Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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There was once a time when geologists routinely accepted catastrophes as explanationsfor the history of the Earth. This viewpoint eventually was abandoned for two reasons.First, geologists became aware that most features in the rocks could be understood interms of everyday processes. The physical evidence preserved in the rocks showedthat Earth history has been dominated by small-scale, gradual processes .The applicationof everyday physical laws to the past became known as uniformitarianism. The belief thatthe Earth was largely shaped by catastrophes was called catastrophism. Second, it becameevident that catastrophes could be invoked to explain anything. In the words of an earlygeologist, Charles Lyell,
"They imagined themselves sufficiently acquainted with the mutations now in progress in the animate and inanimate world, to entitle them at once to affirm, whether the solution of certain problems in geology could ever be derived from the observation of the actual economy of nature, and having decided that they could not, they felt themselves at liberty to indulge their imaginations, in guessing at what might be, rather than in inquiring what is..."
To a scientist lack of evidence means that nothing worthwhile can be known about asubject. To a pseudo scientist, lack of evidence means that all sorts of things might betrue, and if they might (no matter how improbably) be true, then it's permissible tobelieve they are true, and if it's permissible to believe they are true, then any contraryevidence could be wrong!
It appeared to them more philosophical to speculate on the possibilities of the past, than patiently to explore the realities of the present, and having invented theories under the influence of such maxims, they were consistently unwilling to test their validity by the criterion of their accordance with the ordinary operations of nature.
What an uncannily accurate description of modern pseudo science! Lyell continues:
Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, than this assumption of the discordance between the former and the existing causes of change. It produced a state of mind unfavorable in the highest conceivable degree to the candid reception of the evidence of those minute, but incessant mutations, which every part of the earth's surface is undergoing, and by which the condition of its living inhabitants is continually made to vary. The student, instead of being encouraged with the hope of interpreting the enigmas presented to him in the earth's structure,--instead of being prompted to undertake laborious inquiries into the natural history of the organic world, was taught to despond from the first. Even the mystery which invested the subject was said to constitute one of its principal charms, affording, as it did, full scope to the fancy to indulge in a boundless field of speculation.
To sum up in a very few words: catastrophes and extraordinary hypotheses are the lazyman's way of interpreting the world. It is childishly easy to come up with a catastrophethat explains not only selected facts but explains away gaps in the evidence as well. Thisis a surprising point, in view of the charges often made by pseudoscientists that orthodoxscientists are too 'unimaginative' to accept catastrophes, miracles, or the supernatural.Yet it is always the natural and mundane that is hardest to accept. In the New Testament,Christ awed the crowds everywhere except in his home town, where people were too used toseeing him in the role of an ordinary villager. Marco Polo travelled to China at a timewhen miracle tales and stories of fabulous beasts were widely accepted, yet when hereported that Asia was peopled not with strange monsters but with ordinary people doingordinary things, ordinary nations one after another seemingly forever, and that in far-offChina common paper was used for money, most people scoffed. They didn't scoff at some ofthe mythical beasts Marco Polo described; they scoffed at stories of China's cities andships built by ordinary men. We see the same theme in scientific creationism; it'sincredible that ordinary matter and the ordinary laws of chemistry and physics coculdcause life to evolve naturally; therefore we need miracles to explain life. The idea thatextraordinary things can arise from ordinary causes is one of the most daring ideas in thehistory of thought and it has always encountered bitter resistance from the unimaginative.It is the easy belief in catastrophes, miracles and the like that is conservative,unimaginative, and intellectually and spiritually dead.
The concept of uniformitarianism has been badly distorted by catastrophists. GeologistHan Kloosterman, writing about the founding of a new journal entitled CatastrophistGeology, writes: "It has been arbitrarily claimed that causes are not only naturalbut slow-acting and weak, and that their effects are never sudden, always gradual."Contrary to Kloosterman, science does not assume that the Earth or the Universe havealways been the same. Many geologists are convinced the Earth's early atmosphere was poorin free oxygen, and that the Earth did not have its present form of continental drift orplate tectonics early in its history. The early state of the Universe immediately afterthe Big Bang was radically different from the present state. Science does not evennecessarily assume that the laws of nature have always been constant; many physicists havespeculated that gravity is weakening with time or that physical "constants" likethe speed of light have changed. (So far there is no good evidence for these speculationsand a fair amount of evidence against them.) Neither does science assume that processesare always gradual, weak, or small in scale. From the Big Bang through supernovae,cratering on the planets, evidence for vast floods on Mars, and evidence for meteor impacton the Earth, science is filled with solid evidence for catastrophic events.
Many science writers, and most pseudoscientists, contrast catastrophism anduniformitarianism as if they were opposites of one another. In fact, the comparison isworse than apples and oranges; apples and oranges at least are the same general kind ofobject--fruit. Comparing catastrophism and uniformitarianism is more like comparingarmchairs and armadillos because they both begin with A; otherwise the two are entirelydifferent at every level of meaning. Catastrophism and uniformitarianism both deal withthe history of the Earth or Universe, but otherwise the two are not even the same kind ofidea. Catastrophism is a philosophy, a basic assumption that the Universe has been shapedby catastrophic events. Since it is already assumed that catastrophes have happened, theconfirming evidence for a particular catastrophe need not be very strong; if the evidenceis merely consistent with a catastrophe, that's often good enough, even if the evidence isjust as consistent with a non-catastrophic interpretation. Catastrophists tend to assumethat great effects could only have been produced by great events.
Uniformitarianism, on the other hand, makes no assumptions about the kinds of eventsthat have shaped the Universe. Uniformitarianism is simply cause and effect applied to thepast. If we see waves make ripple marks on a sandy sea bottom, and we find a rock thatappears to be made of cemented sand with ripple marks on it, we are justified in assumingthat the rock formed under the same conditions that present ripple marks form under:gentle water movements in shallow water. (There are other ways ripple marks can form, sowe would have to look for additional
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Created 8 July 1998, Last Update 9 July 1998
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