There is a general view, developed from the continuing global warming debate, that some sections of science have now become politicised resulting in bad science.  A common  explanation is that this has come about from the politicisation of the universities and education systems, in which the social sciences and other humanities schools now follow a particular political line and that this political approach has therefore affected science. This has led to the identification of Party-line science in which the left-of-centre follow one particular scientific position whilst the right-of-centre a contrary position which, in the current debate over global warming, has left-of-centre supporting the theory of anthropogenic global warming opposed by the right-of-centre which denies it. This is of course nothing but Lysenkoism and certainly not a view accepted by the right-of-centre advocates. Science is science, and should be free from political and religious influence. In essence science deals with objective facts which the left-of-centre reject from their position of post-modernism.

It is of concern that nowadays science students seem to be avoiding climate science because it has become politicised, but is this a new development in science, or has it always been like that? And what about religion? It is clear that some devout scientists view climate change differently than their less devout brother scientists but little has been said or written of the effect religion has on science, as religion, at least in the secular Western worlds is a subtle but pervasive undercurrent.  Yet its effect remains and it is no less a threat to science than the more recent overt secular politicisation of climate science.

A recent development came from two letters submitted to Nature Magazine both of which were rejected for publication – one on the bizarre science that now forms modern astronomy, the Big Bang Theory, signed by a group of respected scientists  and the other by Professor Patrick Michaels concerning conflicting papers published in a recent issue of Nature Magazine.  A conversation with one of the signers of the first letter prompted my remark that the Big Bang Theory is unlikely to be abandoned in the near future because it is fully compatible with the dominant religious belief of Western Society, and that for the Big Bang paradigm to change it would first require a change in the underlying religious paradigm. This is not going to happen in our lifetime unless a miracle occurs, so from a scientific perspective this is rather depressing as one prefers not to have one's science either religiously or politically correct.

One of the biggest problems facing climate science is unravelling the earth's geological history and the difficulty of making sense of it and then relating it to the current climate debate. Recently new papers published in the New Concepts in Global Tectonics newsletter have dealt the current geological paradigm of Plate Tectonics a rather fatal blow by proving the non-existence of subduction zones, but the main problem still remains of what to replace this paradigm with - Earth Expansion theories? Perhaps but these theories have their own flaws and the plate architectonics will not give in easily. And we still have little knowledge of the causes of ice ages, though we are reasonably certain the extinction of the dinosaurs (the famous K-T event) was caused by the impact of an asteroid with the earth. However palaeontologists point out that some species became extinct before the inferred impact, and others millions of years afterwards, straining the impact-extinction explanation somewhat.  One is permitted to think that perhaps we are missing something rather important.

Whatever caused the past ice-ages and species extinctions must have been climatically catastrophic, but geological catastrophism is still regarded as a heresy though recent work is slowly re-introducing it, but superimposing it onto the existing geological time-scale, which actually tends to make the whole paradigm slightly surreal. Geology's distinctive aversion to catastrophism exists for one simple reason – that it introduces religion back into geology and allows the religious fundamentalists to sell their creationism instead of biological evolution in the schools.

But all is not what it seems, because if we go back to the times when geology became a fledgling science in England during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, some rather fascinating facts emerge.

At that time Europe was wracked by revolutions, monarchies were deposed, and civil war a frequent occurrence, so England as an island, could but watch with horror at what unfolded in Europe at that time, memorialised by such cinema classics as the “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, set in the  Jacobin revolution of the late 18th Century France.  But England itself was also close to civil unrest, and the two dominant political forces,  Tory monarchism, and Whiggish liberalism, the political ancestor of modern day socialism or social democracy, battled it out for the minds of their citizens in various debating halls and written treatises.

The Tories based their authority on the Christian Bible, ably enunciated by the Reverend William Paley, who cogently argued for the natural order and the divine right of Royalty to rule as earthly representatives of God. This was, of course the dominant form of government for the whole of continental Europe but it seems the Continentals were a little more direct in removing the monarchists from power than the English, who preferred endless debate in a polite gentlemanly fashion, as the English tend to do.  The Whigs knew they had to counter the Tories politically not violently since being as devout as their Tory opponents, they had great difficulty in countering the precepts enunciated by Paley in his defence of his Biblical authority.

In 1807 the London Geological Society was formed by the chemist Humphrey Davy writing to his friend William Pepys:

"We are forming a little talking geological dinner club, of which I hope you will be a member." Of the original thirteen members, four were doctors, one was an ex-Unitarian minister. Two were booksellers; another, Comte Jacques-Louis, had fled the French Revolution. Four were Quakers, and two - William Allen and Humphrey Davy - were independently wealthy amateur chemists. Only one, George Greenough, had any training in geology or mineralogy. He had paid a visit to the Academy at Freiburg some years earlier along with Goethe, but did not by any stretch of the imagination pursue the subject for a living. He was a Member of Parliament. Indeed, what is extraordinary about the London Geological Society is that none of the original members were geologists. "The little talking dinner club" as Davy put it was a club for gentlemen given to talk, not to hammering rocks. (Grinnell 1976).

By 1825 the Geological Society was incorporated with a membership of 637, and this was rather significant because it was really the first specialised scientific society. Other scientific societies were formed, but they never really took off, so the London Geological Society's early growth was unprecedented and rather difficult to account for when one remembers that its original members were not geologists. Grinnell makes the rather telling statement that:

“... the London Geological Society was a group of talking amateurs whose interest in Geology was not for its application to mining and canal digging, but for its theological and political implications, which were crucial to the social stability of England and were thereby by no means irrelevant to the early development of geology”.(emphasis added).

Right from its inception modern geology was subject to political and religious interference, and this would have profound implications for its subsequent development as a major science. As a science early geology was heavily influenced by its Biblical foundations which I won't repeat here but compressed to its essence, there was Creation, followed by a golden period, the Noachian Flood or deluge followed by what most of us were taught as the development of civilisation – all within a framework of 10,000 years or less depending on which theological interpretation one wishes to consult. But what about the political implications?

Some of Grinnell's comments concerning the political situation of the day bear repeating because in his introduction to his paper, he writes:

"I think any argument from such a reported radical as myself," Charles Babbage wrote to the geologist Charles Lyell on May 3,1832, "would only injure the cause, and I therefore willingly leave it in better hands."

Charles Babbage (1792-1871) was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (1828-1839) at the time, a dabbler in geology, theology and manufacturing, who had recently made an unsuccessful bid for a seat in Parliament. In 1837 he was to publish his The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, an attack on the theology of the Anglican establishment, and in 1851 he was to carry the attack into the Tory camp in his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, the purpose of which was to argue that wealthy Tory amateurs had a stranglehold on science policy and were discriminating against socially less well positioned scientists, who were more deserving of support.

Charles Lyell (1797-1875), to whom he was writing, had just published the second volume of his Principles of Geology (Volume 1, 1830; Volume 11, 1832; and Volume 111, 1833), a work written in support of political liberalism although ostensibly it was an objective work in science free from any political implications. In his letter of May 3rd to Lyell, Babbage was explaining why he would not write a favorable review of the book. Quite wisely, the Whig scientists, like Babbage, Lyell, Scrope, Darwin and Mantell, did not want the public to know that what was being promoted as objective truth was little more than thinly disguised political propaganda ”(Grinnell op cit.).

(This has eerie similarities with the current dogma of “Global Warming” and the political motivations of the modern day Whigs, the left-of-centre politics).

What was the “Cause”? The political one involving the reformation of Parliament dominated by the Tories and ideologically supported by the indomitable Paley who succinctly summarised in his treatise “Moral and Political Philosophy”  that "it is the will of God that the established government be obeyed" was required for memorization before students could graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. The only way the Liberals from the midlands could get Parliament reformed was to demonstrate that the scientific foundations of Paley's Natural Theology were false,  and this meant destroying diluvial geology and catastrophism”(Grinnell op cit).

Let me repeat this here - “destroying diluvial geology and catastrophism” not for scientific purposes but political, and as I show further down, this fact is poorly understood by modern geology.  Modern geology is the successor of this radical political process and rightly described as neo-creationism.

It is generally received wisdom that Lyell got his uniformitarianism from James Hutton, a Scottish farmer with  a decided scientific leaning but as Ginenthal shows, Hutton was really a non-inductive, theological catastrophist. Ginenthal concludes:

 “Hutton had written, in Theory of the Earth (in a passage expunged by John Playfair), that "the theory of the Earth that I would here illustrate is founded on the greatest catastrophes which can happen to the Earth, that is [continents] being raised from the bottom of the sea and sunk again." (Hutton, 1795: [Vol.] II, [p.] 124.)

To say that Hutton banished catastrophes from his theory is technically correct, for he refused to discuss them on the grounds that evidence was lacking. But it should be clear that very few "catastrophists" in the history of geology ever invoked anything more violent than Hutton did himself. The cataclysms were, for Hutton, part of the history of the Earth, but not part of his theory of it.

So where did Lyell really get his uniformitarianism from? Grinnell continues:

 “In 1825, Lyell's Liberal cohort George Poulett Scrope (1797-1876) published his Considerations on Volcanoes in which he transformed the arguments of the Tories by which every time they ascribed a natural event to God, Scrope ascribed the same event to a Volcano, and thereby attempted to revive the geological theories of James Hutton. So perfect- were the laws of volcanic uplift and erosion which God had created at the beginning of time eons ago, Hutton and Scrope argued, that no more had been seen of God since, nor was there any need of him to run the affairs of the universe, any more than there was need of a king to interfere with the natural and intrinsic laws of economics and of society."

Scrope's book was too radical for the London Geological Society at that time, and it was dismissed without a hearing. Scrope, the son of a wealthy London merchant, bought himself a seat in Parliament and pursued the cause by more direct means. But without a  cosmological proof that monarchy was unnatural and that sovereignty belonged to the people, the Liberals remained relatively powerless.” (Grinnell op cit).

Now Charles Lyell is usually described as a geologist, but as  we can read further from Grinnell''s paper, he was first and foremost a lawyer:

“Undaunted by Scrope's failure the young Whig lawyer Charles Lyell now tried his hand at destroying the geological foundation of monarchical theory. In his Principles of Geology he took a much more subtle line than had Scrope. In the 100-page introduction to the Principles, Lyell argued not so much that the diluvial theory was wrong, as that it was mythological and impeded the “progress” of geology. In the first volume he went on at great length concerning the forces of erosion and the effects of volcanic uplift in what was a brilliant avoidance of all evidence of catastrophism. it was just what the moderates were looking for. They rallied around Lyell and elected him first Secretary and then President of the Geological Society.

"By espousing you," Scrope wrote to Lyell on April 12, 1831, "the conclave have decidedly and irrevocably attached themselves to the liberal side, and sanctioned in the most direct and open manner the principle things advocated. Had they on the contrary made their election of a Mosaic geologist like Buckland or Conybeare, the orthodox would have immediately taken their cue from them, and for a quarter of a century to come, it would have been heresy to deny the excavations of valleys by the deluge and atheism to talk of anything but chaos having lived before Adam. At the same time I have a malicious satisfaction in seeing the minority of Bigwigs swallow the new doctrine upon compulsion rather than from taste and shall enjoy their wry faces as they find themselves obliged to take it like physics to avoid the peril of worse evils. I feel some satisfaction in this." (Grinnell Op. Cit).

Notice how the Bigwigs are forced to swallow the new doctrine? And what are we being asked to swallow today – Anthropogenic global Warming. An idea of how Lyell's legal mind worked comes from this anecdote:

“When Lyell, on his trip to the United States, visited Niagara Falls, he talked with someone who lived in the vicinity and was told that the falls retreat about three feet a year.  Since the natives of a country are likely to exaggerate, Lyell announced that one foot per annum would be a better figure.  From this he concluded that over 35,000 years were necessary, from the time the land was free of ice cover and the falls started their work of erosion, to cut the gorge  from Queenstown to the place it occupied in the year of Lyell's visit”.

Lyell's arbitrary reduction of the erosional rate from 3 to 1 feet per year is the not the hallmark of an empirical scientist, but the single minded resoluteness of someone who had already made up his mind what the erosion rates were, and altered the facts to fit his own perception.  The actual rates of erosion, by the way, were in the order of 4 feet per year, so Lyell's rejection was quite unscientific.  Of course Lyell was a lawyer, not a scientist, and from Scrope's words it becomes pretty obvious that the game was politics, not science, and as today in the global warming scare, climate science has been hijacked by the Whigs for political purposes.

I quote Grinnell again:

“In this day and age when geology is far removed from religion and politics, and when political issues are settled by election rather than at meetings of geological societies, it is difficult for us to understand the extent to which the social shift in world view which took place not only in geology but in astronomy and natural history, was related to the Great Reform movement of 1832. All were part of the far more general shift in world view from paternalism to liberalism, but the persons responsible for engineering this shift were very conscious of what they were doing. "It is a great treat to have taught our section-hunting quarry men, that two thick volumes may be written on geology without once using the word 'stratum'," Scrope wrote to Lyell on September 29,1832, after Lyell's second volume appeared. "If anyone had said so five years back, how he would have been scoffed at." Just as the Conservatives had refused a hearing to the Huttonian camp earlier, now the Liberals pulled the same tactics when they got into power. The stronghold of catastrophism lay in a stratigraphy where unconformity and nonconformities, to say nothing of massive conglomerates, told of wide-ranging geological disasters of the past. Lyell, like Scrope before him, simply suppressed the evidence which did not fit in with his doctrines, and once he was voted into power, the catastrophists found it increasingly difficult to publish their
research.

The Liberal take-over of the Geological Society, and the suppression of evidence favouring the catastrophic position did not come about overnight. Rather, there was a slow assimilation of catastrophic data until there was virtually nothing left to the theory as a whole. When, in 1839, Louis Agassiz attempted to argue in favour of catastrophism with his theory of ice ages, the uniformitarians simply adopted all his evidence, but reinterpreted it in uniformitarian terms. Thus the data did not change, but the gestalt by which that data was organized and given coherence was transformed from catastrophism to uniformitarianism just as the social structure of England was changed from Tory paternalism, in which sovereignty descended from God down to the King, to the new Liberalism, in which sovereignty ascended up from the people through Parliament to its Ministers.” (Grinnell op. Cit).

Lyell's tactic was of course to show that the Old Testament was not historical fact but “literature” and “myth” and this allowed him, along with the rest of the devout Whigs, to have their cake and eat it. The technique was brilliant – Lyell effectively moved “Creation” from 9 am on the 23rd of October, 4004 to an indeterminate time in the past, then interposed a vast period of time between it and the present, but surprisingly did not fully adopt Darwin's theory of natural selection to explain biodiversity. But both made extensive use of the perceived gaps in the geological record to explain why there was no apparent continuity in life and geological development, and this technique is of course, quite unscientific since it cannot be falsified.  The process of invoking lacunae in the geological record, and to then hide in them the missing species and the rest of the geological processes required by uniformitarianism is nothing but specious argument.

Never the less, Lyellian Uniformitarianism was a distinct improvement on the previous model of instantaneous creationism. So why did he effect such an easy shift in the geological paradigm?  The reason is fairly simple – the clerical geologists of the day had one overwhelming problem – while their field work showed that many species died catastrophically, as well as the evidence of geological catastrophes from the unconformities, enormous conglomerates etc, they were suddenly faced with the spectre of many catastrophes in the past in complete contradiction to their religious authority which only spoke of  one catastrophe – the Noachian Deluge.  They could not draw the correct conclusions from their field data because their pre-existing religious beliefs precluded it.

Even Cuvier's suggestion that God would have no difficulty arranging many catastrophes failed to sway them, so when Lyell proposed that the Scripture was literature, and not to be taken literally, it was easy then to fall behind Lyell's Whigs and support uniformitarianism since now they could retain their religious beliefs AND also accept that what they saw in the field were not catastrophes but imperfect data leading to erroneous deductions. An improvement in science? Not necessarily – the catastrophists, including Cuvier in France were right, but were restricted in their thinking by the politics of the day which was also religion.  It never occurred to them that their religion was faulty, and hence they merely use Lyell's proposal to move the fault from one time zone to another.

But religion still retains a profound effect on science, albeit in a most subtle way.  This comes from opposition to the Big Bang Theory, the origin of which can be traced to 1933 when the Belgian Jesuit Abbe Georges Le Maitre first described creation in a scientific terms.  This concept has since dominated astronomy, and I might add geology (which as a science should really be thought of as a subset of astronomy, or the study of planets and stars). So why does the Big Bang Theory persist?

Because it is entirely compatible with Western Society's cultural tradition based on the Judaean-Christian religion.  It is incomprehensible that such a society would have a scientific paradigm which contradicted its core beliefs, and in this sense both the Big Bang theory and geological uniformitarianism are logical paradigms to explain physical reality. It allows a logical explanation of that reality and at the same time allows the practice of religion without contradiction. Yet the close association catastrophism has with religion, makes it clear that geology is not about to re-incorporate it back into its pantheon of ideas, as the clear opposition to Gould and Eldredge's “Punctuated Equilibria” is testimony. But none the less, there is a slow recognition that catastrophes have occurred in the past, as exemplified by the proposal by Alverez for the K-T extinction event, and other impactive explanations for the geological past.

The reason these catastrophic theories are not widely accepted lies not in their not having occurred, but because on the present geological time scale, such events seem implausible. How can events separated by millions of years as indicated by stratigraphy, be causally related? They can't unless, the geological time scale in in error.  This is a core heresy in geology but it can be shown that this too is the result of Lyellian political interference.

When Lyell interposed vast expanses of time into the geological framework, he did so on the basis that observed sedimentary rates were indeed slow and of the rates measured, despite his rejection of the rate of erosion of the Niagara Falls, which we now know to have been greatly in error.  Yet while ancient history, including the Jewish traditions incorporated into the Christian Religion, spoke of humanity suffering many catastrophes, politically Lyell could not accept this, since he was, along with the Whigs, in battle royal with the Tories for the minds of their fellow Englishmen.

The idea of “Creatio ex Nihilo” has long been invalidated and interpreted now that the ancient peoples were describing a “re-creation” of their world after some ancient catastrophe, rather than creation.

The Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfven stated:

"Since religion intrinsically rejects empirical methods, there should never be any attempt to reconcile scientific theories with religion he said. An infinitely old universe, always evolving, may not, he admitted, be compatible with the Book of Genesis. However, religions such as Buddhism get along without having any explicit creation mythology and are in no way contradicted by a universe without a beginning or end. Creatio ex nihilo, even as religious doctrine, only dates to around AD 200" he noted. The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science."  (Peratt.)

To this we can add “since political ideology intrinsically rejects empirical methods, there should never be any attempt to reconcile scientific theories with politics”.  Geological uniformism is the result of politics, not science, despite what is traditionally taught in school and university.

There is an assumption that historical texts, sparse as they may be at times, were accurately interpreted, but this is, of course far from the case.  Even recent history has been fabricated as shown by Keith Windschuttle, for example, in his texts the “Fabrication of Aboriginal History, and “The Killing of History”; Windschuttle shows that literary critics and social theorists “are murdering our past”, and this approach is no different than the one adopted by Lyell and the English Whigs when they took over the London Geological Society, and later the Parliament. A more recent example is that of the author Gavin Menzies who wrote the book “1421 – The year the Chinese discovered the World”, published in 2004.  Now we learn the Chinese discovered America before the Europeans, settled New Zealand for 2000 years and clearly history is often not what it seems to be, and often altered to suit political goals. As Menzies notes, the Christians literally stole the Chinese trading empire when it retreated into itself after the disasters during the close of the Ming Dynasty, and wrote history accordingly.

To this must be added the conundrums of ancient Middle East History where the revisionists have shortened it by almost 1000 years, on astronomical, stratigraphic and metallurgical data rather than from historical records – and the argument continues to this day I should add, with orthodox archaeology steadfast in its refusal to countenance any change at all to their existing chronological framework, despite the contradictory scientific evidence.

There is an axiom in geology that from the radioactive decay of uranium 238, and from meteorites which have radiometric-age-dates of 4500 million years derived from uranium, the earth “formed” 4500 million years ago. The problem with this is that there is no evidence for this – it is a conclusion based on the assumption that all the uranium on the earth derives from its initial cooling or, dare I say it, creation. Except that impertinent journalists, such as Richard Milton, and religious fundamentalists keep pointing to “problems” with this framework. Milton is, of course generally correct in identifying problems but the earth is not young – some recent rocks might be, as well as the atmosphere, but for the earth in general, there is no data for us to form any conclusion concerning its age. I suspect like a proton, it's age is indeterminate.
That the English science journalist Richard Milton, in his book criticising Darwinism, received intemperate criticism from the Evolutionary luminaries of our day,  strongly suggests he also scored a few points in that area too.  One particular example is relevant in terms of the climate debate, and that is the “so-called” age of the atmosphere.

Now Milton selects from Melvin Cook's work the result that if all the earth's helium was derived from the radioactive decay of uranium, then, everything else being equal, it should be possible to calculate how much helium was generated, see how much is in the atmosphere today, and from that, and work out the age of the atmosphere.  Now this has been published in Nature magazine in which Cook notes that theoretically while there should be 10,000 billion tons of radiogenic helium in the atmosphere, there is in fact only 3.5 billion tons present.   The obvious implication is that given the decay rate of uranium, a different date is calculated, and a much younger one. 

Uniformitarians explain this by proposing that 99.96 % of the helium escaped from the earth's gravitational field into space.  Notice this is yet another scientific explanation which cannot be falsified, apart from from not being observed in the first place. And why do they assume 99.96% “disappeared” - because of the faulty assumption that all uranium is “primary” and a residue of the creation of the earth.  This is a common uniformist, and therefore legal, rhetorical ploy to deflect a problem by not really answering it. The missing radiogenic helium is magically sent to space, the oceanic crust presumed to have been produced by ocean ridge spreading is magically hidden in the subduction zones, and the missing mass in the universe is magically hidden in the artificial black holes. The same mind set is present in both professions – an aprioristic belief in some core beliefs – Lyellian uniformity for the geologists, and Le Maitre's Big Bang for the astronomers, and restricts the number of answers they can come up for a problem by restricting the number of ideas with which they think.

Note also that both the creationists and uniformists make the same assumption – that all the uranium was there in the first place and then decayed at the appropriate rates in accordance to their assumptions.

However some of the uranium could have easily been formed at various times in the earth's geological evolution – but as Lyell effectively shifted “creation” back into the past, the conundrum over helium is actually the result of politics being confused with science. Science would suggest that the assumption that all the U238 came from “the beginning” was wrong. Whether a uniformist or a creationist, that concept is unacceptable.  And from a scientific perspective, we don't have any evidence on whether earth formed or “appeared” at any particular instant in time. But the creationists do of course, and hence radiometric dating is nothing really more than technically sophisticated creationism. Lyell's shifting of creation was a political ploy to counter Tory dogma, rather than to compromise his own devout belief as a Methodist.

As for the Creationist conclusion that the earth's atmosphere is 10,000 years old, the present composition of the earth's atmosphere might be tracked back to that time, but it was compositionally quite different before that time as well as we learn from the proxy data from various geological sources, so the age of the present atmosphere has nothing to do with the age of the earth.  In fact the earth's atmosphere is not a static predictable physical substance at all, but a dynamic system which changes continuously over time and it is therefore nigh well impossible to obtain any date from it from the steady state emission from radioactive uranium producing radiogenic helium.  Even radio carbon dating is now recognised to have problems since its assumptions, constancy of C14 in the atmosphere, is also in doubt.

As for the invariance of radioactive decay, there is now doubt that that is true and, as Milton so impolitely reminded us, some radiometric dates are older than the assumed age of the earth. (Why the Darwinians did not seize on this to further expand the geological time scale to counter Milton's arguments is another mystery).  The discovery that radioactive decay is not constant but dependent on externalities was first reported by the Russians in a paper presented to a conference in Wageningen in Holland in 1989, where they showed a partial correlation of alpha particle emission from plutonium 239 with gravity (Udaltsova, Kolombet and Schnol, 1989).  This seems to be backed up by anecdotal evidence from a US Navy experimental reactor in Carolina which experienced unexpected surges in energy release (Cagill pers.comm).

One of the most controversial aspects of radiometric dating concerns the pleochroic haloes described by Robert V. Gentry, in various publications. In some minerals Gentry discovered pleochroic haloes without any evidence of the radioactive substance which generated those haloes, and used that to bolster his creationist age of the earth. (Note that the uniformists use Uranium decay to prove their version of the earth's age, while Gentry and others, alternative radiogenic compounds to prove their version – two squabbling religious sects in other words. And Cook complicates it further by pointing out the inconsistencies in lead ratios (Milton. Op cit.)
However the electrical engineer Ralph Juergens wrote in the middle 70's
“Nearly every modern cosmological theory assumes that all the heavy, radioactive elements were created "in the beginning" or at least prior to the formation of the Earth -- and were assembled as terrestrial elements as the planet formed. Gentry's studies seemed to indicate that radionuclide-creation in some instances occurred mere minutes before those nuclides became trapped in rocks solidifying to form parts of the Earth's crust. If so, they must have been created on Earth long after the planet itself was formed.”

Juergens was careful not to associate this with creationist theory, and further writes:
“According to experiments best explained by Gamow's wave mechanics, an alpha particle escaping from an unstable (radioactive) nucleus does not actually climb all the way over the potential barrier rising above the datum line. Instead, it tunnels through at some level below the top. For example, though the barrier at the boundary of the U-238 nucleus rises past 9 million electron-volts (mev) above datum, alpha particles emerge from this nucleus with energies of only about 4 mev. And since their final (observable) energies are due entirely to electrostatic repulsion in the region outside the barrier, they evidently make their way through the barrier at a level corresponding to 4 mev.

But what is the significance of the datum -- the "zero" of electric potential -- from which these energies are measured? Clearly, since the data dealt with are derived from terrestrial experiments, this "zero" can be nothing other than an arbitrary value assigned to the electric potential of the surface of our planet -- Earth potential.
What, then, if this datum should be shifted - raised or lowered with respect to the nuclear potential well, whose dimensions are apparently unrelated to electric forces - by a sudden change in Earth potential?

The Earth appears to be strongly charged with negative electricity, so that its surface electric potential is low, which is to say, highly negative. Suppose, then, that Earth potential is suddenly lowered by just 1 million volts - this, in all likelihood, an almost negligibly small fraction of the planet's "normal" negative electric potential. The potential (energy) curve outside our radioactive nucleus presumably must now change and take the form of the dashed curve in the figure. Staying with our example of an atom of U-238, we find that an escaping alpha particle (following the same tunnel as before) emerges to be accelerated through a voltage drop and to a final energy half again as great as before - to about 6 mev. Reference to Figure 1 (main text) suggests that we should suddenly find that the half-life of every atom of U-238 at the surface of the Earth has been reduced from 4.5 billion years to something like 1 second! On this basis, any abrupt lowering of Earth potential by a mere million volts could be expected to produce rampant radioactivity, with consequent lethal or at least strongly mutational effects on all forms of life.

But of course we are probably unjustified in assuming that Figure 1 is applicable to the postulated conditions; it may well be that changing Earth potentials also shift the curve of Figure 1 up or down, right or left, so that changes in half-lives are much less drastic than that just described. And it may be, too, that nuclear binding forces are not entirely insensitive to environmental electric potentials, and that the levels of escape tunnels also vary as datum levels change.

Nevertheless, it would seem that Earth potentials must be taken into account in theories of radioactive decay. And we may be forgiven for suggesting here that parentless polonium, sometime in the past when the Earth's electric potential was higher than it is today, could well have been a radioactive element with a reasonably long half-life, such that it could survive periods of cooling and crystallization in once-molten rocks.”(Jurgens, ).

It is pretty clear that earth electric potentials are not accounted for in our theories, since we still rigidly stick to the standard uniformist paradigm, and of course electrical potentials are only noted as problems when we conduct sensitive geophysical surveys, otherwise we tend not to think more about it. So radioactive decay is not really useful either, but it is extensively used by the neo-creationists for their uniformist views, and well as the older creationists to derive both long and short times to creation.

That was until 1950 when an obscure psychoanalyst named Immanual Velikovsky published the heresy - Worlds in Collision - followed by Earth in Upheaval, and then a series of books focussing on a reconstruction of ancient middle east history.

Velikovskys' heresy was that he dared suggest that in addition to gravity another force might be operating in the cosmos: he was right – it now forms the basis of plasma cosmology, and the subject of the first letter to Nature Magazine, which was rejected early this year.  However then as now, religion was confused with empirical science – for Velikovsky suggested that the “myths” associated with ancient cultures, as well as the Old Testament of Christianity, may well be factual historical accounts, but blurred and obscured by each generation re translating the older works.  One only needs to look at the various Bibles to see how history is changed. It was this fact that prompted me to look again at Velikovsky's theories, because when I was checking his citations in Worlds in Collision, I discovered that one of my sources, “The Revised English Bible”, contradicted some of his footnotes – until I realised that he could not have used that as a source, but the King James Authorised instead. It was then that I saw how, in a short period of time, well meaning scholars could drastically change the meanings of older texts by rewriting them in the modern idiom.  No wonder some consider ancient writings as myth.

Now another political brouhaha is happening,  in climate science, where ideology and fact are confused and data engineered for political rather than scientific ends.  It all seems do familiar.  From the geological perspective it is pertinent to quote a recent article in the Australian Institute of Geoscientists by the editor David Shatwell:
“Grinnell wrote those words in 1974, but I would contend that the political battle that underlay the catastrophist/uniformitarian debate” has re-surfaced as the current controversy over global warming.  Most scientists now see the parallel rises in atmospheric CO2 and temperature since the industrial revolution as cause and effect, and regard industrial greenhouse emissions as a new and potent addition to volcanism, Milankovitch cycles, and all the other geological agents of climatic change.  They say that both atmospheric carbon build-up and global warming are occurring more rapidly than in the past. This is a uniformitarian view, in the sense that “geological” climate change was gradual compared to the man-made changes that are occurring today. Left-of-centre parties support this interpretation of the scientific evidence, to achieve political goals such as ratifying Kyoto – a political spin which has nothing to do with whether the interpretation is right or wrong.

The right wing or conservative spin, whose most articulate advocate is Professor Ian Plimer, is that atmospheric CO2 levels have fluctuated catastrophically from natural causes through geologic history, which is true. They claim, much more contentiously, that man-made greenhouse gases have negligible effect, and that high CO2 levels are a result, not a cause of global warming.” (Shatwell in AIG News No 73, p 15, August 2003).

Shatwell concludes with the rather interesting observation, referring to Velikovky's theory of collective amnesia: “But instead of collective amnesia, perhaps there is a process of collective denial that defuses impending catastrophes, rather than past ones, by demonising scientists who bring the bad news – shooting the messenger – or trivialising their findings.

To paraphrase Grinnell one last time: maybe the political right opposes the greenhouse theory, not because they believe it is wrong, but because they are afraid it might be right.” (Shatwell op cit).

Note how it is the political right who are now demonising the scientists bringing the bad news  - because the political right secretly fear the greenhouse theory might be right, though how you could falsify this particular theory does not come easily to mind.  However this conclusion is essentially Lyellian and so geological thinking remains captive to its Whiggish antecedents.

What Shatwell and the neo-creationists fail to realise is that Lyell and the Whigs set out to destroy Diluvial Geology and Catastrophism, and replace it not with an empirically based alternative, but a well thought out imaginative construct in which creation was shifted backwards in time to a sensible date, thus deflecting Tory argument by avoiding it. While modern geology is not nearly as much in the thrall of the old religion, it still remains in the thrall of a new, modern sort of Lysenkoism.  After all – dare opine anti-plate tectonic or catastrophist views amongst your geological peers, and you are quietly marginalised, and censored. It is common in all science, of course. Undergraduates know when to remain silent.

The uniformitarian view is now fully associated with anthropogenic global warming, though as is slowly becoming clear from the evidence, this may turn out to have been a rather premature association. Of course we now realise most scientists do not agree with the IPCC conclusions, as evidenced by recent petitions, and new data are starting to casting serious doubt on the temperature indexes since 1991, eg (Essex and McKitrick, 2002). As well some of us are realising that there is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of temperature in the climate sciences, which is not detailed here, but Essex and McKitrick discuss that in their book “Taken by Storm”.  There seems to be a view that apart from unrepresentative sample sets since 1991, climate scientists also seem to be measuring the average temperature of their thermometers, rather than the air.

So the old clerical catastrophist geologists were probably right after all, the earth has undergone many past catastrophes in the past, memorialised by many ancient myths and traditions, and the memories of those, suppressed as Velikovsky has indicated in his collective amnesia theory, are now being replayed by the Global Warmers as the next expected catastrophe.

Dismissing Velikovsky's ideas as post-modernist waffle suggests his critics have not studied the evidence, nor understand many of the principles forming Velikovsky's training as a psychoanalyst, but that is another story.

We can only make sense of all of this if we can extricate geology and astronomy from their politically inspired Lyellian origins.  Anyone who deigns to assume that the natives of a country exaggerate and from  that reduces the facts of 3 feet per year to 1 foot per year as the real erosion of the Niagara Falls, is not engaged in science but politics. And he is worshipped as the father of modern geology.

And any science such as astronomy which feels a need to invent black holes and all the other, ad hoc, imaginative constructs is also in the grip of its religious antecedents. So Climate Changers are merely the latest group engaging in the same practice by misinterpeting the facts to suit their political agenda, as did Lyell in the early 19th century.

And where did Lyell get his uniformism from? From his own training as a lawyer, ignoring the facts and replacing them not with counter-arguments, but with different arguments so as not to need to debate the issues in the first place.  This same logic pervades all unformist science – so that even today when young anthropologists discover stone spear heads accurately formed by chipping by artisans, in places where dogma states they should not exist, their mentors call them geofacts, as opposed to artifacts, proposing that over long periods of geological time, mother nature must, finally allow the natural creation of stone fragments which look like stone spearheads. This is indeed bizarre science.

It may well be that in the evolution of scientific thought further struggles are needed to unshackle science from its political and religious underpinnings, but if present trends are any indication, we still have a long way to go.

Notes and References

Cagle, Charles – personal note to author on receiving copy of Udaltsova et al paper, mentioned that US Navy personoll at nearby experiemental reactor in Carolina noticed unpredictable surges in power generation, as if the fission rate suddenly and inexplicably increased. Apparently remains a mystery.

Essex C, & McKitrick R, Taken by Storm, 2002, Key Porter Books, Canada

Ginenthal, George, James Hutton: A Non-inductive, Theological Catastrophist, The Velikovskian, Vol. 1 No 3, 1993.

Grinnell, George, The Origin of Modern Geological Theory, Kronos, Vol.1 No 4, Winter 1976

Juergens, Ralph E, Radiohalos and Earth History, Kronos, Vol.III No 1, Fall 1977

Milton, Richard, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, 1997, Park Street Press, Rochester, Vermont.

Shatwell, D, Geopolitics and Cultural Amnesia, AIG News, Quartley Newsletter No 73, August 2003, p. 14.

 Udaltsova, N.V. Kolombet, V.A. and Schnol, S.E., “The Possible Gravitational Nature of Factors Influencing Discrete Macroscopic Fluctuations, in Geo-Cosmic Relations: the Earth and it's macro environment. Proc. first Int. cong.1989, edited by Ed. Tomassen et.al., Pudoc, Wageningen, Holland

Velikovksy, Immanuel, Earth in Upheaval, 1956, p.141, Victor Gollancz Limited, in association with Sidgwick and Jackson Limited, London.