Fountains of the deep, new evidence

OK, I confess that I'm still pumped up by Bill Moyers' PBS interviews with Joseph Campbell about mythology.Most people treat the term "myth" much the same wrong way that they treat the term "theory". To most people, "myth" means some fanciful story that is completely false. Instead (trying to channel Campbell here, which is made even bizaare by being attempted by a member of the Clan Donald, arch-enemies of the Campbells), myths are fundamentally important stories that more than true. But in myths, it is the fundamental themes of the story that are of ultimate importance, while the details are unimportant. It's like what our Rabbinic Literature prof, an old-school rabbi, taught us about haggadah, teachings that use stories. He likened them to jokes. The punch line (or the lesson to be delivered) is always the same, but the build-up to that punch-line can vary very greatly. For example, I'm sure (though I have never seen one yet, so please promise me that you will not start that trend) that there are stories circulating around about some kid who saves a man from drowning and he turns out to be the President, Barack Obama, whereupon the man saved from drowning promises anything the kid wants, whereupon he only asks that his father never ever learns of what he had just done. That same story has circulated around for many decades, with versions being attributed to saving Hitler or saving FDR -- please consult snopes.com for more information. The build-up can vary greatly and is mostly unimportant in its details; it's only the punch-line that actually matters.Look at all those creation myths. They all vary greatly in the details of the story, but are those details really that important? Christian fundamentalists think they are, but then they are so very wrong about everything else, so why should we expect anything different? Instead, what is really important is the theme that we are important in some manner. And that there is a reason for why things are the way that they are.So my point is that, if you are looking past the details of the particular myth and are looking at what the myth is teaching, then you are on the right path. But if you are getting hung up on the details of the story, then you are hopelessly lost. While I was in USAF tech school, a fellow student was taking flying lessons. During one flight, he was concentrating so much on the instruments that his instructor had to tell him to pull his head out of the cockpit. Similarly, in naval navigation (I followed my six active duty USAF years with 29 years in the Navy Reserve) you use dead reckoning to predict where you should be, but then (as per my Quartermaster course) you periodically poke your head out to see where you really are by getting an actual fix.On my Palm Pilot I have a Carl Sagan quote about the difference between physics and metaphysics, but I cannot access that on my system right now. The idea is that in both systems you have a promising idea and you pursue that idea. In physics, you submit that promising idea to testing in the lab and find that it turns out to be wrong, whereupon you drop that idea as being wrong. The only difference is that metaphysics has no laboratory in which to test its ideas. I would say that theology shares that same lacking that metaphysics has.The inherent strength of the scientific method and all disciplines that employ the scientific method is that they are not only able to pull their head out of the cockpit and actually verify where they are, but that that kind of verification is fully expected of them. The inherent weakness of theologies and other similar endeavors is that they are not allowed to pull their heads out of the cockpit and that they are very actively discouraged from doing so.Now, regarding creation myths, there was an article in the Creation/Evolution journal that examined the creation myths of the Mandan American Indian tribes over time. Now, 19th Century culture in Europe was fueled by the Romantic movement which got into all kinds of strange stuff like the supernatural, the macabre, and nationalism. The Brothers Grimm were linguists who did very serious work, but at the same time collected many folk tales, fairy tales. The Romantic conceit was that these folk tales and traditions went back for several centuries. But in reality, those "ancient traditions" actually only went back two or three generations at most. There was a famous "uncontaminated" African tribe with "no contact from the outside world." Their mythology involved the brightest non-solar star in the sky, Sirius, the "Dog Star" (ie, the brightest star in the constellation of Canus Major, "Big Dog"). Anthropologists studying this tribe learned that their mythology mentioned that Sirius had a companion. Yes, Sirius A has a white dwarf companion, Sirius B, which wasn't discovered until modern times. How could they have ever known about that? Well, they are not perfectly isolated. When word of Sirius B filtered in, their oral tradition immediately incorporated that new information. That is the nature of oral tradition. It is fluid and incorporates new information immediately.Here is that issue of Creation/Evolution from Summer 1993: Creation/Evolution, Summer 1993. The article is on page 20, "Creation Science and Creation Myths: An Ethnological Perspective". Share and enjoy!Are you by any chance a believer in white supremacy? I am making no kind of judgement about you here. But here is what the Mandan believed of the white Man at one point:

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Both the Lord of Life and First Man created the White Man, who possessed wampum and lived at this time on the other side of the "Great Water," and who had been conceived from the hair of floating, putrid wolves that had been tossed into the "North Ocean" (a possible reference to Hudson Bay?

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The interesting thing about the Mandan (made a bit more personal to me by my having been stationed in North Dakota) is in how much their creation myths changed in such a short time. Combine that with the conceits and realities of 19th century Romanticism. Now go back to Babylon. It was during the Babylonian Exile that the efforts to commit the writing down of the Jews' oral tradition was made. In Babylon, the Jews were faced with assimilation, so they had to write everything down to oppose assimilation. And in that rush to write, how much foreign contamination made its way in? Gilgamesh anybody?So, Colbard, what do you understand about creation myths?

For disavowing "creation science" as much as you do, you still depend almost entirely on what they say. Like the entire confusion over what "catastrophism" and "uniformitarianism" were and are. As I wrote back in 1990 on CompuServe (reposted at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/geology.html) -- IOW, these are things that we have known for a very long time:

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Another thing to remember is that Flood Geologists are not catastrophists. Catastrophism was prevalent in the early 19th century as an opposing view to uniformitarianism. Both camps agreed that the earth is very old and that the strata were laid down over a very long time. Where they did disagree was over the role of violent events in the earth's history; the catastrophists maintained that only extremely violent events could account for the folding and tilting of the earth's strata while the uniformitarianists maintained that gradual sustained processes would have sufficed. Both groups avoided mixing science and religion and would argue for "day-age" or gap theories if pressed to reconcile geology with Genesis.

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A third group, the Scriptural Geologists, or "diluvialists", was not so reluctant. This group got their start from the 1820's work of William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick in which they argued that river valleys and certain other sedimentary deposits were the results of a recent worldwide flood. In a few years, however, Buckland's own field work started undermining diluvialism and then, with the publication of Lyell's _Principles of Geology_, both Buckland and Sedgwick abandoned diluvialism.

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But the Scriptural Geologists continued writing their views, which were hardly distinguishable from modern Flood Geologists, from the 1820's into the late 19th century. They were highly critical of catastrophists, uniformitarians, and the very founders of diluvialism alike, and Buckland and Sedgwick returned the favor with devastating rebuttals.

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Then in the 1920's and 1930's, George McCready Price revived Scriptural Geology and called it "catastrophism" even though he knew better: "The theory of 'catastrophism' as held a hundred years ago, had no resemblance to the theory here discussed, except in name." (_The Geological Ages Hoax_, George McCready Price, 1931, Fleming H. Revell Co., pg 101)

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Later in 1960, Henry Morris again popularized Scriptural Geology with _The Genesis Flood_, for which he had apparently drawn most of his ideas from Price. The main question now is whether Morris does not know that his stuff is not catastrophism and that the true catastrophists of the 19th century had rejected it, or whether he does know better but finds it politically expedient to avoid admitting that his Flood Geology is traditionally known as Scriptural Geology.

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Similarly, the meaning of "uniformitarianism" has changed since the early 1800's (imagine that!). Now it means that the same natural processes and physical laws have been in operation since the formation of the earth and for billions of years before that. It does not in any manner require that no sudden catastrophic events could have ever occurred, nor did it mean that in its prior early-1800's sense. Where? Because all that Google can find for that quote is your very own Message 99. Cite your source!Of course, we all know that Colbard has moved on to plague other fora with his foolishness.But just in case he checks back in:
Colbard. Before you criticize or berate science for something, first learn something about science!As I have told you repeatedly, ignorance does not work! We know that all too well. How do we knew that so well? Because we have tried it far too many times! And continue to try it!You want your children to oppose evolution? Is the solution ignorance, to keep them from ever learning anything about evolution? No! The solution is to have them learn everything they possibly can about evolution so that they will know all of its weaknesses. You want your children to oppose science? Is the solution ignorance, to keep them from learning what science is and how it works and what it actually teaches? No! You want them to learn everything they possibly can about science so as to know all of its weaknesses. Have you learned nothing from Scripture (albeit the Chinese variety):

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Sun Tzu, Scroll III (Offensive Strategy):

31. Therefore I say: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.
32. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal.
33. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."

(Sun Tzu The Art of War, translation by Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963)

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We have this conceit that creationists are incapable of learning. That is not true. Creationists can indeed learn; they just simply learn the wrong lessons.For example, in the preface of his most useful book, The Age of the Earth, G. Brent Dalrymple tells of his first encounter with "creation science" and motivation for writing his book, which was the 1975 visit and presentation to the US Geological Survey (USGS) at Menlo Park by the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) luminaries and co-creators of "creation science", Drs. Henry Morris and Duane Gish. The overwhelming feedback that Gish and Morris received were the innumerable corrections of their abysmal misunderstanding of thermodynamics. From that, did the creationists learn that there were problems with their understanding of thermodynamics that needed to be corrected? No, what they learned was to never ever again present their claims to an audience that had any understanding of the science that they were zealously misrepresenting.Creationists are indeed capable of learning from their mistakes, but they invariably learn the wrong lessons.Colbard has learned from his time here. And has turned yet again towards the Dark Side of the Farce.