JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 533
A History of Blank and Empty Things #35.
Mr. R.R. Menke, the author The Challenge from the Skies, Planetary Motion and its Solemn Witness Against Evolution and Higher Criticism, self-published his biblico-religico-astronomical diatribe against Charles Darwin in Huntington Park, California, in 1925. What he launches in 51 labored pages against one of the most elegant ideas in the history of science is simply, well, shocking; shockingly eyebrows-catching-on-fire bad, so-bad-it-isn't-even-bad bad. Without reading the whole, um, thing, I do get the piercing whiff of a notion having to do with eclipses and the true date of seven (?) days of creation. He uses some sort of chrono-alchemy layered in spreadable butter, the words made of microscopic asparagus, to prove his point that "as a consequence of the verified truth of these cycles of time, we are bound to believe that there were no eclipses before the prime date (5923 years ago)". No eclipses before creation. AND no precession of the equinoxes, "no seasons before the prime date, no cycles of 360 years before the prime date". Oh my.
His conclusion, by virtue of this magnificently weighty evidence (and which he doesn't even relegate to its own paragraph), is "Therefore Darwin's theory of evolution has no place in the domain of astronomical science..." And this is so not so much, evidently, that there were no eclipses, and no seasons, and no 360-year cycles (?!), but rather, at the base of it all, there was nothing. No earth. And since the earth is only 60 centuries or whatever old Darwin just doesn't work. I have no idea why the eclipse business was necessary if Mr. Menke was going to argue that there was no "there" there for anything to happen, what with the impracticable nature of having something in nothing.
There you have it. There's more, much more, but frankly it just isn't worth the 20 minutes to dig out more. I rarely read anything in Creation Sc__nc_ as there is nothing redeeming at all in it--I'm posting this today because it strikes me that this present work isn't necessarily singularly bad, but rather representationally bad. Since the entire belief/hope/prayer system or whatever the Creationists claim as the intellectual/moral basis to their Principa in explaining the stuff of the universe is painfully wrong, and bad, and potentially harmful, I wonder why we should distinguish the levels of badness and wrongness? It isn't as though establishing a geology of wrongness will somehow categorize it all in such a way that something worthwhile could be discovered, like a miraculous toe-hold at the top of the Sisyphusian hill they're trying to slide up. And so perhaps Mr. Menke's work is just wrong, along with the rest of the others; perhaps the other side needs to deal with him as being one of their own more so than anyone else. Certainly there are more elegant refutations than this unfortunate attempt, but that only makes the wrongness prettier: a pig in a (white) wedding gown is still, after all, a pig.
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