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Today's scientific beliefs are founded on the work of many earlier philosophers reaching back into three millennia of antiquity to the ancient Greek thinkers whose intellectual exploits were recorded and survived to enlighten later generations. As each idea or concept was modified or replaced by a better or newer idea, the body of scientific knowledge concerning creation and functioning of the Earth gradually developed and spread throughout the known world.
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However, the spread of knowledge was neither smooth nor easy for a variety of reasons, but primarily for lack of a rapid means of communication and the fact that the advent of Christianity and its dominant influence on matters philosophical, particularly during the long reign of the Holy Roman Empire, delayed the progress of scientific thought for many centuries. The Church insisted that Earth, and Man's existence on Earth, were as described in Genesis and this view was rigidly enforced by officials of the Church known as Inquisitors. No other view was permitted.
The brave and courageous independent thinkers who dared to contradict Church edicts in order to advance the corpus of scientific knowledge are few, but well-known for their exploits. Many lost their lives, the best-known being Father Giordano Bruno, a monk who was burned at the stake in 1600 by the Inquisitors for supporting the theory of heliocentrism advanced earlier by Copernicus (1473-1543). Galileo escaped a similar fate in 1633 only after publicly recanting his belief in heliocentrism.
The heliocentric proof of Copernicus, published in 1543 as he lay dying, was especially significant because it forever changed and enlarged the scope of scientific inquiry from Man's egocentric view that Earth was the center of the Universe to the broader and more important heliocentric view that Earth is just one of several planets orbiting the Sun.
After Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in 1687 explained the physical Universe in mathematical terms and developed the concept of universal gravitation, other philosophers and investigators were stimulated to develop and expand their scientific investigations. Immanuel Kant(1724-1802), the great German philosopher, published a treatise in 1755 based on Newton’s theories, and in 1778, the French naturalist, Comte de Buffon, published the first of many "collision" hypotheses.
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In the final years of the 18th century, Marquis Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827), the great French scientist, modified Kant’s work and produced the treatise now known as Laplace's nebular hypothesis, which is often referred to as the Kant-Laplace hypothesis. Both Kant and Laplace necessarily accepted the Bible's story of Earth's creation as a sudden event (they had little choice in that era of history) but modified their views to reflect the new and emerging reality from geological and palaeontological evidence that the planet must be much older than portrayed in Genesis.
Not many people are aware of other alternate creation philosophies that have been proposed, particularly today's younger students and scientists who are seldom exposed to such alternative hypotheses in their academic curricula. In the 20th century alone, at least nine totally different cosmologies (the only ones known to me) have been postulated to explain how the Sun and its nine solar planets came into existence. The large number of alternative ideas attempting to explain this most fundamental of all geophysical assumptions is a strong indication that something must be wrong with the nebular hypothesis.
The prescient skeptics of this century include F. R. Moulton and T. C. Chamberlin, 1900; Otto Schmidt, 1932; C. F. von Weizsacker, 1944; Gerard P. Kuiper, 1949; Harold Urey, 1962; Sam Elton, 1966; A. E. Ringwood, 1966; A. G. W. Cameron, 1972; L. S. Myers, 1972. In each of the ideas mentioned, certain differences stand out: (1) The sources and forms of matter involved. (2) The processes and duration of time in which the planets were formed. (3) Heat, or lack of heat, in initial stages of creation. Urey, Elton, Cameron and Myers were the only proponents of a cold beginning, and few of the hypotheses speculated on the genesis of water, assuming that it had always existed on the planet.
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Cameron came closest to the truth with his concept of an accretion process, suggesting the Earth may have commenced from an object no larger than a basketball that has steadily grown in size since that small beginning. Cameron's idea is similar to the Accreation concept except for his suggestion that the gravitational attraction of his proto-planet accelerated formation of the planet in only thousands of years, instead of millions or billions of years. "The major accumulation of the planets," he suggests, "took place in the last few centuries of their development." Whatever the merits of his idea, Cameron apparently abandoned his hypothesis and let it perish for lack of attention.
Many other creation hypotheses have undoubtedly been postulated in the past two centuries, but obviously none have attracted sufficient attention to become viable contenders to replace the current philosophy of the nebular hypothesis.
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