V is for ... Velikovsky

With the end of the A to Z challenge hoving into view - hoving, moreover, at rather alarming speed, given my somewhat scattershot approach to daily updates in a linear-time paradigm - this seems as good a moment as any to write a blog about an obscure Russian Zionist and revisionist historian.

The obscure Russian Zionist and revisionist historian in question is one Immanuel Velikovsky, a medical man who published in the 1930s the first article advocating the use of encephalography as a diagnostic tool in cases of epilepsy. A disciple of Freud who also authored several papers on psychoanalytic subjects, Velikovsky was a well-traveled man, fluent in several languages and educated in Montpellier, Edinburgh, and Moscow. He obtained his medical degree in 1921, and for much of the next two decades lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, where he worked with other notable Jewish intellectuals - including one Albert Einstein, later to refuse the Presidency of Israel - on the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a practicing Freudian psychoanalyst, Velikovsky was naturally interested in Freud's own output; as future events were to prove, he shared his mentor's somewhat monomaniac habit of shoehorning all manner of data into a pet theory, and, with war looming, Velikovsky decamped with his wife - the violinist Elisheva Kramer - to New York, there to research material for a book about Oedipus.

The 'Oedipus complex' is one of the better-known offshoots of Freud's comprehensive psychosexual theories of human development - it describes a syndrome in which the son's unconscious sexual attraction to his own mother creates a tension eventually resolved by self-identification with his father, and is named for the mythical king of Thebes immortalized by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex. Freud considered this a universal stage in the development of all males - females passed through a similar 'Electra Complex' in which they fixated on the father - which earned him a devoted following at the time as psychoanalysis flourished, but has since equally drawn criticism from more cautious and more pluralist researchers. Part of Freud's basis for universalizing his theories was the support he sought and found in historical contexts. An example of this was his Moses and Monotheism, which rewrote the Bible and argued that Moses and the Pharaoh - identified as Akhnaton, the first Pharaoh to promote monotheistic worship of the Aten - were one and the same. From this revisionist leap, it was a short journey for Freud to postulate the murder of Moses/Akhnaton as the motivation for the Jewish belief in a Messiah, and thence to characterize the importance of religion in the Jewish identity as a shared guilt complex arising out of the Oedipal murder of the father-figure.

Velikovsky took a different but no less bizarre tack - his psychohistoric theory identified the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton with the Thebean king Oedipus directly. He was seeking confirmation of his theories in contemporary Egyptian accounts of the Exodus, a task made possible by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 but still fraught with difficulty. He found in the Ipuwer Papyrus evidence that seemed to correspond with the Biblical plagues of Egypt; there was a trifling chronological problem with the centuries these events were believed to have happened, but Velikovsky was equal to that and embarked upon a feat of revisionism that left Freud in his shadow: nothing more nor less than a hybridization of Biblical scholarship with Egyptology into a new Velikovskian history of the ancient world, one in which psychoanalytic theories were consistently demonstrated in the events and personages recorded in the resultant mishmash.

The story takes a turn for the even wierder when, in 1950, we catch up with a Velikovsky now deeply embedded in catastrophic cosmology and hawking his Worlds in Collision around various publishing houses. Despite his track record as a published scientist, and despite the erudition and scholarship of his work, he is turned down by eight publishing houses because what he is writing is deemed to be simply too controversial - too "out there" - for the highly conventional world of academic publishing. Part of their reluctance stems from the unifying thesis of Velikovsky's reimagining of the Bible: he ascribes many of the events of Biblical history to an extraordinary astronomical event, the eruption of the planet Venus from the planet Jupiter, and the subsequent near misses as both Venus and Mars swooped past Earth en route to their current celestial positions. The complete lack of any precedent - indeed, any conventional astronomical evidence - for this remarkable cosmic occurence dissuaded Velikovsky not at all, because he was able to compile all the evidence he needed by selectively culling from widely-disparate sources and, where necessary, guessing.

Eventually, Velikovsky's perseverance was rewarded: the textbook division of prestigious publishing house Macmillan agreed to publish Worlds in Collision. It seemed as though Velikovsky's ideas were going to be aired before the public - but there was a problem. During his research for Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky had corresponded with, among others, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley - a potential stablemate at Macmillan's scientific division. The problem was that Shapley considered Velikovsky's theory of planetary billards patently absurd, and mounted a vehement, and successful, campaign with the assistance of other scientists contracted to Macmillan to have Velikovsky's book shelved. The success of that campaign demonstrated that Velikovsky's own world was in collision with the monolith of orthodox Science.

Doubleday, a publisher without a textbook division, picked up the book; and the assaults of the scientific community upon it continued. No less a luminary than Carl Sagan used his various bully pulpits, including his PBS show Cosmos, to inveigh against Velikovsky's maverick ideas. He cited the atmospheric composition of Venus, the radioemissions of Jupiter, the physics of celestial orbits, and other established scientific facts to assert that Velikovsky's proposed causal mechanism was junk science - it simply couldn't have happened as Velikovsky asserted it had. Sagan did have the grace to consider Velikovsky's thesis, and reject it on the basis of scientific observations that contradicted it; he criticized others in the scientific community who had simply tried to silence Velikovsky because his proposals were so far outside the mainstream.

This firestorm of criticism came as a surprise to Velikovsky himself, for whom ten years of his life had been devoted to systematically laying out the evidence for something that, to him, had become obvious. In vain, he tried to defend his own claims, pointing out that the vast majority of his evidence was concerned with archaeological and historical matters: what had convinced him of the truth of his assertions was the remarkable concordance between mythologies in places as far-flung as China and Egypt. And he gained a following among the lay public, who were sympathetic to him because of the harshness of the treatment meted out by his fellow scientists. Velikovsky was neither the first nor the last man to have his work ridiculed because its results lay outside the mainstream - Robert Goddard, for example, had been mocked in the New York Times for lacking the knowledge "ladled out daily in high schools" when he proposed the use of rockets in the vacuum of space; a groveling apology was printed when, years later, his theories were employed to put men on the moon.

Science has since moved on from attacking Velikovsky's causal mechanism to attacking the substance of his thesis: the assertion that the miraculous events described in the Holy Bible were actual historical occurences. This transition perhaps illustrates why the reception to his controversial book was so hostile: Science and Religion have always been "worlds in collision." Ironically, the evidence used to undermine the catastrophic theories of Velikovsky was partly compiled to support the catastrophic theories of global warming. Al Gore, a man with no significant scientific background - unless you count his claim to have invented the Internet - earned himself a Nobel Peace Prize, an Emmy, an Oscar, and a Grammy for his advancement of a catastrophic thesis. It's all about who you know, rather than what you know...

Although history will remember Velikovsky as a brilliant but flawed thinker, his years of scholarship did raise questions that remain valid despite his rigorous pummelling at the hands of the scientific community. For example: if there was no Great Flood, as documented in the Book of Genesis... why do the mythologies of Australia, China, Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, India, Zimbabwe, and the Americas - cultures that had no contact with one another until well into the period of historic time - agree that there was?

A is for ... Axiom.

An axiom is a particular kind of sentence, that forms the basis of a logic. Logic describes any method for establishing true conclusions from true premises, and is broadly subdivided into deductive logic, which draws specific conclusions from specific premises, and inductive logic, which draws general conclusions from general premises. The truth of the conclusions in any logic is determined by the soundness and validity of the steps connecting them to the initial premises. The overall logical process by which conclusions are induced or deduced from premises is an argument; ultimately, every logical argument begins with one or more axioms.

The thing that makes an axiom so special is that it can't be proven by any sort of logical argument. You just have to accept an axiom is true, and go from there. For this reason, axioms are generally statements that seem self-evidently true; statements we find it hard to imagine could be false. The logic most people understand and recognize as logic was formalized by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. His logic rests on a small number of axioms that state seemingly uncontrovertible assertions: the Axiom of Identity states that a given A is the same as itself, so A = A; the Law of Excluded Middle, which is actually derived from the identity axiom and so not strictly axiomatic itself, asserts that a given A must either be the same as a given B, or different from it, so A = B or A = ~B (~B means 'not B' in formal logical notation). Most of Western philosophy accepts these axiomatic principles as Aristotle formed them; but it's worth remembering that there is no logical reason that we have to. We can, for example, emulate Oscar Wilde and assert "nothing is itself alone" (it should be clear that this denies the validity of the identity axiom); we can posit that there may be a class of things which can both be and not-be one another simultaneously. It may seem absurd, to modern people conditioned to accept the assumptions - the axioms - of empirical scientific method, but it is entirely valid; even, for some purposes, advantageous.

Axioms are enormously powerful, because when we choose an axiom we are creating a whole potential logic that rests upon that axiom. It is important to distinguish between an axiom, which is unprovable within a logic, and an assumption, which is a statement whose truth is tested by logical analysis. For example, "cats have antlers" doesn't work as an axiom, since we can inductively show that there exists no cat in particular which has antlers, and so conclude that cats in general share this lack. It is a false assumption. "Cats do not have antlers" is not axiomatic, either, although it is so obvious empirically to anybody who understands what cats and antlers are that it can be treated as such under most circumstances. The danger lies in treating what seem to be obviously true assumptions as axioms - this is a good way to close ourselves off from valid alternative hypotheses. Ironically, this sort of confusion is common among adherents of the scientific method - which properly adopts a spirit of open enquiry, continuously challenging its own assumptions.

In common parlance, an argument is a dispute, a difference of opinion; each side has a reason for believing its conclusions to be true, and each side believes the other's conclusions to be false (this can be seen to be a function of Aristotle's Excluded Middle - without that, each side could have an opinion that worked for them, and not invalidate the other's opinion thereby). Some of the most intractable arguments concern situations that resist logical analysis - theology is a fertile ground for these, beginning with the fundamental argument over whether God exists. The atheist position that there is no God is grounded in an empirical worldview, which asserts that everything we observe can be explained without recourse to a God. A rule called Occam's Razor advises us that if we don't need an extra element to account for something, we should properly discard it, so that our explanation is as simple and elegant as possible. This rule, suggesting the simplest possible explanation for a phenomenon is also the best, has disadvantages which may become clear on a little reflection; we can readily conceive of situations that arise from complicated interactions but are explicable by more simple ones, and this is for example one facet of the magician's art. These performers rely on the assumptions people make based on what they observe; they are skilled at manipulating those observations, misdirecting their audience, and producing apparently 'magical' results that are explicable only by recourse to hidden phenomena of the sort Occam disregards. It should be said that the simplest explanation - "it's magic!" - is, from an atheist's perspective, closely similar to the theistic explanation - "God makes it happen." Scientific atheists assert that what we cannot explain with our current level of knowledge about the universe will become explicable as that knowledge increases and we appreciate the greater complexities of time and space. There are reasons to doubt this, and certainly no logical reason why we must accept it, but it is as logically valid a position as its counter from the theistic perspective.

Even among theists, arguments are rife, precisely because the dogma of each religion is beyond the scope of logical refutation. Where logic derives its authority from its axioms, a religion derives its authority from the Divine - belief in its deities is therefore a necessary precursor to acceptance of the religion's claims, although in this religion functions exactly as logic does: for we will only find logical force to an argument if we first accept the axioms that underpin it. Major religions differ in their characterizations of the Divine - some are monotheistic, believing in just one God (for example, the Abrahamic God worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims); others are polytheistic, believing in a whole pantheon of Gods (Norse Pagans, Hindus, and Buddhists are examples). Within a given religion, there may be differences on small points of dogma, which result in schisms or splits. These can be extremely violent. A schism within the Catholic Church of medieval Europe led to the establishment of a rival Papacy in Avignon - these Popes were known as Antipopes because they stood against the temporal authority of the Popes in the Vatican, who were officially the earthly representatives of Christ. Individuals who challenge the dogma of a religion, as Martin Luther did with his 95 Theses, or as Galileo did with his assertion "eppur si muove", can find themselves accused of heresy - under some theocratic jurisdictions, this can be a crime punishable by death. The Albigensian Heresy of the Cathars, knights who founded the first central bank in history, led to the destruction of that immensely powerful order (although several modern secret societies, like the Prieure de Sion, claim descent from them).

It comes down to this: everything any of us believe, no matter what authority we claim for it, is simply a matter of opinion. And we all know what opinions are like - something else that begins with A...