Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

• Genesis 1:1-2

After the birth of Noah, Lamech lived another 595 years, and he had other sons and daughters. Lamech lived 777 years, and then he died.
After Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

• Genesis 5:30-32

When Noah was 600 years old, on the seventeenth day of the second month, all the underground waters erupted from the earth, and the rain fell in mighty torrents from the sky. The rain continued to fall for forty days and forty nights.

• Genesis 7:11-12

“The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard studied physics before switching to philosophy. He taught at Dijon University, going on to become the first professor of history and philosophy of the sciences at the Sorbonne in Paris. His study of thought processes encompasses the symbolism of dreams and the phenomenology of imagination. He contested Auguste Comte’s view that scientific advancement was continuous, claiming instead that science often moves through shifts in historical perspective allowing fresh interpretations of old concepts.”

• Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained

Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) was a French philosopher.  His idea that he postulated to contest Comte’s view of science being an advancement that was continuous was referred to as the epistemological break.  Charles Lyell wrote his geology book about one hundred years before Bachelard joined the fray, but by this time, other geologists were quoting Lyell’s book as stating proven facts.  Lyell, a lawyer, only postulated theories with the stated motivation to free science from Moses, basically wanting to give an alternative to Creation and Noah’s Flood.  One hundred years before Lyell, James Hutton, a farmer, postulated that it would take millions of years to make a rock – no proof, but Lyell made the statements as if the proof was not necessary.

The science that followed biblical teaching was called catastrophism.  Creating the universe in six days would be abrupt.  Then the layers of rock around the world would have been laid down by Noah’s flood, a catastrophe.

Lyell postulated uniformitarianism, the idea that everything took millions of years to form.  Without uniformitarianism, Charles Darwin would not have had a platform in which to postulate (again with no proof) his theory of evolution.

There are a multitude of arguments to disprove uniformitarianism just in the Grand Canyon, each fact supporting the biblical narrative.

But before the discoveries that make Evolution more implausible by the day, Bachelard enters the picture.  To “help” uniformitarianism’s lack of uniformity, he postulates a purely philosophical argument, later picked up by other philosophers, of an epistemological break.  Some discontinuity in the continuity of science.  That way if something does not fit the easily disproven uniformitarianism, it is chalked up to an epistemological break – something that has no cause, but the affect is “presto change-o”, uniformitarianism is still a philosophy in play in spite of the data that might disprove it.

What they have in claiming proof when there is none, they make up for it in making their own religion even harder and harder to believe in – yet, they are desperate to find anything to support their Godless worldview.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.