VELIKOVSKY STILL COLLIDING
--- E-Skeptic <skeptic-admin@lyris.net>
wrote:
From: E-Skeptic <skeptic-admin@lyris.net>
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 10:16:17 -0700
Subject: E-SKEPTIC: VELIKOVSKY STILL COLLIDING
To: "Skeptics Society" <skeptics@lyris.net>
Reply-to: E-Skeptic <SkepticMag@aol.com>
INTRODUCTION: The following essay complements David Morrison's
article on the Velikovsky controversy fifty years out in the
current issue of Skeptic magazine by describing (a) the reaction
of Velikovskians since 1985 to the negative evidence in the
Greenland ice cores mentioned by Morrison and (b) the major
centers of interest in Velikovsky today:
WORLDS STILL COLLIDING
A Velikovsky Update
Leroy Ellenberger
----------------------------------------------------
ONE MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT THAT THE Velikovsky movement would have
ended with the "crucial test" of the Greenland ice
cores (Kronos 10:1, 1984), first proposed by R.G.A. Dolby in
1977.1 A visible layer of
debris in the ice caused by Velikovsky's planet-juggling
catastrophes, especially from the 40 years of darkness at the
Exodus, was never found. In 1986-7, Lynn Rose, a Velikovsky
devotee (and then philosophy professor at SUNY-Buffalo) writing
in Kronos, suggested Velikovsky's signal is the ice in the
so-called "brittle" zones of deep cores, deposited
between Venus and Mars episodes, when supposedly Earth's axis had
no tilt. Assuming Velikovsky correct, Rose discounted the
fact that the dates of the brittle zones did not match
Velikovsky's dates and ignored the concordance of tree rings and
ocean sediments with ice cores. This, of course, makes a
mockery of the "interdisciplinary synthesis" heralded
by Velikovskians. In 1994 Charles Ginenthal, writing in The
Velikovskian, suggested the bulk of the Greenland ice was
deposited almost overnight. With Kronos defunct, Sean
Mewhinney refuted Rose in 1990 with "Ice Cores & Common
Sense" in Catastrophism & Ancient History2
and Ginenthal in 1998 with "Minds in Ablation" at (http://www.pibburns.com/smmia.htm),
exposing their absurdities in exhaustive detail. [Another
critical examination of Rose's bizarre and deliberately
misleading reaction to the record in the Greenland ice cores,
"Litmus Tests in the Ice", was prepared in 1992 for
publication in Aeon and is available via e-mail by request from
this writer. The reader should understand that (a) in the
GRIP and GISP cores from Summit Camp, Greenland, the top-most
84,000 annual layers of ice are visible to the naked eye and (b)
in the glaciers of Tibet and Peru the most recent 4,000+ annual
dust layers in the ice are also visible to the naked eye; and NO
indication of any cataclysmic episode such as described by
Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision is apparent by gross
confrontation or detected via instrumentation.] This denial of
the clear message from the ice cores is an example of
"invincible ignorance," reminiscent of the flat
earthers' rejection in 1870 of Alfred Russel Wallace's proof of
the Earth's curvature, tested on the Old Bedford Canal. [On 26
April 1994, on talk.origins, David Boucher replied cogently to
John Godowski's "VELIKOVSKY--an approach to heresy" (a
reposting by Walter Alter of Greg O'Rear's 30 July 1993 post),
"The objection to Velikovsky has nothing to do with 'HERESY'
or resistance to unconventional ideas--it is rather that
Velikovskianism is an absurd fantasy, on a par with a belief that
the earth is flat." Interestingly, this 132 message
thread can still be browsed at <www.googlegroups.com>.
Like all "true believers", and despite the
various pleas for an "objective re-examination of the
evidence", doctrinaire Velikovskians, such as Lynn Rose,2a
C.J. Ransom, Lewis Greenberg, Irving Wolfe, and Charles
Ginenthal, have no respect for the absolute veto power of
negative evidence.3]
[As recently as July 2007 in an email forum Dave Talbott (see below) insisted that he had no confidence in the Greenland ice core record because, as far as he was concerned, there was no way to know for sure that one or many thousands of annual layers of deposition were not melted/washed away in some climatic warm period or some sort of cataclysm. If Talbott had ever bothered really to read the scientific ice core literature, as opposed to Ginenthal's distortion of it, he would know that the climatic profiles for the Holocene revealed by the several recent ice cores from Greenland are corroborated by the profiles obtained from the ice cores from Antarctica, Tibet, Peru, and elsewhere. This is strong presumptive evidence that no gross melting/washing away of ice layers has occurred in Greenland. This is real "cohairence", but Talbott either ignores it or dismisses it *because* it contradicts his idée fixe.]
Most Velikovskians in America have also spurned the
modern catastrophist alternative to Velikovsky's scenario
proposed by British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier
starting with The Cosmic Serpent (1982). These
"neo-catastrophists" use myth to inform our
understanding of the ancient sky, but reject Velikovsky's
colliding planets. For them, humanity's archetypal fear of
comets and the origin of sky-combat myths result from Earth's
intermittent, energetic interaction during the past 10,000 years
with the then young Taurid meteor stream, radiating from near the
Pleiades (http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html#ST).
Although not accepted by most astronomers, at least this
hypothesis does not contradict the laws of physics. The
growing list of scientists and scholars who are favorably
disposed towards Clube and Napier's work now called
"coherent catastrophism" includes astronomers
Mark Bailey and Duncan Steel, physicists Fred Hoyle and Gerrit
Verschuur, geographer Richard Huggett, and dendrochronologist
Mike Baillie, whose 1999 book Exodus to Arthur makes the case for
a cosmic vector associated with several major global climate
crises in the past 5000 years. Regardless, Velikovskians
reject it because they (1) have blindly accepted Velikovsky's
false premise that planets were the first
gods, when planets were only relatively recently associated
with deities whose earlier origin had nothing to do with planets,
and (2) believe Venus really was once a comet, when it is too
massive ever to have had a visible tail as real comets do.
Most surviving Velikovskians now see Worlds in
Collision and Ages in Chaos as seriously flawed, if not
completely wrong. Many instead propose that the real
interplanetary catastrophes occurred earlier than Velikovsky
thought. Adopting the "Saturn theory," inspired
by an unpublished Velikovsky manuscript alluding to the ancient
Sun-Saturn polarity (http://www.catastrophism.com/texts/sun-and-saturn/),
they claim that, during the "Golden Age" ruled by the
god Saturn/Kronos, Earth was part of a "polar
configuration" that orbited the Sun near Earth's present
location so that a nearby Saturn loomed continuously over the
north pole as a rotating crescent. Situated between Earth
and Saturn were Venus and Mars with Jupiter hidden behind Saturn!
[In addition, Mars is claimed to have oscillated annually between
Earth and Venus producing the so-called "descent of Mars".]
Saturnists believe (1) mythology preserves the record of that
alignment and transition to the present Solar System by 2000
B.C.E. and (2) their novel interpretation of ancient myth and
sacred symbol (which redefines such terms as "ocean,"
"sky," and "earth") gives results superior to
those of modern science. Scholars consider this a naive
re-imaging of the Greek divine succession myth: Ouranos- Kronos-
Zeus- Ares. The claimed "historical" basis for
the "Saturn theory" is greatly exaggerated.
[One might have thought that Talbott's "Saturn Myth" movement would have ended on April 29, 1997, when celestial mechanician Robert W. Bass posted to Talbott's kronia-list "The Samson Solution", the results of his analysis of the planetary orbits in the Solar System, whose Part 3 concluded: "In summary, the mutual relationships presently observed between the Sun, the Earth, its Moon, and Jupiter cannot have varied by more than 0.01 percent during the past 'several million years.' And according to the Titius-Bode empirical 'Law' . . . , Saturn's distal ratio to that of Jupiter has been least unstable if it is about 1.8, as presently observed. . . . The geophysical FACT that the Saturn Hypothesis has been _falsified_ by hard science is as certain a FACT as that Copernicus was correct about the earth moving around the Sun." It seems there is no fact firmly established enough to trump Talbott's confidence in the validity of his necessarily subjective interpretation of ancient myths, religion, and their accompanying symbols.]
Significantly, the ice core evidence also disproves
the "polar configuration," not to mention the
conservation laws of energy and angular momentum. Having failed
to make a prima facie case, the Saturnists shift the
burden-of-proof by inviting "scholarly critics" to
disprove their model by identifying "a single recurring
mythical theme not predicted by the model." They
simply do not believe that their coherent, internally consistent
narrative, based solely on mythological exegesis, can be wrong.
Their leading theorist remarked in 1987, at a time when he did
not appreciate the difference between zenith and pole, "it
is not possible that a simply-stated theory could predict all
mythical archetypes but be false." To the contrary,
systems of thought can be internally consistent yet bear no
resemblance to physical reality. Coherence is no guarantor
of truth.
Interestingly, in 1987 an essay by independent
scholar and Sanskrit specialist Roger Ashton, "The Bedrock
of Myth", was accepted for publication in the then fledgling
"Saturnist" journal Aeon. Drawing on the contents
of the Hindu Rgveda, Ashton showed that the "polar
configuration" imagery can be explained without recourse to
planets. Although Aeon subsequently suppressed this paper,
it is now being posted on the WWW: (http://www.saturnian.org/bedrock.htm).
Since conventional physics precludes any such
arrangement, Velikovskians have adopted the plasma-theoretic
"electric universe" model, propounded in the 1970s by
civil engineer Ralph Juergens, as a deus ex machina.
Supposedly the Sun is an electric discharge powered by an influx
of galactic electrons. Based largely on various analogies,
this "theory" has no quantitative basis and, despite
all the hand waving, is disproved by everything known about the
Sun's behavior; see (http://www.tim-thompson.com/electric-sun.html).
Juergens' work is carried on by the "Holoscience"
project (http://www.holoscience.com/),
organized by Wal Thornhill, a retired computer systems engineer
who now bills himself as an "Australian physicist" on
the basis of his 1964 B.S. degree.
What of Velikovsky's revision of ancient history?
Chronology revisionists exist today in two schools: modest and
drastic. The modest revisionists shorten Egyptian
chronology less drastically than Velikovsky's 500 year
compression, eliminating only a century or two by various
schemata, e.g., (http://www.centuries.co.uk).
The drastic revisionists claim, in essence, that the second
millennium B.C.E. is a fiction that duplicates the first
millennium; see (http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ancient.htm).
Today, interest in Velikovskian studies resides
primarily with four groups: (1) Saturnists are the most visible
with the journal Aeon (http://www.aeonjournal.com/)
and Kronia Group (http://www.kronia.com)
{founded in 1987 by Dave Talbott, author of The Saturn Myth
(1980), whose efforts as publisher of Pensee arguably led to the
1974 AAAS Symposium where Carl Sagan and Velikovsky clashed},
which publishes the electronic newsletter Thoth, produces the
Mythscape video series, and runs the moderated kroniatalk
listserve. Their alternative-science conferences include
invited speakers with bona fide scientific credentials, such as
plasma physicist Anthony Peratt and astronomer Halton Arp, who
provide a veneer of scholarly respectability, with the
Intersect2001 world conference held July 2001 at Laughlin, NV, (http://www.kronia.com/intersect2.html);
(2) Charles Ginenthal founded The Velikovskian in 1992 (http://www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovskian/index.htm)
and has produced several books and sponsored annual conferences,
recently with Cosmos & Chronos, the original Velikovsky
discussion group founded in 1965 by geologist H.H. Hess at
Princeton University and now headed by C.J. Ransom in Texas; (3)
The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in Great Britain,
established in 1974 (http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/),
publishes Chronology & Catastrophism Review and, while it is
nominally interested in catastrophism and ancient chronology and
its leadership embraces the work of Clube and Napier, a large
portion of the membership has a strong affection for Velikovsky
and an indiscriminate interest in the work of other distinctly
fringe writers; and (4) The Velikovsky Archive is a web resource
(http://www.varchive.org)
containing many manuscripts, lectures, correspondence, and the
1972 Canadian television documentary "Velikovsky: The Bonds
of the Past."
Velikovsky continues to be revered especially by
those who, for a variety of reasons, distrust mainstream science
and scholarship, believing they are, in good part, socially
constructed consensus mythologies, and believe he was correct on
three points: (1) the present order of the Solar System is
recent, (2) electromagnetism plays a more important role in the
cosmos than generally appreciated, and (3) the chronology of
ancient Egypt is seriously flawed. The resistance of
Velikovsky's successors to all the contradictory physical
evidence mounting since 1977 indicates they are demonstrably
incapable of changing their core belief, namely, recent
interplanetary catastrophism. Velikovskian believers have
often subordinated their judgment to that of a charismatic
authority figure and, as with other "true believers,"
secular no less than religious, no amount of evidence is going to
change their minds. As Carol Tavris incisively noted in
1984 regarding Freud, "One of the sturdiest findings in the
slushy social sciences is that when such a belief system meets
contrary evidence -- when faith meets facts -- the facts are
sacrificed." By contrast, the revolutionary terminal
Cretaceous impact 65 million years ago was accepted during this
time by most scientists within a decade.
________________________________
[Occasionally a new champion for Velikovsky comes on the scene, as science fiction author and electrical engineer James P. Hogan did in 2004 with a chapter in his book Kicking the Sacred Cow. Hogan relies excessively on diehard Velikovskians such as Charles Ginenthal and Lynn Rose while ignoring the incisive criticism of such as Henry Bauer, David Morrison, Sean Mewhinney, and Ellenberger. Also in 2004, a similarly unenlightened book, The Velikovsky Inheritance: An Essay in the History of Ideas, by David Marriott appeared in England, 99% of whose contents is based on pre-1979 material.]
1 [Earlier in 1973 at the seminar "Methodological Aspects of the Velikovsky Controversy" at Univ. of Leeds, England, R.G.A. Dolby noted: "Velikovsky failed to show that his catastrophism was the only reasonable alternative to the current orthodoxies: certainly on a scientist's reading, his theory was far richer in anomaly" (Dolby, "What Can We Usefully Learn from the Velikovsky Affair?" Social Studies of Science 5, 1975, 165-175; revised as "On Schools of Thought" in S.I.S. Review I:3, 1976, 26-30. Predictably, Dolby's candor did not endear himself to Velikovsky and his supporters. Lynn Rose has deigned not to engage Dolby as he has engaged other scholarly critics whom he holds in contempt. Dolby is one of several unsung heroes from the early 1970s whose incisive criticism was ignored by Pensee, and later Kronos, as it fostered the illusion that it was providing complete coverage of discussions of Velikovsky in the media. Other critics whose insights have been ignored include David Leveson, A Sense of the Earth (1971); Wesley Salmon, "Confirmation" in Scientific American, May 1973; letters in Science Forum from D. Walton and R. Steven Turner (June 1974) and J.W. Grove (August 1974); and James Fitton, "Velikovsky Mythistoricus" in Chiron I:1&2 (1974).]
2 [For a copy of Mewhinney's "Ice Cores & Common Sense" (60 pp.), send $5.00 to Leroy Ellenberger, 3929 Utah Street, St. Louis, MO 63116 U.S.A., and also receive "Applied Philosophy of Science 101: The Annotated Rose", a devastating 53 pt. deconstruction of Lynn Rose, "The Censorship of Velikovsky's Interdisciplinary Synthesis" in Pensee I (1972), reprinted in Velikovsky Reconsidered (1976), prepared by Bauer, Ellenberger, and Mewhinney for distribution at the August 1990 "Reconsidering Velikovsky" Conference in Toronto.]
2a [Lynn Rose has expended much effort since 1972, often with co-author Raymond C. Vaughan, analyzing the observations of Venus preserved on the "Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa" in order to show that the observations do not agree with the present motion of Venus as observed from Earth. In 2002 John P. Britton (Yale, Ph.D. 1966), a student of the history of ancient astronomy and Dibner Institute Fellow at M.I.T. (2003-2004), read Rose's publications on the Venus Tablet and reported to this writer: "Rose is an aggressive crank, entirely unconcerned with the truth, with a substantial capacity for both intellectual dissembling and nasty, ad hominem attacks. Anyone who cannot recognize the nature of his nonsense seems beyond hope to me" (7/18/2002).]
[Earlier, Britton had offered: "...In general I think Gingerich had Rose about right: a resourceful, shyster lawyer with a crooked client, arguing persistently, but disingenuously, from the inconsistencies and imperfections of the historical record (and when useful, citing misunderstandings by early Assyriologists). Basically, if one takes out the puffery, innuendo, pop psychology, and ad hominem attacks, Rose's positive arguments boil down to: a) a misinterpretation of the early Sumerian symbol for a bundle of reeds [representing the door posts on the birthing huts that were sacred to Inanna, still seen today in reed huts in southern Iraq] as a comet; and b) an assertion that the Venus tablets constitute no evidence of events in the 17th, 16th, or 15th centuries B.C., because calculation ought to agree with the preserved text in more instances than it does....I have little to add to what Huber has said with great clarity and credibility re: the Venus tablets and chronological issues in general....However, a few points may be worth noting....4) It is telling that in criticizing Sach's annotated contents entry for LBAT 1560+1561 (BM 34227+42033) -- which was hardly intended as a critical discussion of the text -- Rose incorrectly claims that Sachs attributes 34227 to Section I and that 42033 belongs to the 'Corrigenda Section' (S-5). In fact, Sachs notes (correctly) that 34277 'presents problems', something confirmed and discussed at length in RP [i.e., Reiner & Pingree, The Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa, Malibu, 1975], and only line 5' of 34277 (not 42033) represents S-5. Sachs does misattribute lines 6'ff of 42033 to omens 14ff of VTA [i.e., Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa] instead of omens 38-42 of Section IV (which begin with a recapitulation of omen 14). Rose is certainly aware of the discussion in RP and apart from the fact that his own description of this text is less accurate than what he castigates Sachs for, his failure to mention Sachs' correct observation of the text's peculiar problems is, once again, essentially dishonest. 5) Finally, I would note that his snide and quite outrageous attack [in Pearlman (ed.), Gould & Velikovsky, 1996] on Sachs' bonafides notwithstanding, Rose does not address Sachs' most serious criticisms of Velikovsky, which apply equally to him, namely their disregard or ignorance of the substantial evidence, textual, linguistic and archaeological by which Mesopotamian chronology is securely extended back to the middle of the 14th century B.C. [See: http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/vsachs.html.] All in all, I find little but stubborn fanaticism and sophistry in Rose's rantings, which are too often presented in dishonest fashion. Since he clearly has no interest beyond advancing his own view, I can't see why anyone bothers with him..." (12/12/2000). Contact the writer for a copy of the full report.]
3 [The disdain of Velikovsky's supporters for "crucial tests" comes honestly since their exemplar emphasized confirmation from supposedly "correct predictions" over falsification from "crucial tests". When Velikovsky wrote Worlds in Collision, he reasonably believed no trees survived the first encounter with Venus 3500 years ago because the oldest trees then known, the Giant Sequoia, started growing 3300 years ago. Then the bristlecone pines in California were found to be over 4000 years old. When I first met Velikovsky, at his invitation, on Palm Sunday 1978, the survival of the bristlecone pines was on my list of questions. When this question was asked, Velikovsky responded immediately and with the nonchalance of a Borsht Belt comic, "So? They survived." Obviously to him, their survival did not mean Venus did not nearly collide with Earth "when the heavens rained fire, continents writhed and shattered apart, and most of mankind was destroyed" (from the cover puffery on Pocketbook edition of Worlds in Collision).]
________________________________
Leroy Ellenberger is a chemical engineer with graduate degrees in
finance and operations research. He was "Executive Secretary
& Senior Editor" for the Velikovsky journal Kronos,
"devil's advocate" for Aeon, and a one-time confidant
to Velikovsky. His "An Antidote to Velikovskian
Delusions" appeared in Skeptic, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1995 (http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html)
and his "A lesson from Velikovsky," in Skeptical
Inquirer, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1986 (http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/vlesson.html).
His e-mail address is (c.leroy@rocketmail.com).