneering ideologist of uniformitarianism– nor Lyell nor any of their colleagues were professionally trained or experienced geologists themselves at all. .

In his groundbreaking 1974 paper, “Catastrophism and Uniformity: A Probe into the Origins of the 1832 Gestalt Shift in Geology, Dr. George Grinnell, a professor of history at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, discovered, that the London  Geological Society, which gave birth to the uniformitarian paradigm, did not originally consistent of a group of practicing field geologists but was comprised of gentlemen (no ladies), Members of Parliament, clergymen and lawyers who were primarily concerned with the political and theological implications of geology at the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832 when the concept of monarchical sovereignty was being challenged by the Whigs and defended by the Tories.”

Were there then no geologists at all in England in the first half of the 19th century? On the contrary: There were already hundreds of them and more with every year. They were in intense demand.

They were employed by the great railroad, canal-building, mining and construction companies and by the famous engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and later by the railroad barons of North America to build bridges, tunnels and railroad lines and systems across the entire northern hemisphere of the world in the first and greatest Industrial Revolution.

In other words, they were too busy actually making things and doing their jobs to come up with comforting fairy tales or fables about the world to explain all the evidence away.

By the time the actual real professional geologists of 19th century England started wandering into the London Geological Society and its myriad spinoffs and emulators, it was too late. The intellectual, conceptual high ground had already been seized by the politically liberal, ideological uniformitarians. And there was no question of open or fair debate.

Open criticism and skepticism was mercilessly and consistently crushed. To quote Dr. Grinnell again, “Once in control, the Liberals attempted to cement their hegemony by repressing by repressing the catastrophists.”

As a consequence, Grinnel continued ,”In the ensuing years of the 19th Century, geology became fully professional and dogmatic. It became a scientific heresy to believe in the catastrophist theory

But also, why did the intellectual classes of first England and then the rest of the industrializing world that looked to it embrace the theories of uniformity so passionately? As Grinnell pointed out in his brilliant and now forgotten pioneering paper almost half a century ago, the liberal myth of scientific objectivity and respect for facts and evidence was in reality always a lie.

Scientific orthodoxy progressed and triumphed by suppressing scientific methodology and conclusions, not by embracing them. And this conclusion was eagerly embraced by the so-called enlightened classes for the next 170 years.

On the contrary, whenever the obvious evidence of geological and archaeological upheaval around the world was pointed out or documented by field researchers over the next 200 years, it was repeatedly explained away with the most absurd and ludicrous rationalizations.

But why was this done and why was it so immediately, universally and consistently believed?

Here again, the most obvious and therefore intellectually unsatisfying of answers is the correct one. Human beings believed that the earth had been – and has been – a safe and stable, predictable world for millions and millions and billions of years because they wanted to believe it.

Throughout history, no primal fear not even that of death, of conquest, rape enslavement or hideous epidemic disease has ever shown comparable power to that of Divine Judgment or destruction from the heavens.

Over the generations, a handful of pioneering scholars have explored why this should be so?

The example of Venus as a literal hell planet has been displayed before the human race as an example of the Judgment that awaits us all and our blessed environment unless as a species, we renounce fossil fuels and in practice deindustrialize.

Venus is presented as a twin planet of Earth, of comparable ancient age and certainly it is of almost the same size Literally nothing was known about the surface, atmospheric and internal conditions of our nearest planetary neighbor in the Solar System until the Soviet and US probes of the early 1960s conducted their first astonishing flybys and investigations.

In recent years, pioneering researchers have documented how immense qualities of the most fertile soils on earth such as the American Midwest or or the Black Earth regions of Southern Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus may only be a few thousands years old and that they were most likely deposited by enormous continent -spanning waves of oceanic waters or even pouring down from immense cometary bodies in close cosmic flybys.

The traditions of native peoples across from the Atlantic Ocean to South Asia suggest similar origins for the vast sand deserts that buried what had previously been fertile lands filled with vegetation, wildlife and human habitation.

These transformations did not come slowly and gently over millions and millions of years. They occurred suddenly and violently in a matter of days or even hours. And consequently the geological time scale to interpret and measure them must literally be foreshortened by factors of millions not even thousands . Yet the monumental upheaval required to re-envision the entire world this way is so great that almost no one is capable of it.

Ironically, it is the more literalist and religious of individuals, and those who around the world still clung to the memories of their cherished ancestral cultures, from the one billion adherents of Hinduism in India to the proud and gritty survivors of the great Native Nations of North America, who have the least difficulty in acknowledging and embracing these truths that ought to be self-evident – yet somehow are not.

But today, we no longer can indulge the luxury of patience, tolerance and turning our heads away from the evidence of the nightmarish events that shaped our religions, global belief systems, fears, terrors and systems of emotional propriation of the threatening forces of Nature.

Since 1945, Humanity has seized to itself the fiundamental destructive powers of the Universe and immediately thereafter, its two dominant powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, eagerly launched on a manic, even demented quest to make the most enormous destructive weapons systems posisble on a  scale never before thought imaginable.

Today, our most imminent threat is not that some single anonymous minor asteroid or comet might impinge upon our earthly paradise, but that we may carelessly plunge into annihilating it ourselves at the press of a button.

In this terrifying new world that threatens to inflame us all, our most pressing need is to understand where we came from, what our past as a species and as a planet really is: In other words, why we are as we are.

To meet this challenge, complacent, crass ignorance, stupidity, blindness and amnesia are not enough. They will not cut it.

The catastrophic past of the Earth and the survival of the human race upon it must at last be addressed.

Header image: futureisgreat.com

About the author: Martin Sieff is former Chief Foreign Correspondent of The Washington Times and former Managing Editor, International Affairs and Chief News Analyst for United Press International and is the author of seven published books (so far). Since 1973, he has been a prolific and productive scholar in the study of catastrophism and the reinterpretation of ancient and classical history in the light of it.

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