Brian,
It was decades ago that I read Worlds in Collison. I suppose I could research google to find indepth refutation of Velikovsky's delusions. Throwing Occam's razor to the winds, Velikovsky has come up with an even greater miracle to explain the miracles of the Exodus. We arrive at a regression of explanatory miracles that grow more outlandish as they purpose to explain an earlier miracle away. Best just to go with the "God dunnit" of the Bible.
There is not a shred of scientific support for Velikovsky's bizarre proposals. Venus never was a comet and didn't come out of Jupiter. Leave it to Willowtree to drag out Velikovsky as irrefutable proof for his attempts to establish his version of the Exodus.
I know reputable scientists have published refutations of Velikovsky but it's been decades since I read them and Ray Willowtree will with practised paranoia dismiss them as part of some conspiracy of scientist bent on discrediting the Bible. Ray doesn't believe science anyway, either that or he is a dedicated troll, but still he will cling to his irrefutable authorities.
Besides if you take Velikovsky's argument away from Ray, what is to prevent him from falling back on the corroboration that crack in the stone floor of the Great Pyramid irrefutably offers to support the Exodus?
It's not that Ray is convinced the Bible is literally true, lots of folks are convinced of that, it's that there is no theory too bizarre that we won't drag forth in support of it's inerrancy. This is what defines the lunatic fringe of Ron Wyatt and others. The thing to remember is that very few therapists have ever succeeded at arguing lunatics out of their delusions.
I'm reminding of the story of the psychiatrist who grew irritated with a mental patient who kept on insisting that he was dead because there was no blood in him. The annoyed psychiatrist took a needle and jabbed it into the guys arm and squeezed out a drop of blood telling the patient, "look, see you are bleeding." The lunatic peered at his arm and then answered unfazed, "you have to admit it's only a very little blood."
Prediction, Ray will move the goal posts and he will do it predictably to preserve his delusions. He is not going to give them up. All his energy is directed to maintaining them. And he will.
Just my not so humble 2 cents ...
lfen
ABE: Links to scientific refutations of Worlds in Collison
TOP TEN REASONS WHY VELIKOVSKY IS WRONGImmanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in
Collision - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
Amusingly searching Google with the string "Velikovsky refuted" resulted in a top ten that included more pro Velikovsky websites proclaiming that Velikovsky has never been refuted than sites publishing refutations! So there you have it. Ray told you. Neither Ray nor Velikovsky, or Buzsaw for that matter have ever been refuted.
ABE: Brian, definitely read the links. Velikovsky is much funnier than Ray.
Imagine we're on earth 3,500 years ago when an object about the same size as our planet is coming at us from outer space! It whacks us a couple of times, spins our planet around so that its rotation stops and starts again, creates great heat and upheavals from within the planet and yet the most anyone can remember about these catastrophes are things like "....and the sun stood still" [Joshua 10: 12-13] and other stories of darkness, storms, upheavals, plagues, floods, snakes and bulls in the sky, etc. No one in ancient times mentions an object the size of earth colliding with us. You'd think someone amongst these ancient peoples, who all loved to tell stories, would have told their grandchildren about it. Someone would have passed it on. But no one on earth seems to remember such an event.
Velikovsky explains why our ancestors did not record these events as they occurred in a chapter entitled "A Collective Amnesia." He reverts to the old Freudian notion of repressed memory and neurosis. These events were just too traumatic and horrible to bear, so we all buried the memory of them deep in our subconscious minds. Our ancient myths are neurotic expressions of memories and dreams based on real experiences.
Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in
Collision - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
Velikovsky is a hoot and a half. Monty Python should make the movie of the book.
This message has been edited by lfen, 05-22-2005 01:05 PM
This message has been edited by lfen, 05-22-2005 01:14 PM
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