Opus 2024-433: Why Be Consistent?

As I read Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization my gestalt keeps kicking in.  Not only do I have my total remembered knowledge, but also the gestalt of the actual book I’m reading.  I am now, as I write, in his chapter dealing with Israel.  By this time I’m seeing some real arrogance based on ignorance in his writing.

Ignorance and lack of data don’t stop a creative secular historian.  The first section of the book talks about prehistoric man.  We really know very little but that doesn’t stop him from putting together a total culture.  One point that I was thinking about this morning was how one of the early forms of man was credited with using tools.  Those tools were obviously stone, but what was interesting was that the archaeologist claim that the stone was not really worked.  It was not chipped like the later Stone Age artifacts.  All they did was find rocks that seem to fit a certain purpose and use them as tools.  At least that is the story of the archaeologists, and they are sticking with it.

He attributes the use of tools by these early “humans” as something they learn from watching animals.  I think we’ve all seen videos of otters laying on their back with some kind of shell creature on their belly and pounding on it with a rock.  There are birds that use sticks for prying bugs out of cracks.  In modern times, we have beavers that build houses and dams.  Evidently the early man was supposed to have learned this from watching the animals.

This brings up two questions.  First, where do the animals learn to use tools?  OK, Mr. Dr. PhD, answer the question.  Who taught animals to use tools?  Could it be that your willingness to define tools in such a broad description makes it possible for anything to be a tool in the case of animals?  Could it be your desire to discredit the idea of God himself teaching them some of these things makes it necessary for you to plug in your imagination instead of turn on your intellect?  There’s no question that all of these scholars are intelligent.  There’s no question they have incredible imaginations.  What they’re missing is the basics assumptions.

Second, and this is not my original observation, how come the animals untold millions of years later are not advance beyond using a stone to break an oyster or a stick to dig a bettle out of a hole?  How come the nests are no more complex today than they were amazing years ago?  Animals have not progressed.  Yet man has.

I will continue reading for the entertainment value and in case my blood pressure gets so low I need something to fume about.  I also hope that there will be something valid enough to say I have learned.

Durant, Will.  The Story of Civilization:  Part 1, Our Oriental Heritage.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1954.

homo unius libri