Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (7 page)

6
The Case for the Flood

Exposing the Scientific Myth of the Ice Age

Peter Bros

T
hose people who are not satisfied with the paradigms supported by the scientific establishment regarding the creation of the universe are naturally interested in Plato’s story of Atlantis, a prehistoric civilization destroyed in a flood. We are all aware of the degree of opposition the story creates in the scientific community. Atlantis is up there with flying saucers and free energy devices as targets for the professional skeptics (who are organized to perpetuate entrenched scientific dogma), because it raises the specter of an actual source for the thousands of seemingly impossible megalithic remains, including the pyramids, that dot the surface of the earth.

Graham Hancock, in his book
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization,
visits the remains of a prehistoric, worldwide civilization using the monuments it left behind. He posits that this worldwide culture was brought to an end by superfloods. Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D. contends in
Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids from Lost Egypt to Ancient America
that the geological, linguistic, and geographical evidence associated with the worldwide megalithic monuments demonstrates the actual existence of such a prototype civilization, a civilization that was dispersed around the globe by rising sea levels caused by a flurry of comets.

While the edges of evidence appear to support the notion of Atlantis as a worldwide civilization lost in a catastrophic flood, many authors have sought out Atlantis in specific locales because the scientific establishment unknowingly cast its lot against a prehistorical civilization before the evidence began showing up. It did so by enforcing the eighteenth-century rule of reason which stipulated that God could not be used as an explanation for physical reality, thereby rejecting out of hand the possible validity of all biblical accounts and, in the case of a worldwide prehistoric society, the possibility that a flood of biblical proportions destroyed all but the megalithic evidence for that civilization.

Making the world of science safe against Bible-thumpers became the overriding goal of nineteenth-century science. Pierre-Simon de Laplace had barely finished banishing God as the source of Newton’s perpetual motion of the solar system (by creating his swirling mass of gas out of whole cloth) before evidence for the worldwide flood described in the Bible began to accumulate. Science, at this time, was unaware that accounts of a universal flood appear around the globe, the universal flood being a part of the myths and traditions of more than five hundred widely separated cultures.

As explorers started to bring home descriptions of the world from afar, science was horrified to see a picture emerging of a planet scarred by massive movements of water, generally from the northwest to the southeast, over its surface. The northwestern sides of whole mountains were scored as if they had been subjected to fast-moving waters containing gravel and boulders. Floodwater was unmistakably the source of the scoring because science could see the same effect from fast-moving rivers. Furthermore, those same sides of the mountains were also home to massive buildups of drift materials, detritus presumably left behind by receding waters. Again, this was an effect that mimicked natural actions in the real world. These drift deposits even contained the remains of animals, including the woolly mammoth.

More horrifying to nineteenth-century scientists than the evidence of water damage and silting were the gigantic boulders exposed to public view all over the European countryside in places where they clearly didn’t belong. These oversized rocks, many weighing thousands of tons, could have been moved only by massive floodwaters carrying them along and then depositing them when the waters receded. The movement of these rocks by the floodwaters would have been, in part, responsible for the aforementioned mountainside scouring.

What to do with these discoveries that constituted irrefutable evidence of a worldwide flood? If science had been true to the evidence and concluded that the evidence had, in fact, resulted from a worldwide flood, religious crazies would have filled the pulpits and newspapers with cries that the biblical story of the flood, and thus the entire Bible, had been scientifically confirmed: not a desirable result.

The only thing science had going for it was the lack of an apparent
source
for the floodwaters. Arguments that its waters had originated from the visible seabeds and ocean floors of the moon were easily squelched by referring to Newton’s theory of gravitation, which holds that gravity is proportional to matter. All the matter in the Moon that has ever been there appears still to be there. Thus, there could have been no lessening of the gravity and thus no way for the Moon’s apparent seas and oceans to have escaped its gravity and move the quarter of a million miles across space, in response to the earth’s stronger gravity, and produce a worldwide flood.

Science, however, is an enterprise that turns beliefs into facts, and it accomplishes this feat so well that its myths become more real than actual facts. It takes hypotheses, mere notions, and crafts a methodology designed to do the impossible—to turn those notions into facts. Science holds that hypotheses that predict facts that are later found are as good as fact.

The scientific landscape is littered with hypotheses that have been accepted as scientific fact even though the term
scientific fact
is an admission that proven hypotheses are not facts. There is nothing that can be done to turn an idea into a fact. The scientific process merely accepts theories as scientific fact so long as they have not been disproved. Of course, what we have when we accept as fact ideas that have never been disproved are a bunch of ideas that have never been disproved. Laplace’s swirling mass of gas, light as water waves, the oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle, the electron, even Newton’s mass/gravity are scientific facts, ideas capable of neither proof nor disproof.

The task that faced science when it was confronted with the incontrovertible evidence of a worldwide flood was to create a scientific fact that would provide a substitute for the already existing evidence left behind by the actual flood. In the early 1820s, a Swiss engineer, Ignaz Venetz, focused on the remains of woolly mammoths found in the drifts, pointing out that as the same animals were being found in the frozen Siberian wastes, the area in which the drifts were found must have at one time been covered with ice. A chorus of experts joined in, positing the slow descent of glaciers from the north, a process that, because it visualized the inexorable creep of ice over eons, deftly captured the spirit of uniformitarianism, Charles Lyell’s theory, published in the 1830s, which maintains that geologic processes occur
gradually
rather than catastrophically. Lyell’s own reconstruction of the earth’s history, focusing on the layers of sediment left as the floodwaters receded, pictured the sediments as deposited over eons so they could be used to produce a fictitious dating system for the earth to counter the biblical creation story.

A decade later, the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz consolidated the speculations of Venetz and his chorus of approving voices by enthroning himself as the inventor of the ice age. Agassiz’s creation, for scientific and public consumption, was a distinct reversal of the scientific process. Instead of taking an idea and using unknown facts to prove it to be a scientific fact, Agassiz took disparate facts that led inexorably to an uncomfortable conclusion—a worldwide flood—and then created an idea—the ice age—that could be used in place of the uncomfortable (flood) idea. And then he exclaimed his ice age theory to be scientific fact!

Because no methodology can prove an
idea,
ideas have to be accepted or rejected on the basis of the evidence they explain. The glacier theory did not explain why the scoring, labeled striations that supported glacier theory appeared only on
one
side of the mountains or why the drifts, called
moraines
to tie them to glacier theory, contained the remains of animals that were found
only
in equatorial regions, insects that were found
only
in the southern hemisphere, and birds that were native to Asia. The glacier theory did not explain why the giant boulders, named
erratics
to accommodate glacier theory, were found in desert regions where no glacier could possibly go.

But these discrepancies were small potatoes compared to the scientific reality of glaciers themselves. Glacier theory simply ignored the basic facts of glacier movement. Glaciers are flows of ice that, like rivers, respond to gravity. Glaciers do not climb hills and they do not travel across level land. However, because scientific facts are merely notions, ideas that cannot be disproved, those who present strong visual confirmation of their truthfulness are always both widely and wildly accepted. Even though glaciers could not have carried the erratics the thousands of miles required to reach (and cover) the European countryside, the fact that the North Pole was north, which was “up there” on the globe, was more than ample scientific proof that gravity could cause the glaciers to inch “down” over the sides of the globe.

No one proposed that ice fields covered the southern half of the planet because that would require the glaciers to defy gravity and travel “up” the sides of the globe from the South Pole.

Such is the stuff upon which empirical science bases its notions of reality.

Like Laplace’s swirling mass of gas, which was proposed four decades before Agassiz’s ice age and provided the template for turning theories about existing facts into scientific facts, the ice age is no more than a
proposition,
a
possible
explanation for the reality that we see. Science saw the evidence of the flood described in the Bible and created the ice age to avoid the appearance of verifying an event described in the Bible.

Once the ice age was accepted as a reality, the only problem that science encountered was its need to produce a model that would explain how the earth could undergo vast temperature variations, a task at which it has failed so far. In the meantime, subsequent discoveries continued to verify the existence of a worldwide flood and mirrored the hundreds of newly encountered myths and traditions attesting to the flood’s actuality. The very drifts that contained the bones of the woolly mammoths that gave rise to the idea of the ice age contained, along with the remains of exotic animals, insects and birds that had
never
lived in the same location and vegetation that could
never
have been local to where the drifts were found. There was no way to explain this admixture of life by glacial movements.