Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 23:02:55 +0000
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: M-TH: relativism


James H wrote:

> Creationism does not have a point.
>
  Scary to play devil's advocate over a subject like Creation, but
actually it MAY have a point.

See, the Younger Dryas ended 7,000 years before the Old Testament was
written. It (the Dryas) was a mini-ice age brought about when a vast
flood of water, thawed out glaciers, and covering much of North America,
emptied off the great plains into the Atlantic. So much fresh water
stopped the Gulf Stream flowing and for a thousand years the climate
flip-flopped back to cold.

Now, a biblical day is generally thought to be a thousand years, so
undoubtedly the ancient Semites were repositories of very old stories,
going back to this Biblical times of floods ('water lay on the face of
the earth'). As is know, aboriginal dream-time can extend back to 30,000
years: that's how long their folk memory runs. So 7k years is easily
possible. It is the seven days of Creation.

Thus the Old Testament contains a folk memory of events so apocalyptic
they amounted to the recreation of the world. Just the kind of things
that can happen again if global warming denialists have their way (How
was the pro-fox hunting march, today, BTW?)

One other thing: while 'science-is-social-relations' is bullshit, the
idea that science is objective, neutral etc, is, James, terribly passe.
At the end of the 20th century, you shd try at last to exit the 19th.
Logical positivism has had its day. Complexity and chaos rule, and what
content they have is nothing more or less than the materialisation of
dialectics, or Dialectical Materialism as it is also known.

Quark




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