The True Origin of Continental Drift

What we will be dealing with in the future is so big that most people can't get their minds around it, and need time and looking at it from different angles to get used to the idea and its validity. For example, when I say "the Earth was subjected to a wholesale re-formation in order to enable a great design", many followers of currently-accepted science consider this claim an insult to modern science, and to the theory of plate tectonics in particular. So they refuse to look at the new facts I have uncovered in my own research program. After all, that theory is the recognized linchpin, the central theory, for all the earth sciences today. As an older scientist, I would counsel the newer generations to remember that it achieved this high status only recently (within the last 40 years or so). Here is an article I wrote about a recent development brought forward by scientists in the field, to show another way of looking at it for the average interested reader:

I have just coined a new term: Punctuated Plate Tectonics.

Remember when Stephen Gould hypothesized "punctuated equilibrium" to explain the strange apparent pattern of evolution as a succession of ages, each beginning with a worldwide extinction of most previous lifeforms, followed by a swift repopulation of the world by new ones, with relatively little evolutionary change through ensuing millions of years, until the next catastrophe-led "age"? Perspicacious critics of evolution pointed out that his hypothesis merely admitted the obvious--that natural selection was a mechanism for homeostasis, or little change in species over even geologic time spans, rather than for continued, gradual evolution--but they were ignored or dismissed as religious creationists, not the scientists they often were.

Now comes a report at enn.com that plate tectonics, too, shows clear signs of being an on-again, off-again process. As the report says:

Writing in the January 4 [2008] issue of Science, Paul Silver of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and former postdoctoral fellow Mark Behn (now at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) point out that most of today's subduction zones are located in the Pacific Ocean basin. If the Pacific basin were to close, as it is predicted to do about [sic] in 350 million years when the westward-moving Americas collide with Eurasia, then most of the planet's subduction zones would disappear with it.

This would effectively stop plate tectonics unless new subduction zones start up, but subduction initiation is poorly understood. "The collision of India and Africa with Eurasia between 30 and 50 million years ago closed an ocean basin known as Tethys," says Silver. "But no new subduction zones have initiated south of either India or Africa to compensate for the loss of subduction by this ocean closure."

From this simple observation and other evidence, the scientists conclude:

Plate tectonics is driven by heat flowing from the Earth's interior, and a stoppage would slow the rate of the Earth's cooling, just as clamping a lid on a soup pot would slow the soup's cooling. By periodically clamping the lid on heat flow, intermittent plate tectonics may explain why the Earth has lost heat slower than current models predict. And the buildup of heat beneath stagnant plates may explain the occurrence of certain igneous rocks in the middle of continents away from their normal locations in subduction zones.

"If plate tectonics indeed starts and stops, then continental evolution must be viewed in an entirely new light, since it dramatically broadens the range of possible evolutionary scenarios," says Silver.

Scientists critical of plate tectonics have long pointed out that the total length of "subduction zones" (trenches) and "collision zones" is only about one-third of the total length of "spreading zones", quite contrary to the theory, so this newly-perceived lack of new subduction zones in the wake of the closing of the Tethys sea merely confirms those critics. Plate tectonics is not the robust , successul theory--the triumphant linchpin of all the earth sciences--that it is usually presented as being. It is failing; it has always failed. This report admits "subduction initiation is poorly understood," but scientists such as David Pratt, Dong Choi and others have pointed out the real truth, that there is no good evidence for subduction at all, anywhere, and calculations indicate the subduction of lighter crustal material into the denser mantle cannot be initiated, much less maintained by heat-driven, internal currents. Geophysicists resisted continental drift for about 50 years because they could find no sufficient physical cause for it. Although science is now well assured that the continents were moved over the Earth, it still has no physically reasonable cause for such wholesale movement. Science does not want to face it, but the truth is that we know "continental drift" occurred, but (some of us know, and all should know) "plate tectonics" was not responsible. The reader is also referred to mantleplumes.org, a site devoted to detailed scientific discussions and articles critical of plate tectonics theory.

This is where my discoveries come in. I have shown in my work that the Earth was re-formed--not created, re-formed--wholesale and by deliberate design, less than 20,000 years ago according to both ancient testimony and the design itself (which communicates a coherent, verifiable purpose). Remembrance of that design, through "sacred images" and "sacred stories", or myths, was the motivation for the subsequent religious obsessions, and all the greater endeavors (toward science as well as art and religion), of mankind. Plate tectonics as it is currently envisioned will never be confirmed, because physics has all along been against it, and now the design of the "gods" (as they were known in earliest recorded history, worldwide) makes it unnecessary.

Isaac Newton famously compared himself to a child playing with pretty stones on the beach, while before him lay the real ocean of truth, unexplored. When will science stop tossing up "pretty stones"--like the article reported on here, claiming what I call "punctuated tectonics"--that really only underline the fundamental, even logical, weaknesses of the most-admired theories of our time? The real history of the Earth has been one of successive designs.

Looking Around

"Change we can believe in" is what we all want now, but the reality is entangled in everyone thinking and doing just what they are accustomed to do (and no more!), and change can go hang. It's going to take rock-solid leadership to get people to work together, for one another.

What the country really needs--what we need--is the courage to lead ourselves. We have dreams and hopes that are stunted and shunted aside, by the forces of inertia both around and within us; we know they are there, crying to get out. We may even see another person, here and there, expressing what we would do ourselves if we could only see the way. We think of the angles, the risks, the seemingly inevitable bruises or worse we would be asking for, and we decline. We can't do it now, we say. We have to wait for a better time, a decent chance. Only the chance never comes.

We have to make our own chance for ourselves. We have to stand forth, out in the fierce rain of public ridicule and near-universal dismissal. We have to show ourselves, and one another, it can be done.

Design vs. Contrivance

Above the entrance to the library where I first went to college (CU Boulder, Colorado, 1966-70) are these words:

"Who knows only his own generation remains always a child."

I have always been a fan of very old wise sayings, and this one stands out for me, over the 44 years since I first read it, as particularly appropriate for our time. I am quite sure that not until we all make a renewed effort to reclaim the wisdom of the far past (from before the beginning of known history, it turns out), and integrate it with our modern knowledge and experience in a more thorough understanding of our humanity, will we be truly grown-up.

We don't have to go back too far to begin to see how scientific belief has changed, in just a few generations. Here is how Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, thought about the world as little as three centuries ago:

"Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians... Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements... He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty..."
(from Newton the Man by John Maynard Keynes, quoted in the preface of Hamlet's Mill, which can be found at phoenixandturtle.net)

Now here is Charles Darwin, a century and a half ago, or two centuries after Newton's Principia inaugurated modern physical science:

"I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems too much misery in the world..." (from a letter to American botanist Asa Gray)

Note that it is the lack of beneficence, not design, upon which Darwin hangs his reasoning. His is basically the quintessentially childish complaint of every generation--"it's not fair!"--that adults should be able to answer with real wisdom ("No, it's not, but there is more to it than you yet know, and reasons for everything, many of which you can and will learn as you go through life, if you will keep your eyes and mind open.")

In another interview, upon the publication of his The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilised by insects (and note that a contrivance is a design--"artificial arrangement or mechanical assembly as opposed to natural or logical development", as Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines it), Darwin noted:

"I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton..."

Fair enough, but note his use of the term "designed laws." He could not escape consideration of design, something that modern science refuses to honestly and properly acknowledge. Design of the natural world is a taboo subject within science, to their intellectual discredit and ultimate shame.

Now, if the world were not now full of stubborn children knowing only their own generation, I shouldn't have to instruct anyone on "why is there evil in the world," the thing that was such a stumbling block for Darwin--though he led a charmed life of financial security and the admiration of others--but not for Newton. Not to make a big deal out of it here, as I won't be dwelling on it, but the short answer is: Because we are here to learn, dummy, and especially to learn that this world is not the end-all and be-all of our existence.

I intend, if this blog generates sufficient interest, to demonstrate in coming posts that Newton was, astonishingly (to the modern scientific mind), right about the world being a complex riddle or cryptogram, whose solution indeed partly involves the "evidence of the heavens"--though the world design I have uncovered was not Creation, nor was it done by the Almighty. Darwin, and all the undirected evolutionists of the last century and a half, have indeed been weak-(and generally closed) minded in failing to honestly recognize real design(s)--as Darwin himself insincerely admitted in the above--instead opting to celebrate design by other names, such as "contrivances", "co-evolution" (something quite contrary to supposed "universal competition" or "survival of the fittest"), "self-organization", and even "natural selection". But don't think this is a Creationist or Intelligent Design rant. I won't be dwelling on the living world, but the physical, for that's where the verifiable world design is to be found--involving the actual layout of the landmasses on the Earth, as well as the observable forms in the heavens, or the celestial sphere. I'm talking about new knowledge, new facts proving a real world-encompassing design, which science does not want to hear and refuses to hear.

The Once and Future Paradigm -- Is Back

Man is an animal, as modern science would have us believe; but he is far, far more, as the same science too often would have us forget. We are insignificant on the Earth, and in the vastness of the universe. Yet our minds constantly slip these bounds, and all others that are placed upon them. We are very much minds with bodies, not bodies harboring only a simulacrum of mind. Physical reality is a hard reality we constantly bump into -- and we are annoyed, or insulted, or scared witless, or worse -- because our minds touch a higher reality, a prior reality, that entices us inward, and outward, with the ultimate freedom. Thus, within this physical realm, we must learn in order to survive and to prosper -- to deal with the structures of physical existence.



I'm talking about physical details. The world is full of it, more often than not far too much of it for our simple tastes. So we say "The Devil is in the details." Or better, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio." Science is about finding simple answers to the astounding detail of physical processes, physical phenomena. It gathers large swaths of the physical experience into classes, and sets of classes, and organizations of sets. It would replace the real many (the near-infinitude) with much fewer, simple categories. Yet the real physical world is "everywhere dense" in detail, and resists every simple-minded categorization, no matter how "unified" the approach, how sophisticated the philosophy. Sooner or later the old observation comes back to haunt the present: "There are more things (still)...."



This blog is about something that science, along with the entire human race throughout history, has neglected to learn...or been misdirected from realizing. Something fundamental to everything Man has studied for thousands of years, something at the very heart of our physical existence on this world, and the very origin of all our learning. Call it the First Paradigm, or the Once and Future Paradigm. Because it's back. More later.