It saddens me that modern people will take a realist approach to interpreting mythological archetypes when it suits them. After all, David Talbott has gone to great lengths to point out that the concept of uniformitarianism (we can reconstruct the past by observing the present) precludes other interpretations which are no less realist (namely, transient catastrophes). These “pseudoscientists” are labeled as such for not subscribing to the inference (and to some extent, assumption) in science that it necessarily takes enormous lengths of time for things of importance to happen in the universe. It’s such an important question to ask, since our bias as humans will be to gravitate towards the uniformitarian assumption, as the subconscious prefers to believe we live in a safe universe. And anybody who looks at the discipline of social psychology will observe that much of this bias occurs at this subconscious level, far from reach of our rational minds.
In layperson’s speak, if you see people of the past talking about fire-breathing dragons which fly in the sky, perhaps one good question to ask is: Is it possible that people saw a large event which their language struggled to describe? It’s not an extraordinary question, for if you ask people today what a plasma is, you will observe that few actually understand what it is even to this day. To suppose that ancient people might struggle to explain it as well is hardly a stretch.
There’s nothing wrong with using conventional science to try to explain mythological archetypes, but isn’t it completely inaccurate to present the endeavor as though people have never even investigated the subject? The fact is that there are specialists called comparative mythologists who have spent their entire lives trying to understand the archetypes. We are talking about many, many decades of work analyzing the enigmatic similarities in the mythological archetypes and petroglyphs (coincidences which, btw, span the entire globe), and even linking these archetypes to features which can be observed in high-intensity plasma discharge experiments. David Talbott, Dwardu Cardon, Rens van der Sluijs, Anthony Peratt (a former advisor to the Department of Energy, btw, and a peer reviewer for IEEE’s Transactions on Plasma Science, no less), and of course, the infamous Immanuel Velikovsky have produced an incredible volume of literature on this subject. What sense is there to just ignoring all of that in our science journalism?
Modern scientists perhaps just want the public to forget that when Worlds in Collision was the nation’s national bestseller (yes, that happened, guys), academia forced its publisher to yank its publication. And when Albert Einstein died, the book sat there open on his desk.
It’s one thing to think, “Hey, this mythology stuff is nonsense,” after you’ve put some effort into learning what they are saying (which few ever actually do), but notice that science journalists talk about mythology as though nobody has ever studied it before. Just to be clear, this is so far from the truth as to be a misrepresentation which does the public a great disservice. What would be far more valuable would be to talk about the strange coincidences which permeate these global stories and pictographs. One would think that these things are important, after all, as they represent the first stories and pictures we have record of humans telling and drawing.
And none of this has absolutely ANYTHING to do with creationism, btw. In fact, I believe it’s apparent to most who study the creation stories in any depth that the mythological archetypes precede the writing of the Bible. Mythology came before religion, folks.
