Elia
Well-known member
Maybe you would like to respond to Gould's rebuttal of this book?
Bs"d
There is no rebuttal. As Gould himself says, he is not qualified to comment on it, much less to rebut it.
I read "Earth in Upheaval", and it cannot be rebutted. It is just a whole lot of observations, which cannot be rebutted. The facts are the facts. You cannot rebut facts.
Here is an excerpt of the Foreword of Earth in Upheaval. It is tailor made for you guys:
In Worlds in Collison I presented the chronicles of two the very last series of such catastrophes, those that visited our earth in the second and first millennia before the present era. Since these upheavals occurred in historical times, when the art of writing had already been perfected in the centers of ancient civilization, I described them mainly from historical documents, relying on celestial charts, calendars, and sundials and water clocks discovered by archaeologists,and drawing also upon classical literature, the sacred literature of East and West, the epics of the northern and the oral traditions of from races, primitive peoples Lapland to the South Seas. Geological vestiges of the events narrated in documents and traditions were indicated only here and there, when I felt that the immediate testimony of the rocks must be presented along with the historical evidence. I closed that description of cataclysmic events with a promise to attempt, at a later date, the reconstruction of similar global catastrophes of earlier times, one of them being the Deluge.
I had intended, after piecing together the history of these earlier global upheavals, to present geological and paleontological material to support the testimony of man. But the reception of Worlds in Collision by certain scientific groups persuaded me, before reviving the pageant of earlier catastrophes, to present at least some of the evidence of the rocks, which is as insistent as that carried down to our times by written records and by word of mouth. This testimony is never given in metaphors; and as with the pages of the Old Testament or of the Iliad, nothing can be changed in it. Pebbles and rocks and mountains and the bottom of the sea will bear witness. Do they know of the days, recent and ancient, when the harmony of this world was interrupted by the forces of nature? Have they entombed innumerable creatures and encased them in rock? Have they seen the ocean moving on continents and continents under water? Was this earth and the sliding of its seas showered with stones and covered expanse by ashes? Were its forests, uprooted by hurricanes and set afire, covered by tides carrying sand and debris from the bottom of the oceans? It takes millions of years for a log to be turned into coal but only a single hour when burning. Here lies the core of the problem: Did the earth in a slow a added change process, year to a year and a million years to a million, the peaceful ground of nature being the broad arena of the contest of in which the fittest survived? Or did it throngs, happen, too, that the very arena itself, infuriated, rose the contestants and made an end of their against battles?
I present here some pages from the book of nature. I have excluded from them all references to ancient literature, traditions, and folklore; and this I have done with intent, so that careless critics cannot decry the entire work as "tales and legends." Stones and bones are the witnesses. Mute as they are, only they will testify, clearly and unequivocally. Yet dull ears and dimmed eyes will deny this evidence, and the dimmer the vision, the louder and more insistent will be the voices of protestation.
This book was not written for those who swear by the verba magistri, the holiness of their school wisdom; and they may debate it without reading it, as well.
I. Velikovsky
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