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Monday, February 11, 2013

Uniformitarianism is Scriptural!

I was reading my Bible this morning and found myself in Ecclesiastes Chapter Four. By the time I had finished reading Verse 15 I was experiencing an epiphany: Solomon was talking about Uniformitarianism. Of course, his emphasis was not on geologic or astrophysical processes but rather in regards to the human condition. However, I would contend that Uniformitarianism applies to just about everything in the Universe in which we currently, ephemerally reside.

 "That which has happened before is happening now; and that which is going to happen has also already happened before...". ~ Ecclesiastes 4:15 (Kimicus ad Absurdum translation)
Many of my Christian brethren foolishly feel threatened by science and also often take too many things in the Bible literally to which God spoke metaphorically. These sort of people tend to not cotton to the idea of Uniformitarianism. This is especially true if they erroneously believe that the Bible claims the world is about 6000 years old. These hayseeds fail to grasp the unity of Scripture and Science.

Contrariwise, many unbelieving scientifically-minded people feel nothing but disdain and contempt for the Bible and some even bizarrely seem to feel threatened by it even while denying it has any power. At the very  best such people seem to feel it is a cool thing that was wholly inspired and authored by Mankind and NOT God. In doing that they deprive themselves of fully realizing and actualizing the full potential of the Bible in the world generally and in their lives individually. They also tend to deny the unity of Scripture and Science.

Other philosophies have addressed this theme as well and it can be labeled under the general title of Eternal Return which concept lost popularity with the rise of Christianity. 

If you are at all like me then when you read that passage you also thought of the quote by Pythia from Battlestar Galactica that goes, "All this has happened before. All this will happen again." Likewise, even author J.M. Barrie wrote in his classic Peter Pan over a century ago that "All this has happened before, and it will all happen again." Truth is truth and believer and unbeliever alike can recognize some of the more obvious and self-evident truths and truisms.


2 comments:

  1. Kudos, Kimmer, and well stated! You are an English prof's dream student!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over again and expecting a different result.

    ReplyDelete