Hi Dennis. Have you ever heard the phrase “The hammer and the pendulum?” Take Care…Don in creepy town.

Huxley wrote:

To my mind there appears to be no sort of theoretical antagonism between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism; on the contrary, it is very conceivable that catastrophes may be a part and parcel of uniformity.

Let me illustrate my case by analog. The working of a clock is a model of uniform action. Good timekeeping means uniformity of action. But the striking of a clock is essentially catastrophe.

The hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a deluge of water, and by proper arrangement the clock, instead of marking the hours, might strike all sorts of irregular intervals, never twice alike in the intervals, force or numbers of its blows.

Nevertheless, all these irregular and apparently lawless catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely Uniformitarian action, and we might have two schools of clock theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the pendulum.

So if uniformity and catastrophe, rather than being the antagonists that perception has separated into evolutionary and creationist camps, became the new paradigm of agreement instead, what specific action would it take to bring the metaphorical hammer & pendulum into synchronous motion so that the pendulum, in laying out the passage of geological time, was coordinated with the striking of the geographical patterned hammer? A unification theory perhaps?

There have been various attempts at unification, but each has failed, largely, I suggest, because insufficient consideration has ever been given to the fact that Nature's Laws are in control of the motions of the hammer & the pendulum; but scientists don't know what laws these may be, or where to look, or where to go or what to do to find out, and so to this very day, these laws remain undefined. The hammer & the pendulum parable that we have been discussing here, so that we keep it fresh in our minds, is about the earth sciences. We are talking about the formation of continents, of mountains, of the re-establishment of stagnant rivers to their primeval heights. We are talking about earthquakes, volcanos, and the earth's magnetic field. We are talking about catastrophic episodes that have churned the crust into a menagerie of the dead. We are noting the fact that nothing is original; every particle of the earth's crust has been re-cycled. The evidence is so pervasive that its very presence is proof in itself of catastrophe. There can be but scant debate on this issue, for the entire expanse of the crust's upper layers, top to bottom, side to side, is one huge graveyard.