ted@imsvax.UUCP (06/01/84)
Current moon capture theories undoubtedly see this event as seperated
from us by the usual hundred million years or so. The ancient world viewed
this event as having occured within the age of man and to judge by their
writings, retained a racial memory of the event. Greek and Roman authors
writers, including Democritus, Anaxagoras, Lucian, and Appolonius Rhodius
refered to the Arcadians of ancient Greece as "proselenes" because they
claimed to have inhabited their land since before the moon. Plutarch,
in "The Roman Questions", wrote that "These were arcadians of Evander's
following, the so-called pre-luner people". Similar traditions existed
in other parts of the world.
It is the notion of uniformity and of huge expanses of time being needed
for all evolutionary, geological, and solar system level events and changes
which sets modern evolution theory and most geological theories of origins
apart from reality. The ancients, who lived closer to these events, believed
changes occured suddenly, that cosmic violence had gotten out of hand on a
regular basis in an age about as ancient to them as their age is to us. Such
events included the universal deluge, the meteorite storm which ruined Sodom
and Gomorrah, the disaster which occured at the time of Joshua Ben Nun and
which Greek legends refer to as the ekpirosis at the time of Phaeton, a story
which Plato says "has the form of a myth but actually signifies a declination
in the bodies revolving in the heavens (planets)".
All current methods of fixing dates for ancient events rely on assumptions
that conditions and rates of change in all ages never varied from what we can
observe today. Radiocarbon dating assumes that the present ratios of radio
carbon to ordinary carbon held good in all ages. The method of dating
major geological epochs by layers of sediment between them and the earths
surface assume present rates of sedimentation held through all ages. It
seems obvious to me that any cosmic disaster of a global nature would mark
a line beyond which these methods can only yeild non-sensical results.
Unless modern scientists get rid of the idea of millions and billions of
years in every theory regarding origins, unless they come to grips with the
reality of catastrophism and stop deluding themselves into believing that
all of mankinds traditions and ancient writings are fairy-tales, and unless
they come to accept the Velikovskian notion of cataclysmic evolution laid
out in "Earth in Upheavel", they had best get used to coming in last in
debates with the likes of the reverend Dr. Falwell, as they did in Roanoke.