1. The Paleophysical Hermeneutic: Catastrophe Metaphor vs. Real War
With these thoughts
in mind a comparison of catastrophism versus the “real war”
hermeneutic (explanation) is in order.
Clearly,
catastrophism and “real war” are both paleophysical interpretive
paradigms, that is, they both attempt to make sense of ancient
legends and stories by means of a comparison of the claims of those
texts and the models of modern science. Here, however,
catastrophism and “real war” diverge on a number of
points.
For the “real war”
hermeneutic, the texts only make consistent sense if taken more or
less as asserting an underlying reality to the events described. In
other words:
(1) the war was real;
(2) the people or “gods” who fought it were real;
(3) these people had real motivations for doing so, i.e., there is an underlying social order that was threatened by some perceived enemy, and a political agenda was at work;
(4) it was fought with real, and horrendously powerful weapons of mass destruction on a planetary scale, including, weather weapons; thus, the exploded planet hypothesis is used merely to explain certain texts as a limited event;
(5) there were real winners and losers;
(6) these people or “gods” in some cases prior to, in some cases during, and in some cases after the war, then initiated a contact with humanity and began to interfere in its affairs, to the point of siring and initiating human civilizations and their dynasties.
For the
“catastrophist” explanation, however, especially as exemplified in
the popular work of Alan Alford, the following interesting thing
begins to happen:
(1) the exploded planet hypothesis is used to interpret references to “wars of the gods” as a metaphor for colliding planets;
(2) the exploded planet hypothesis is used to interpret references in texts to the unions or marriages of the gods as metaphors for colliding planets;
(3) the exploded planet hypothesis is used to interpret the children of such marriages as metaphors for the debris of those collisions;
(4) the exploded planet hypothesis is used to interpret references of mixed heavenly and earthly origins of people(e.g. Adam, or the Nephilim in the Old Testament) as meaning this debris fell to earth - in yet more planetary collisions and impacts - and seeded life on earth.
In other words, the
catastrophist use of the exploded planet hypothesis - especially in
the hands of an Alan Alford, becomes a way to view almost
every textual theme in such legends as
a metaphor of what he calls “the exploded planet cult.” This is as
true of Plato in his allegory of Atlantis, to the Hebrew priests
who compiled the Old Testament, to the Sanskrit scribes who
composed the Hindu epics.
The tendency “to see
through everything” in the texts in catastrophism is a real one,
for by seeing through everything, one is in real danger of seeing
nothing at all to paraphrase C.S. Lewis once again. If there is no
opacity to the texts, there is nothing to see. On Alford’s
approach, one would have to understand even comic books such as Superman to nothing but “cleverly disguised
propaganda” for the exploded planet cult. One might view coffee
with cream and sugar as a “mixture,” as a “chimera”, and thus as a
symbol of “meteorites” and exploded planets. One might view the
current genetic chimeras of biologists and genetic engineers as a
vast new program of symbols for the exploded planet, and so on and
so forth. In the face of modern technologies that recapture the
images recounted, Alford’s catastrophism reduces to ridiculousness,
for his interpretive paradigm must explain them on the very same
basis, as nothing more than manifestations of the exploded planet
religion.
As interpretive
approaches to paleophysics, then, no two schools could be farther
apart than the catastrophist school and the “real war” school for a
very obvious methodological reason. In the former, one particular modern physics model, the exploded
planet hypothesis itself, is used to interpret most if not all textual themes as metaphors for
that one thing. In the latter, however, different modern physics models, from “scalar
physics” to the “exploded planet hypothesis” to “plasma cosmology”
are used to find correspondences between
specific textual references and the modern model with a view to
testing the accuracy of those texts and their various
assertions. Moreover, other areas of science are employed to
make sense of other portions of the textual traditions, as, for
example, in the use of genetic engineering to explain the
occurrence of chimeras in those texts.
While both
paleophysical approaches certainly challenge standard models of
science and history, one may safely maintain that the catastrophist
model exemplified in the works of Alford, the most popular and
careful of the catastrophists, leads everywhere and nowhere all at
once. It is difficult to conceive what sort of predictions it
makes, other then to make predictions that more such metaphors can
be found, and found almost anywhere. It
ends by being nothing more than a well-footnoted compendium of the
various types of metaphors for the one and only model it is willing
to consider: the exploded planet hypothesis itself.
The “real war” model,
in contradistinction from this, does not run quite so roughshod
over the texts it considers, and moreover is able to make a
prediction, namely, that artificial artifacts of the civilization
that fought that war might be found and
conclusively documented. And, as we shall discover in part two,
there is yet another variable in the formula:
Mountains ≈ planets ≈ gods ≈ “X”.
For now it is best to
leave that “X” factor unstated. But once discovered and
articulated, we shall see that it spells the death knell for
Alford’s convenient reductionism.
In any case, such
artifacts might be structures in the desert, to structures on other
planetary bodies that evidence some type of machining or
intelligent origin, to residual evidences within earthly DNA that
indicate some prior manipulation, or the remains of some strange
humanoid creature that is anomalous in some way, from its
appearance to its size. To this last subject, giants, we now
turn.