h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Those darned evolutionists, keeping on about how fossils come from millions of years ago and 'prove' that animals change their shapes over time. Well I am here to learn you better. Witness one of the greatest cover-ups of the history of science. Back in the eighteenth century Professor Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer of the University of Würzburg had the far more rational theory that fossils were in fact created directly by God and put into the rock in fits of creative wimsy. Beringer was delighted when he started finding some particularly interesting fossils that certainly proved his point. Some did seem to be petrified dead animals but there were many which did not. There were for instance images of the sun, stars, and of Hebrew letters ... spelling the name of God. Well! That proves it - case closed. These were little works of art by God himself, put into the rock just so humans could find them and witness His glory. He even signed these wonderful works of art!

So ... what does God's own art look like? Feast your eyes:

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/beringer1726/0055/image?sid=d39bfbdbcaa2a29e072c142348006438

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/beringer1726/0074/image?sid=d39bfbdbcaa2a29e072c142348006438

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/beringer1726/0126/image?sid=d39bfbdbcaa2a29e072c142348006438

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/beringer1726/0133/image?sid=d39bfbdbcaa2a29e072c142348006438

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/beringer1726/0135/image?sid=d39bfbdbcaa2a29e072c142348006438

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/beringer1726/0127/image?sid=d39bfbdbcaa2a29e072c142348006438

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/beringer1726/0067/image?sid=d39bfbdbcaa2a29e072c142348006438

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/beringer1726/0087/image?sid=d39bfbdbcaa2a29e072c142348006438

Can you believe that this was known in the eighteenth century? Beringer wrote a big, fat book about his remarkable discoveries, and it was published, and went to a second printing. If you want more you can see it here:

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/beringer1726/0001/thumbs?sid=d39bfbdbcaa2a29e072c142348006438#current_page

So: this was KNOWN, and was documented by a UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR almost three hundred years ago! How come this is not known any more today? It is a conspiracy! There were even two colleagues of Beringer's who came forward, J. Ignatz Roderick and Johann Georg von Eckhart, who claimed they had made these fossils and planted them so Beringer could find them, because they considered him a pompous ass and wanted to expose his gullibility and bring ridicule on him. It went to a court case which ended up discrediting all three. Now really! That two learned men would go so far as to jeopardize their own academic reputations to steal God's limelight and claim these superlative art works as their own, in the process so obfuscating the nature of fossils that even today so many 'scientists' still hold the ridiculous opinion that they are petrified primeval animal remains. Well such is the dastardly nature of devious, anti-religious, so-called 'science'.

I think we need to organise a Tinfoil Mortarboard Society, Willem. I'd make Beringer a Professor Emeritus.

These are great! The sad thing is, that book's written in Latin. Makes it hard to spread the word.

I understand from noodling around on the internet that Prof Dr Dr Beringer's fossils were quite the collector's items. Apparently, the kids he hired to search for him found them all around Wuerzburg. They were made of mollusk chalk.

He must really have annoyed his colleagues. There must have been a certain amount of expense involved.

You genius, Willem.

I have found a sample excerpt from the 1963 English translation of Beringer's book - no etext available, alas. Very scholarly, the whole thing. I'm reading the introduction, which has this to say about the scientist of 1725 - at least, what they called the 'virtuoso scientists':

'Occam's Razor was relegated to rusty disuse by the vogue of speculating from flagrantly arbitrary a priori premises in a vacuum of factual substantiation.'

O-kay...and they're complaining about how overwritten their LATIn was?

From these people, we learn that the good Professor did NOT, in fact, go bankrupt buying back all those fossils. He lived to a ripe old age, and published more books.

The librarian and professor who admitted to manufacturing these objets de sciences, on the other hand, were run out of town.

Oh, here's the link if you want it:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=62JiT3uK66EC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Hello again! I think I could nominate a few more professors for positions at the Tinfoil Mortarboard Society.

That sentence you quote there sounds like something George Orwell warned against ...

I'll bet you could. And once we've got our journal started, we can send a complimentary copy to Malabarista's flatmate, who is trying to poison them all by washing her dishes with inappropriate cleaning compounds. When read the warnings, she reportedly said, 'Oh, that's only science. You can't go by that.'