From: allenroy (allenroy@peoplepc.com)
Date: Tue Sep 23 2003 - 02:29:27 EDT
Michael Roberts wrote:
>You have misunderstood both Ratsch and Gould in your desire to keep in with
Ellen White's revelation...
Have I, misunderstood Gould? The following comes from:
CATASTROPHISM: Systems of Earth History
by Richard Huggett (a non-Creationist)
Edward Arnold (pub), 1990
(the page number follows each paragraph)
It is imperative that the uniformity of law and the uniformity of process be not
mistaken for testable
theories about the Earth. They are rules of practice and nothing more. Stephen
Jay Gould drives this
point home with his customary cogency: “You can't go to an outcrop and observe
either the constancy of nature's laws or the vanity of unknown processes. It
works the other way round: in order to proceed as a scientist, you assume the
nature's laws are invariant and you decide to exhaust the range of familiar
causes before inventing any unknown mechanisms. Then you go to the outcrop.
The first two uniformity's are geology's versions of fundamental principles -
induction and simplicity - embraced by all practicing scientists both today and
in Lyell’s time. (Gould, S.J. 1987: Time’s arrow, time's cycle. Myth and
metaphor in the discovery of geological time. Harvard University Press. p.
120) p24
Actualism versus non-actualism [gradualism]
Gould argued that both the uniformity of law and the uniformity of process are
assumptions shared by all scientists, but this is not strictly true. Granted,
both uniformitarians and catastrophists [of the 18th and 19th Centuries]
fervently supported the principle of uniformity of law. ... But while
uniformitarians held staunchly to the principle of uniformity of process,
catastrophists were equivocal about it, generally agreeing that present
processes should be used to explain past events whenever possible, but, unlike
the uniformitarians, being quite prepared to invoke, if necessary, causes which
no longer operate. p24-25
But the equating of actualism with uniformitarianism and the confounding of
actualism with gradualism results from misconceptions about Lyell’s system. A
number of revisionists, including Reijer Hooykass, Stephen Jay Gould and Martin
J. S. Rudwick, have managed to set the record straight, but their message seems
not to have got through to practicing geoscientists. p37
The message is clear. It runs as follows: Lyell adopted four uniformity's - the
uniformity of law, the uniformity of process (actualism), the uniformity of rate
(gradualism) and the uniformity of state (steady-statism). The first two are
usually regarded as procedural rules practiced by all geoscientists; the last
two are substantive claims about the empirical world. Lyell’s system of strict
uniformitarianism was founded upon these four assumptions. The first
assumption, and to a lesser degree the second, he shared with the
catastrophists; the third and fourth were the mainstays of his particular vision
of the world. p37
There can be little doubt that Lyell, the arch-uniformitarian, is the hero of
most nineteenth-and twentieth-century geologists. The reason for the general
acceptance of his uniformitarian ideas is, according to conventional wisdom,
that by ignoring the strictures of biblical chronology (which forced geologists
to invoke a catastrophic past to account for the short history of the Earth) and
instead proclaiming that Earth history was very much longer than six thousand
years, he was able to demonstrate that the slow and steady operation of present
processes could explain the apparently enormous changes which the Earth had
evidently suffered in the past. However, Gould argues that conventional wisdom
is wrong, and that Lyell won wide support for his thesis because of two ploys.
The first was the ploy of setting up, and then destroying, the straw man of a
six thousand year old Earth. During the second half of the eighteenth century a
great debate began in geology over the age of the Earth. Archbishop James
Ussher had, around about 1650, dated Creation to towards the end of October in
the year 4004 BC. This date was assumed to be definitive, and was widely
accepted. ... Even before Lyell wrote his Principles, geologists - Huttonians
and catastrophists alike - had found it almost impossible to reconcile a six
thousand year old Earth with evidence they saw in the field. They could not see
how the Earth could grow, and its surface be shaped, in so short a space of
time; nor could they see how fossils fitted into the biblical account of Earth
history. Gould claims that by 1830, no serious scientific catastrophist
believed that catastrophes had a supernatural cause, or that Archbishop Ussher’s
reckoning of the date of the Creation was correct. p85-86
Nevertheless, it was necessary for Lyell to demolish these notions because they
were widely held among laymen and were advocated by some geologians. It was not
Lyell’s fault, explains Gould, that later generations took his straw man to mean
that uniformitarianism was science, catastrophism was not. To be sure, the
early catastrophists believed that natural processes could not have wrought the
changes or brought about the structures which exist as part of the earth's
surface; but by the first half of the nineteenth century relatively few
catastrophists really believed that the features of the Earth's surface could be
explained simply by invoking the wrath of God. p86
The uniformitarians did not triumph over the catastrophists because they
advocated a more subtle and less empirical method: they used reason and
inference to supply the missing information that imperfect evidence cannot
record. In short, Lyell carried his case with words, not with hard facts. p87
The second of Lyell’s ploys was to slip by two substantive claims with two
methodological statements which must be accepted. The two methodological
statements were the uniformity of law and the uniformity of process
(actualism). The two substantive claims, which in Lyell’s thesis were cloaked
by the methodological statements, were the uniformity of rate (gradualism) and
the uniformity of state (steady-statism). It is important to stress here that
Lyell’s claims are definite suppositions about the empirical world which may or
may not be true; they are not methodological presuppositions. Therein, as we
have already seen, lies the basis of the different geological system conceived
by the catastrophists and the uniformitarians. p87
“We do adhere to Lyell’s two methodological uniformity's as a foundation of
proper scientific practice, and we continue to praise Lyell for his ingenious
and forceful defense. But uniformity's of law and process were a common
property of Lyell and his catastrophist opponents - and our current allegiance
does not mark Lyell’s particular triumph.” (Gould, 1987, 177 [see above]) p87
-------end quote-----------
Creationists and Evolutionists alike hold to the necessary presuppositions of
uniformity of law and uniformity of process in order for geologists to derive
empirical data and scientific evidence. These presuppositions are not derived
from science but from the philosophical foundations they begin with.
Allen
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