Podcast # 43 – Everything You’ve Been Taught Is Wrong

My name is Mark Stevens.  I am speaking today with Allan Colston. He is the author of The Last Days of Tolemac, which is a book dealing with prophecy and other end-time events.

For those listeners who may be new to this topic, this is another in the series “Signs of the Times”.  Welcome to the Podcast Allan.

Thanks Mark, it’s good to be with you again.

Mark: We have talked about many different subjects over the last few years, and I was wondering what you would like to talk about today? 

Well Mark, I thought for a change we could play a version of the game twenty questions. I will ask you a question, and then when you answer, I will comment on that answer. Only this time I would like to do something that I haven’t done before.

Mark: And what is that? 

I am going to embed in my comments a series of links to my Blog, so that those readers of my Blog who would like further information can follow these links. Does that make sense to you?

Mark: Sounds like a great idea. So what is your first question? 

My first question is, who is or was James W. Loewen?

Mark: Well that’s an easy one to answer. I haven’t the faintest idea. 

I’m not surprised Mark. Most people have probably never heard of him, which is a pity, because he deserves to be better known than he is. The James Loewen I am referring to is an American author. He is 76 years old, and as far as I am aware, still has an office at the University of Vermont. (See link)

Loewen grew up in Decatur, Illinois, and was educated at MacArthur High School where he was awarded a National Merit Scholarship. After graduating from school in 1960, he attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He then went on to earn a PhD in Sociology from Harvard University.

It was while he was teaching at Tougaloo College, a black college in Mississippi, that he became aware that the history taught to black students about events occurring at the time of the Civil War in America, was very different from that taught elsewhere in the country.

It was this discovery that led him to spend two years at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where he studied and compared twelve different history textbooks which were widely used throughout the United States at that time.

He subsequently published the results of this research in 1995 under the title: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. The book went on to become a bestseller, and Loewen has since become an acclaimed sociologist, historian and author.

Loewen has travelled the world giving lectures publicising history, or to be more precise, the propagation of historical ideas that have proven to be biased, or even plumb wrong. These lectures were published in a new book in 2005, under the title Everything You’ve Been Taught Is Wrong. 

In these lectures, Loewen has not just confined himself to the subject of American history, but to Archaeology and Prehistory as well. And this brings me to my next question Mark. How old is human civilisation? What did they teach you in school about this? 

Mark: I was taught that human civilisation began about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, with the Sumerian or Akkadian culture. And that this time frame more or less coincided with the rise of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. 

That’s pretty much what I was taught as well, Mark. And this is where it gets interesting, because this is not just what was taught in schools when we were growing up. This is also what is being taught in leading universities to this day. In fact, it is even more insidious than James Loewen imagined.

If you were to be accepted for a PhD degree at one of the leading Ivy League universities in America today, and you chose for your thesis something related to the earliest human civilisation, you would fail if you did not adhere to this accepted timeline.

This is not just a question of there being no evidence of prior civilisations on the earth that date back before the time of the Sumerians, or the earliest dynastic rulers of Egypt. Evidence of earlier civilisations than these not only exists, but it has existed for centuries.

This evidence has not just been ignored, it has been deliberately and systematically suppressed. You might think that this sounds like some bizarre conspiratorial plot. But it just happens to be the actual state of advanced education today, and it exists in all the countries of the world.

And I am not just referring here to human history, but to every discipline of science as well. And to understand the reason why this situation exists, we need to investigate the fundamental philosophy of science. And that brings me to my next question. Who was Thomas Kuhn?

Mark: Again, I must admit that I have no idea.

Thomas Kuhn was another graduate of Harvard University. When he died in 1996, he was recognised not only as an accomplished physicist, but as one of the world’s leading philosophers of science. His best-known work was his book titled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. (See link)

Kuhn studied the history of science from its beginnings in the 16^th century with the discoveries of men like Copernicus and Galileo, up to the modern era. What he found was that science had developed in a way that was very different from the way that was taught in schools and universities.

Instead of linear progress, in which one scientific discovery led naturally to the next, he found that scientific development had followed a similar course to the social and political upheavals of those years, in which steady development was punctuated by sudden outbreaks of dramatic change.

Kuhn called these transformations scientific revolutions, and he popularised the use of the term “paradigm” to describe them. He defined a scientific paradigm as “the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by members of a given community”. 

Paradigms according to Kuhn, were scientific revolutions which altered the entire perspectives of their times, being “universally recognised scientific achievements that for a time provided model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.”

He found, for example, that each new scientific revolution did more than build upon the theories of its predecessors, for each completely changed the foundations of the past. As each new paradigm became entrenched, so it was necessary not only to reconstruct past theory, but also to re-evaluate past fact.

So, for example, the Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus did not discover facts which were unknown to those trained in the Ptolemaic school of astronomy. What he did was to explain these facts in a completely new way.

It was his brilliant and revolutionary insight which enabled subsequent generations of astronomers to add a wealth of information about celestial dynamics, and to explain this information in ways which overcame the problems inherent in the old Ptolemaic system of astronomy.

Other examples of these intellectual giants were Sir Isaac Newton, the British physicist James Maxwell, and Albert Einstein. These men revolutionised the theoretical constructs of their times, in ways which had profound implications for future scientific research and development.

A new paradigm was not therefore just an incremental advance on what was previously known. Instead, it demonstrated a complete revision of the past. It also provided new avenues for solving the anomalies of the past and opened up new vistas for potential exploration.

The key insight provided by Kuhn was that each new scientific revolution was followed by a period of “normal science”, in which scientists trained in the new paradigm were content to function within that paradigm, without realising that they had become trapped within the confines of that paradigm.

And that is where we find ourselves today. Scientists everywhere, no matter what discipline they practise, have unwittingly become bound by the constraints of the current paradigm. And anyone who tries to challenge this, faces excommunication by their peers. They are forced to become outcasts.

As I said, this applies to every known discipline of science. To illustrate my point, let me begin by asking you about the fundamental basics of life on this planet. What were you taught about the origin of the different species that populate the earth? How did these different species come about?

Mark: That’s easy. As Darwin discovered, life first began as simple single-cell creatures that slowly evolved over time into the myriad species that we see under the seas and on the earth today.

Exactly Mark. That’s what I was taught as well. But even though his theory has become the foundation of modern Biology and is taught in all the universities of the world, and is believed to have proven beyond doubt, there’s just one small problem. There is not the slightest evidence to support it. (See link)

When Darwin published his book On The Origin Of Species in 1859, he presented his theory of biological change as a result of what he called “natural selection”. And although he did not conceive of this idea himself, he explained his theory in the following way.

All life is faced with a struggle to survive. And in this battle, some die and some survive. According to Darwin, the reason that some survived was because the were “naturally selected”. In other words, their bodies adapted better to the changing conditions of the world. Those who didn’t, died.

As he explained, these biological changes happened very slowly, which was why we didn’t notice them in our lifetimes. However, he expressed his confidence that, even though he personally was unable to find evidence of these changes in the fossil record, they would be found by others.

The problem is, that in the century and a half since his book was published, no one else has been able to find evidence of these morphological changes either. In fact, biologists have been unable to find evidence of any one species slowly changing over time into another separate species.

And when they tried this experiment in the laboratory, by inducing biological mutations in species that reproduced very rapidly, like fruit flies, scientists were unable to persuade them to change into a separate species, as Darwin’s theory of macro-biological change predicted.

But worse was to follow, for what the fossil record actually shows is that over 90% of all the species that have ever lived on the earth have emerged suddenly in the fossil record, and then remained in that same form until they finally disappeared from the fossil record, again equally suddenly.

So although it is obvious that creatures within a particular species can change as a result of selective breeding, as can be seen with any species that has become domesticated, there is as yet no evidence that these changes lead, by fine gradations, to any species that is completely different.

There are, however, still more problems associated with the traditional theory of evolution. As Darwin himself admitted, his elegant theory was confounded by certain complex organs such as the eye and ear, which he referred to as “organs of extreme perfection”.

If we take the human eye as an example, in order for a person to see effectively, a number of different things need to happen simultaneously and in harmony. The eye has to be kept clear and moist, as a result of the activity of the eyelids and tear glands.

The light which enters the eye has to be focused by a lens precisely upon the retina at the back of the eye-ball. The amount of light which enters the eye must also be carefully controlled by the variable aperture of the iris. If any one of these interdependent functions is faulty, the person is unable to see.

Likewise, in the human ear, rhythmic variations in outer pressure must be matched by equivalent movements of a flexible eardrum. This eardrum is in turn attached to a set of tiny bones located in the middle ear, all of which have to act in unison in order to hear properly.

So for humans to see or hear at all, every part must relate perfectly to every other part. If there is a breakdown at any point in this process, nothing is ultimately seen or heard. And this applies to all species that have reached a certain stage of physical development.

The difficulty that confronted Darwin was all too obvious. If these organs of extreme perfection had themselves evolved through a variety of stages, then how was it possible for a species to survive while these changes were taking place? For as one of his critics has remarked:

“The transparent cornea of our eye could hardly have evolved through progressive trial and error by natural selection. You can either see through it or you can’t. Such an innovation has to be right the first time, or else it just doesn’t happen again, because the blind owner gets eaten.”

Darwin’s essential thesis was that every species survived because of its ability to evolve physically in beneficial ways. But if survival depended on changes of such complexity that they could not possibly be transmitted in a single generation, then existence would effectively be terminated.

Darwin’s response to this difficulty was a splendid piece of intellectual sophistry. He merely drew attention to a succession of different types of eyes, ranging from the simple to the complex, and pointed out that variations in eyes could be inherited.

Then presto! By inferential deduction, it could safely be assumed that the simple eye had evolved into the complex through the process of natural selection, even though the method whereby it did so remained, in his words, “insuperable by our imagination.”

So to summarise, evolutionists have blindly accepted Darwin’s theory for well over a century. Yet although everyone agrees that different species have evolved in form from the simple to the complex, there is not a shred of evidence to prove that this happened in the way that Darwin has described.

And that brings me to another question Mark, that is closely linked with Darwin’s theory of evolution through the process of natural selection. Who was Charles Lyell?

Mark: Well at last we have a name that I can relate to. I seem to recall that he was a Scotsman who was associated with the modern ideas about geology.

Well done Mark. As you say, he was a 19th century Scottish geologist who was the author of the book Principles of Geology, which is the foundation of modern geology as taught in schools and universities around the world. In fact, his work was fundamental to Darwin’s theory. (See link)

The central argument of Lyell’s book was that the present is the key to the past, as well as the doctrine of uniformity, or uniformitarianism as we know it today. What that means is that the forces of nature that sculpt our world today are the same as those that operated in the distant past.

One of the reasons why Darwin’s theory of evolution was embraced so quickly and so readily by the scientific community, was because it not only embodied the work of Lyell, but that it validated it as well. Lyell said that all geological change was the result of minute changes over vast spans of time.

And Darwin’s theory of natural selection was based on a similar idea, that different species evolved by means of equally minute changes in form, which we call mutations, which took place too slowly for the eye to notice. In other words, they needed enormous periods of time to achieve their purpose.

But when it came to providing evidence in support of his theory, Lyell ran into the same problem that Darwin did. The sad fact was that the evidence that did exist at that time, in the form of fossils embedded in geological strata, not only did not support his theory, but plainly disproved it.

This embarrassing fact was so obvious that Lyell pointed it out himself in his book. In the 12th edition of Principles of Geology he wrote:

“It has been truly observed that when we arrange the known fossiliferous formations in chronological order, they constitute a broken and defective series.”

“These violations of continuity are so common as to constitute in most regions the rule rather than the exception, and they have been considered by many geologists as conclusive in favour of sudden revolutions in the inanimate and animate world.”

Lyell’s response to this was hardly believable. He said that the reason why other geologists were unable to find evidence in geological strata of the processes that he described in his book, was because they were stupid. And not only that, but that they were unaware of their own stupidity.

You probably think I’m joking Mark, but this is what he wrote in Principles: “It appeared clear that the earlier geologists had not only a scant acquaintance with existing changes (caused by wind, flowing water, etc.), but they were singularly unconscious of the amount of their ignorance.”

You would think that modern scholars would have seen through this subterfuge by now. But it gets worse. The idea that changes in the surface of the earth have primarily been the result of forces of nature that operate slowly and imperceptibly, has also been incorporated into the paradigms of History and Archeology.

References to cataclysmic events that can still be found in the historical records of ancient societies are ignored by scholars today. And structural ruins that bear testimony to catastrophic changes in the recent past of humanity, continue to be ignored by archeologists.

They are ignored because the idea of catastrophic change within the recent history of the earth has now been officially expunged from the current paradigm of science. Those few brave souls who still try to challenge that view are condemned to being mere voices crying in the wilderness.

So there you have it. Historians ignore the evidence of catastrophic events that have occurred in recent times in the history of the earth, because to do otherwise would offend the theory of Uniformitarianism, which has now become part of the official dogma of science.

And talking of dogma Mark, let me ask you a question about another of the fundamental beliefs that are embedded in the official paradigm of science as taught in all our schools and universities today. It is about Cosmology, the queen of the sciences. How did the universe begin?

Mark: Well that’s an easy one. It began with the Big Bang.

Once again, you’re right on the button with what establishment science would have you believe. And once again, the only problem with this elaborate theory is that it is based on a false assumption. However, that doesn’t bother them, so it continues to be taught in schools and universities. (See link)

The prevailing cosmological model is that all the matter and energy that now fills the universe was flung out from a primordial explosion, and that everything we see in the sky today is the result of that initial explosion. This theory has come to be known as the “Big Bang” theory.

It was the American astronomer Edwin Hubble who played a significant role in the development of this theory. Based on his study of galactic red-shifts in the 1920’s, he concluded that separate galaxies were drifting apart from one another, and that as a result, the universe was expanding.

Once the idea of an expanding universe had become accepted, it was easy to imagine this process in reverse. In other words, based on the rate at which the universe was expanding, astronomers could go back in time and calculate that this explosion took place roughly fourteen billion years ago.

The problem with the Big Bang theory, however, as I just indicated, was that the entire theory rested upon an incorrect interpretation of a phenomenon that was well-known to astronomers at the time. This phenomenon was referred to as the “galactic red-shift”.

Hubble believed that the perceived “red-shift” of distant galaxies was a “Doppler effect”.

It was the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler who showed that a moving source of sound changed its pitch when it passed a stationary observer. Its frequency increased when it approached the observer, and decreased when it moved away. This principle had become known as the Doppler effect.

Because light also travelled in waves, Hubble assumed that it travelled through space in the same way as sound. He found that the waves of light appeared to increase in frequency whenever a source of light moved towards an observer, and to decrease in frequency whenever it moved away.

While this effect was hardly noticeable at low speeds, it became very pronounced when a source of light was moving away at a speed approaching the speed of light. If the light source was receding at high speed, it would move to the left, or red side, of the visible spectrum.

Hubble believed that as galaxies receded from the earth, their light would shift towards the red end of the visible spectrum.  And the extent of this shift would show how fast they were receding, and how far they were from the earth. And this was the basis of what became known as “Hubble’s Law”.

But by a strange twist of fate, Hubble’s law, which now forms the basis of the whole theory of the Big Bang, was challenged by Halton Arp, who once served as an assistant to Edwin Hubble while he was conducting his research at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California.

It all started off innocently enough when Arp published his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies in 1966. It was only some years later that he realized that several of the objects illustrated in his Atlas also appeared on the published list of recognized quasars.

Arp noticed was that some of these “peculiar” galaxies had much smaller red-shifts than the quasars associated with them. It was obvious that these differentials could not be explained by the so-called Doppler effect, nor to any movement of the objects themselves.

He published his findings in the “Astrophysical Journal”, which was the leading publication in its field at the time, hoping to attract the attention of fellow astronomers. Unfortunately, what followed was yet another travesty in the long, sad saga of science.

What Arp had done was unforgivable. He had dared to challenge the established paradigm of science, by having the audacity to provide evidence that Hubble’s law was wrong, and that the entire theory of the Big Bang was invalid.

Arp was shunned by his colleagues and asked to change to another line of research. When he failed to do so, he was denied further use of the Palomar Observatory for his research. Despite being a long-standing Fellow of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he lost his job and was forced to leave America.

So that brings me to another question that forms part of the paradigm of modern science, Mark. Why is the sun hot?

Mark: You’re kidding me of course. The sun is hot because the nuclear reaction inside the sun generates intense heat, which then radiates outward into space in all directions.

Well done Mark. Score one for the academic establishment, and zero for scientific truth. What you just said is exactly what continues to be taught in schools and universities everywhere. It just so happens that this is not only wrong, but that even a child can see why it is wrong. (See link)

Based on spectrographic analysis, our sun has been found to consist primarily of hydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. Small amounts of heavier elements such as oxygen, carbon, neon and iron have also been found.

Our sun is thought to have been formed about four and a half billion years ago as a result of the gravitational collapse of a large molecular cloud that existed at the time of the formation of the solar system.

Being at the centre of this gravitational collapse, the sun became increasingly hot until a process of thermonuclear fusion began spontaneously. It was this process of converting hydrogen nuclei into helium that was thought to be the source of its heat and light.

All this remained well and good until the beginning of the space age, when scientists were at last able to send probes to the sun, as well as satellites that orbited the sun, and send back information about the sun that was never previously available.

What this showed was that there was something seriously wrong with their historical model. For if the sun truly was a nuclear reactor, converting hydrogen atoms into helium through a process of thermonuclear fusion, then there should be a simple temperature gradient emanating from the sun.

In other words, the temperatures should get cooler the further away you travel from the surface of the sun. But what the space probes revealed was the exact opposite. It is actually hotter.

For example, although the temperature at the surface of the sun is about 4,400 degrees K, scientists found that at the top of the Chromosphere the temperature rises to about 20,000 degrees K. And further out at the Corona, it again jumps dramatically to about two million degrees Kelvin.

Every schoolchild knows that in this universe a source of heat does not get hotter the further away you go. So when the facts contradict theory, then it is a good idea to re-evaluate the theory. But that is not what academics have done. They have preferred to stay with the old paradigm.

But not all astrophysicists have been prepared to toe the line. Some brave souls who have risked ostracism by their peers have banded together to propose an entirely new paradigm, one that is not based on gravity, but on electromagnetism. They call this paradigm the “electric universe”. (See link)

Mark: Well Allan, I learn something new from you every time we chat. But before we end this Podcast, I want to go back to your question about the age of human civilisation. You never said what you think about this.

Well if you go by ancient texts that are stored away in various museums around the world, you will find that human civilisation goes back tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, dating back to the earliest Adamic race and the civilisation of Lemuria. (See link)

But the conventional dogma is that even though the earth is a little over four billion years old, human civilisation only began about five thousand years ago. We have also been taught that the planets in our solar system have remained unchanged ever since they were first created.

All of this is of course a myth, as any historian could show within a few days of serious research. But as I have said before, to do so would be to go against the scientific paradigm of uniformitarianism, and anyone who tried to do so would quickly find themselves rejected by their peers.

It was Immanuel Velikovsky who shocked the world of science in 1950 with the publication of his book Worlds in Collision. In this book he produced evidence showing that Venus had a close encounter with the earth around the 15th century BC, and that it threatened the earth again some 52 years later.

The gravitational effects of these encounters forced Venus into a new orbit which then brought it into a collision path with Mars. These close encounters led to Mars being thrown into a new orbit, where it had a series of disastrous encounters with the earth. (See link)

According to Velikovsky, the actual history of the earth was very different from what geologists like Lyall had portrayed. He quoted legends, myths and stories describing times when dwellings were destroyed and the earth was convulsed by natural disasters which had their source in space.

While the nature and number of these disasters varied, these legends indicated that entire civilisations had vanished as a result of these encounters. And, as Plato himself described, our world has repeatedly changed its axis, as well as its orbit around the sun. (See link)

But even though their civilisations may have disappeared, in some cases parts of their architecture have survived, such as the sphinx on the Giza plateau which, as Boston University professor Dr. Robert Schoch believes, may have been built as far back as 10,000 years ago. (See link)

But the existence of so many other megalithic ruins around the world suggest that there may well have been a global civilisation centred on the island of Atlantis that was destroyed by a world-wide cataclysm around 10,500 BC, as described by Plato in his dialogue entitled Critias.

The gigantic stone statues on Easter Island called Moai, some of which weigh fifty tons or more, are considered by conventional archaeologists to have been carved by the Polynesian inhabitants, even though no other examples exist of similar statues carved by Polynesians elsewhere.

They lie at odd angles all around the island, with their bodies covered in sand and debris, and only their heads protruding. To any open-minded observer, it is obvious that they were carved before the soil and debris arrived, most probably by a series of devastating tsunamis. (See link) 

Other stone ruins buried beneath tons of soil and debris have been found at a height of over 12,000 feet on the Bolivian altiplano, at a place called Tiwanaku, together with nearby megalithic ruins at Puma Punku. Again, it seems obvious that whatever existed there originally was destroyed by a series of natural disasters. (See link) 

Also in South America, this time at Marcahuasi in Peru, can be found a giant stone image of a human head 80 feet high that the locals call Peca Gasha. This location is filled with other strange carvings that are suggestive of animals that have never lived in South America. (See link) 

And talking of images of creatures unknown to modern archaeologists, there are the enigmatic stone carvings that were discovered about twenty years ago in Turkey at a place called Göbekli Tepe.  (See Link) Again, these ruins had been buried under a hillside of soil and debris that had hidden them for centuries.

These megalithic ruins contain T-shaped stone pillars twenty feet tall that weigh up to ten tons each. Again, whatever civilisation was responsible for building these structures, seems to have vanished without trace in a series of disasters that buried them under a sea of sand and mud.

Finally, anyone interested in learning about the true history of the solar system should look at the video Symbols of an Alien Sky. (See link) And anyone wanting to know more about the real history of human civilisation should listen to this discussion with Dr. Robert Schoch. (See Link)

Based on the foregoing Mark, it is clear that what we have been taught in our schools and universities does not reflect the latest discoveries of science, and no longer provides valid answers to the questions I have raised. So my final question to you is this, and you don’t have to answer it.

Will the next scientific revolution that Thomas Kuhn wrote about come before our civilisation is wiped out by the next cataclysm, or as a result of it?

Mark:  Yes, I think I’ll leave that topic to another time. Anyway, this has been a fascinating discussion. I want to thank you Allan for the unique way you have presented your ideas. It certainly gives me much to think about, and I’m sure our listeners will agree as well.

You have been listening to Allan Colston, author of the book The Last Days of Tolemac.  Do join us for our next Podcast, which will be another in the series titled “Signs of the Times”. Allan Colston can be reached at tolemac@shaw.ca 

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