Velikovsky in Collision

"Velikovsky in Collision" (1975) is the title of an article written by Stephen J. Gould that gives a general assessment of Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979). You don't hear much of Velikovsky these days, but he was apparently rather popular (and always controversial) in his day. His notoriety came from his publications which attempted to explain Biblical and other historical oddities by invoking catastrophic earthly encounters with other planets. Mainstream scientists derided his ideas, which made him a hero among scientific insurgents.

Gould summarized Velikovsky's methodology.

He begins with the working hypothesis that all stories reported as direct observation in the ancient chronicles are strictly true—if the Bible reports that the sun stood still, then it did (as the tug of Venus briefly halted the earth's rotation). He then attempts to find some physical explanation, however bizarre, that would render all these stories both mutually consistent and true. Most scientists would do exactly the opposite in using the limits of physical possibility to judge which of the ancient legends might be literally accurate.... Secondly, Velikovsky is well aware that the laws of Newton's universe, where forces of gravitation rule the motion of large objects, will not allow planets to wander. Thus, he proposes a fundamentally new physics of electromagnetic forces for large bodies. In short, Velikovsky would rebuild the science of celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient legends. [italics added]

Gould went on to lay out several general critiques of Velikovsky's treatment of geology. One of them deserves particular note because Velikovsky's name often appears along side the term "catastrophism."

Third, the inference of worldwide events from local catastrophes: no geologist has ever denied that local catastrophes occur by flooding, earthquake, or volcanic eruption. But these events have nothing to do, one way or the other, with Velikovsky's notion of global catastrophe caused by sudden shifts in the earth's axis. Nevertheless, most of Velikovsky's "examples" are just such local events combined with an unwarranted extrapolation to global impact. He writes, for example, of the Agate Springs Quarry of Nebraska—a local mammalian "graveyard" containing the bones (according to one estimate) of nearly 20,000 large animals. But, this large aggregation may not record a catastrophic event at all—rivers and oceans can gradually accumulate vast quantities of bone and shell (I have walked on beaches composed entirely of large shells and coral rubble). Also, even if a local flood drowned these animals, we have no evidence that their contemporary brethren on other continents were the least bit bothered.

I wish I had a better handle on the history of catastrophism in geology. Charles Lyell revolutionized geology by popularizing the method of interpreting past changes to the earth using known geological processes, an approach known as uniformitarianism. In contrast, catastrophists appeal to large-scale or global disasters. My sense is that catastrophists tend to have a bad name, not because large-scale catastrophes never happen, but because they are invoked without sufficient evidence in order to save whatever pet theory the catastrophists are pushing. Having said that, uniformitarianists may have been a little too hardened at times in the past. Modern geology is apparently not as rigid. (For what it's worth, doing a Google search on uniformitarianism or catastrophism brings up a lot of creationist websites.)

Gould concludes,

The Velikovsky affair raises what is perhaps the most disturbing question about the public impact of science. How is a layman to judge rival claims of supposed experts? Any person with a gift for words can spin a persuasive argument about any subject not in the domain of a reader's personal expertise.... But what it is a person who knows neither astronomy, Egyptology, nor geology to do—especially when faced with a hypothesis so intrinsically exciting and a tendency, shared, I suspect, by all of us, to root for the underdog?

Gould never really answers the question.

For more critique of Velikovsky, see here.

Postscript:
Velikovsky apparently had a fan among the writers of the Church's Old Testament institute manual.

Although the majority of geologists, astronomers, and other scientists believe that even this long period is not adequate to explain the physical evidence found in the earth, there are a small number of reputable scholars who disagree. These claim that the geologic clocks are misinterpreted and that tremendous catastrophes in the earth’s history speeded up the processes that normally may take thousands of years. They cite evidence supporting the idea that thirteen thousand years is not an unrealistic time period. Immanuel Velikovsky, for example, wrote three books amassing evidence that worldwide catastrophic upheavals have occurred in recent history, and he argued against uniformitarianism, the idea that the natural processes in evidence now have always prevailed at the same approximate rate of uniformity. These books are Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, and Earth in Upheaval.

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