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Originally Posted by Praxeas
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I was checking Google Books and the Amazon previews just now, neither has the dedication page. The book is dedicated to the leader of ISKCON.
The reason the Krishnas are against "modern science" isn't because they believe that the earth is just 6,000 years old; rather, they believe that the earth and all of the cosmos are eternal and had no beginning.
Sir Fred Hoyle, the astonomer who along with his collegue Chandra Wickramasinghe discovered stellar nucleosynthesis (mentioned in an earlier post) won Nobel Prizes for that work. Yet when people like Georges Lemaître (a RCC priest!) and George Gamow suggested that Edwin Hubble's observations led inevitably to the universe having a "creation" or at least a "starting point in time," Hoyle laughed off the idea and called it the "The Big Bang Theory."
Of course in the end, after collecting their own Nobels, Gamow and Lemaître and others had the last laugh. Sir Fred believed in a "modern" version of the Vedic creation accounts. He was one of the first to propose an Anthropic Principle and a form of the Gaia theory. He stayed back from mysticism, but much have his writings have been gobbled up by the New Age movement and regurgitated in predictable forms.
That's where Cremo and Thompson's book comes in. They support Hoyle's "Steady State Theory" that the cosmos has always existed pretty much like you see it today. YECs like Hovind who can rattle off chapters from this book by rote yet refuse to acknowledge using it are hiding something from us. Listen to
Hovind's debate with atheist Farrell Till. Hovind is in his prime and Till, well Till sounds old and tired. In Kent's last speech, when Till has no opportunity to respond, Hovind goes through this lengthy listing of "anomalous artifacts." Compare that list to the Table of Contents available at Amazon.com of "Forbidden Archeology."
You'll have to find a copy of the book itself to go through the end notes. It's great fun. "Scientific" sources like "
The Weekly World News" are cited repeatedly. Cremo and Co. don't even realize that this "newspaper" is a joke like The Onion. The WWN even has a comic now dedicated to their most infamous "cover story"
Bat Boy. The whole thing is intended to be a JOKE! Yet here are YECs regurgitating the same mistake made by the Krishnas.
Try to track down and pin down just one claim in this huge volume. It's all one huge smoke screen intended to throw so much mud at the wall that the writers hope something sticks. Nothing does. Nothing. And that in itself is a remarkable achievement.
Notice, I have not "attacked" their religion? ISKCON may be questionable, but the Vedic texts they purport to follow are a treasure trove of important historical information. It's just the "eternal Earth" theory probably should not be taken any more literally than the "6,000 y.o. Earth theory." And both theorists are wrong to cite the Weekly World News as a "scientific" source!
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