What are your presuppositions about our world?

My name is Sarah, and at age 20 I decided it was time to learn history. Before age 20, I hated to learn about the past. Some day soon I will put my personal testimony on this website, which will explain my shift in opinion. For now, let me give the story of this website.

I began Erthe in summer of 2004, as a website to explain the true prehistory of the world, a counter-history that modern textbooks do not cover. I still intend to study the little-known facts of the universe, but I understand that I have to learn the known facts first. I have many years ahead before I can make this website what I would like it to be. It will remain my personal website for the time being, and only the links in the left menu will work. Check back in the years to come.

	to
in 23,000,000,000 easy years
(give or take a million)

Everything on this website assumes that the Bible is literally true, and applies facts to the biblical account the best way that I, the author, know how. I freely admit that I theorize. This is all I, or anyone, can do. All we can do is take the facts - all the facts - and try to make one picture out of them.

This is my journey towards the truth. Where was the Tower of Babel? Where did the different peoples travel, and why? Who made the stone heads on Easter Island? Where did the myth of Atlantis come from?
I don't know yet. But I have to know. As I find out things in the years to come - as I learn German, Hebrew, ancient Akkadian cuneiform, hieroglyphics, etc., study geology, read ancient myths - I will start to put it together. It will all end up here eventually, in between college and work. My News page will show the details as I create pages.

Meanwhile, I am also honing my writing skills in general. Go to Erthe? and My Writing to find out more about that. Also, since I and my work are inseparable, this is my personal website. Read my Blog or post Comments about anything on my site. I am extremely busy most of the time, what with college, work, and a pile of books at least 10 thick to read at any given time for these "personal" studies, but I will reply to comments when I can.

This is the short version of my motivation. For the longer version, see below.

God, Science, or Both?

Recently, I heard one of my Christian homeschool friends mention that their kids could "refute every argument an evolutionist might toss at 'em." This was how I was raised as well. But it's not that easy.
Take potassium-argon dating. It's easy to point out:

1. We don't know whether the rocks held argon before potassium began to decay.
2. We don't know whether the element has always decayed at the same rate.
3. We don't know whether or not, because of a worldwide Flood, some of the original potassium was washed away.

Truth be told, what does it even mean to be "scientific" about the origins of humanity? I wasn't there. You weren't there. If we evolved, at what moment did we form our particular type of rationality, a rationality entwined with the odd strand of irrational emotions such as love, hope and ambition? When did we take this step in the progression from animal to man? There is no record of the event - no account of a man's dawning realization that he alone could think, and that he was surrounded by millions of others that looked like him and yet could not. But of course, they say writing was invented much later. Still, why did men not recount this in their myths? How could they forget aeons of struggle in which they, the intelligent animals, overcame the non-intellectual beasts?

But Creationism - how does one scientifically prove the existence of God? As St. Augustine questions in his Confessiones:

But truly, do the Heaven and Earth, which You made and in which You made me, contain You? But since whatever exists does not do so without You, does it come into existence so that whatever exists may contain You? (Book I, sec. 2)

Friedrich Nietzsche, writing on the philosophical basis that "God is dead," honestly concluded that, if his premise was correct, no right or wrong - no "truth" - could exist. He defined his "ascetic ideal" as Christianity and as any set of morals that involved sacrificing something of what you desire for the sake of others. He then said the following about the religion/science debates:

This pair, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation - I have already indicated it: on the same overestimation of truth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth is inestimable and cannot be criticized). . . . A depreciation of the ascetic ideal unavoidably involves a depreciation of science: one must keep one's eyes and ears open to this fact! . . . Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past - he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God. . . . all science . . . has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been nothing but a piece of bizarre conceit. (Nietzsche, 589-92)

In other words, what Nietzsche says is that any argument for the existence of any "truth" rests on an argument for the existence of God. Modern science argues that it can find truth without God, when all the time it rests on a foundation of assumptions. Anywhere you look this is true, because man cannot reason ex nihilo (from nothing). A huge block of concrete is not itself part of a house, but without it the house has nothing on which to stand. That block of concrete is our starting assertions.

Any time I, you or anyone else looks at the world, each one of us applies his or her foundational assumptions. For the past century, those searching for the truth have assumed evolution. They have then attempted to fit the data they have found into this framework. If it didn't fit, it was pushed out of sight. For this reason, many facts about the ancient world are unknown to the mainstream public, and are relegated instead to the realm of the crackpots and self-proclaimed psychics.

I, and other young people like myself, have grown up in this world of lost information. Taught by my parents about Creation, I have also heard my whole life from many others about evolution. What were the differences between these two accounts? For one thing, my parents pointed me to facts. I can see an experiment from the University of Colorado about the settling of sedimentary layers for myself, or I can read the Flood accounts of numerous civilizations. On the other hand, the evolutionists expected me to believe, without a shred of proof, that I came from an ape. Where are the intermediate steps, the countless skeletons necessary for this transition? Well possibly, humanity lept forward in tremendous bursts of evolution - thus "punctuated equilibrium." Why might this have occurred?
Well, we're here, aren't we?

Not good enough. Belief in God is, from the outside, at least as rational as disbelief. From the inside, I know God exists, and He alone is my foundation. I hope that you, whether you share that belief or not, will still find much of use on this website about our common origins.

Bibliography

Augustine, St. Confessiones. Translated by myself. Unpublished.