J harlen Bretz by MLD

( I posted this on Fb 18 July 2020 answering e Bakker)

You have resorted to bullets, so I will in turn take refuge behind the history of science. J Harlen Bretz
was a geologist who taught at Chicago university. In the 1920’s he spent a lot of time in the scarred
land of Washington state. In a paper he published in 1922 he went against the established thinking
which said that slow processes over millions of years had formed the landscape features, and
instead he claimed that a massive flood in a few days had carved ravines 300 metres deep, laid down
gravel bars 100 metres high and created potholes the size of bomb craters over 4 states: Montana,
Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The water which flowed was all the rivers in the world today times
ten. This sounded too much like the Flood of Noah and threatened to open the door to God being
allowed back into science. So the geological establishment ridiculed Bretz. They even staged a
scientific ambush where he was publically shamed. His crime? An unfalsifiable theory. None of the
geologists could even see the very features Bretz was pointing out. They could only see what their
belief permitted them to see. Even in the early 1970’s, geology textbooks opposed Bretz. Finally in
the late 1970’s the geological community changed its mind because evidence was found of a massive
lake that was hypothesized as a possible cause. In 1979 Bretz received a medal for his theory. It
only took 57 years for geologists to see what Bretz could see. The moral: unfalsifiability is only as
good as the presuppositional biases of those who advocate it.