Origins: Today's Science, Tomorrow's Myth (2nd Edition)

By James E. Strickling

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0965171701
• ISBN13: 9780965171700
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Peripheral Vision
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.58 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Intriguing Speculations

The enigmatic title of this book, *Origins: Today's Science, Tomorrow's Myth* reflects what Thomas Kuhn describes in *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* as a case in which "...the initially anomalous has become the anticipated" and a new paradigm emerges. What we consider "givens" today may appear puerile and outmoded in the scientific thought of tomorrow.Strickling charges that Darwinism, as originally promulgated and currently perceived, is the Great Lie, "...and it engulfs us" whereas Creationist interpretation is the "Great Mistake." We would appear, therefore, to be between a rock and a hard place because, as the author declares, "...[I]t is dogma in both religion and science that appears to be at the very heart of the ongoing controversy surrounding our origins."I hesitate to go too deeply into Strickling's unique resolution of this dilemma. It would be like revealing who did it in a "who done it", but the author begins with the uniformitarianism vs. catastrophism controversy. In our present-day emerging scientific paradigm, uniformitarianism - the assertion that nothing has happened in the earth's past that is not happening now, is increasingly being beaten out by Catastrophism - the idea that in times past the earth has suffered numerous disruptions from the nearby presence of other planet-sized bodies. "Such disturbances," says Strickling, "would impact not only the earth itself, but all the life-forms residing on it. Evidence of these disturbances abounds."Strickling cites the work of Immanuel Velikovsky whose research "cuts across the fields of physics, astronomy, geology, archeology, paleontology, history and mythology" to assert that the universe is electrical in nature and that "the structure of the solar system has changed in historical times." Velikovsky made numerous successful predictions (such as the radio noise emanating from Jupiter) but he was so thoroughly and unfairly maligned by the scientific establishment that few of those predictions are remembered and credited to him. (Einstein, who initially discountenanced his findings, changed his mind and began a dialogue with Velikovsky just before his [Einstein's] death.)Strickling also cites the work of major Catastrophist authors David Talbott and Dwardu Cardona to suggest that the planetary arrangement the ancients saw was quite different from what we now see in the sky and that creation myths described not creation, but the new order observed by humans when the planetary arrangement changed.Perhaps the author's most tantalizing speculations are about the role of Extremely Low Frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF's) in the ancient world and their importance in such stories as the Tower of Babel (that the interruption of the understanding of language may have been electromagnetic in nature), the Ark of the Covenant (an electrical capacitor - all that copper, gold and silver) halos (coronas - discharges resulting from the i