Free Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization by J. Douglas Kenyon Page B

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