Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
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There was once a time when geologists routinely accepted catastrophes as explanations for 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 in terms of everyday processes. The physical evidence preserved in the rocks showed that Earth history has been dominated by small-scale, gradual processes .The application of everyday physical laws to the past became known as uniformitarianism. The belief that the Earth was largely shaped by catastrophes was called catastrophism. Second, it became evident that catastrophes could be invoked to explain anything. In the words of an early geologist, 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 a subject. To a pseudo scientist, lack of evidence means that all sorts of things might be true, and if they might (no matter how improbably) be true, then it's permissible to believe they are true, and if it's permissible to believe they are true, then any contrary evidence 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 pseudoscience! 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 lazy man's way of interpreting the world. It is childishly easy to come up with a catastrophe that explains not only selected facts but explains away gaps in the evidence as well. This is a surprising point, in view of the charges often made by pseudoscientists that orthodox scientists 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 to seeing him in the role of an ordinary villager. Marco Polo travelled to China at a time when miracle tales and stories of fabulous beasts were widely accepted, yet when he reported that Asia was peopled not with strange monsters but with ordinary people doing ordinary things, ordinary nations one after another seemingly forever, and that in far-off China common paper was used for money, most people scoffed. They didn't scoff at some of the mythical beasts Marco Polo described; they scoffed at stories of China's cities and ships built by ordinary men. We see the same theme in scientific creationism; it's incredible that ordinary matter and the ordinary laws of chemistry and physics could cause life to evolve naturally; therefore we need miracles to explain life. The idea that extraordinary things can arise from ordinary causes is one of the most daring ideas in the history 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. Geologist Han Kloosterman, writing about the founding of a new journal entitled Catastrophist Geology, writes: "It has been arbitrarily claimed that causes are not only natural but 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 have always been the same. Many geologists are convinced the Earth's early atmosphere was poor in free oxygen, and that the Earth did not have its present form of continental drift or plate tectonics early in its history. The early state of the Universe immediately after the Big Bang was radically different from the present state. Science does not even necessarily assume that the laws of nature have always been constant; many physicists have speculated that gravity is weakening with time or that physical "constants" like the speed of light have changed. (So far there is no good evidence for these speculations and a fair amount of evidence against them.) Neither does science assume that processes are 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 impact on the Earth, science is filled with solid evidence for catastrophic events.
Many science writers, and most pseudoscientists, contrast catastrophism and uniformitarianism as if they were opposites of one another. In fact, the comparison is worse than apples and oranges; apples and oranges at least are the same general kind of object--fruit. Comparing catastrophism and uniformitarianism is more like comparing armchairs and armadillos because they both begin with A; otherwise the two are entirely different at every level of meaning. Catastrophism and uniformitarianism both deal with the history of the Earth or Universe, but otherwise the two are not even the same kind of idea. Catastrophism is a philosophy, a basic assumption that the Universe has been shaped by catastrophic events. Since it is already assumed that catastrophes have happened, the confirming evidence for a particular catastrophe need not be very strong; if the evidence is merely consistent with a catastrophe, that's often good enough, even if the evidence is just as consistent with a non-catastrophic interpretation. Catastrophists tend to assume that great effects could only have been produced by great events.
Uniformitarianism, on the other hand, makes no assumptions about the kinds of events that have shaped the Universe. Uniformitarianism is simply cause and effect applied to the past. If we see waves make ripple marks on a sandy sea bottom, and we find a rock that appears to be made of cemented sand with ripple marks on it, we are justified in assuming that 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, so we would have to look for additional clues.)
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Created 8 July 1998, Last Update 9 July 1998
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