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Some more on Patten

4 November 2013
Catastrophism

William Thompson sent in this link, chapter 12 'Catastrophism, Uniformitarianism, and Western Civilisation' from his book, The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch – go to www.creationism.org/patten/PattenBiblFlood/PattenBiblFlood12.htm

It becomes clear that Patten doesn't agree with Velikovsky'smodel in respect of Venus – and its birth out of Jupiter. Surprisingly, in view of his date of Ice Epcoh (or Ice Ages in mainstream parlance) he refers to an event between 10 and 20 thousand years ago, and 'there may be others in the dateless past'. In effect, he is out of sync with Young Earth believers as well but presumably he knew he had to accommodate some very ancient catastrophes known from the geological record. This is even more surprising as his book is hosted by a Creationist web site – which just goes to show the diversity of views under that banner. The difference between Patten and the likes of Clube and Napier (and the YDB team) is that they favour comets as the projenitor objects and he favoured the planets. Again, he was living and writing at a time when comets were regarded as fairly harmless objects in the sky, something that has remained in vogue in some respect, even after the Shoemaker-Levy comet impacted with Jupiter in such a way that brought it home to the astonomical community at large that comets were rather more destructive than they had been telling everyone.

Patten dates the Flood to 2800BC (probably old dates and would now be calibrated to around 3000BC). Paul Dunbavin claimed there was a small movement in the axis of rotation at that time, and various parts of the world were flooded as the oceans realigned themselves with the new arrangement of the axis and the subsequent change in the equatorial bulge etc. Stephen Oppenheimer, in 'Eden in the East' has a bigger sea level anomaly at around 6000BC and associates this withy a number of flood traditions from around the world, which he describes in some detail. In addition, we may note the end of the Ice Age was associated with even bigger seal level changes and anomalies that are not adequately explained in the uniformitarian model.

Patten, on page 9 of 11, has a nice piece on hospital infections caused by doctors not washing their hands and how measures to contain them were initially opposed by doctors and medics. He describes Jeremiah as a non-conformist – in that he opposed the conforming view. Patten came on the heels of Velikovsky – all so long ago now.

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