Chariots of the Gods review

By Dalton McGee on August 31, 2010

What else is there to do on the subway but to read? Well, people watch, yeah, but that gets boring, so I decided to start reading a copy of Chariots of the Gods? that I have had for a long time and never got around to reading. I don’t know if any of you have ever read this book that came out in 1968 but it is interesting in a I want to burn this book kind of way. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this book, it works under the premise that anything from human’s ancient past that is inexplicable must have been the work of extraterrestrials helping our ancestors. This includes, but is not limited to the Pyramids, large rocks in Peru, the precision of the Greek builders. The book also goes on to say that any reference to the gods in ancient works is obviously extraterrestrials and not just the imaginations of ancient peoples because apparently only modern people can come up with things such as Moby Dick, War of the Worlds, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Dune, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Frankenstein, The Munsters, Johhny Quest, blah blah blah.

The same exact copy I have, but less destroyed by my dog.

I do have to hand it to the author because the first chapter is actually quite thought provoking and inspiring. It is about how the likelihood of alien life forms in the universe is somewhere around 99.9%, which according to modern statisticians is accurate.

Since the latest counts give 100 billion stars in our Milky Way… we may surmise that there are 18,000 planets comparatively close to the earth with conditions essential to life similar to those of our planet… Yet we can go even further and speculate that if only 1 percent of these 18,000 planets were actually inhabited, there would still be 180 [planets with intelligent life] left!

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It also have the gall to say that we’ll have nearly speed of light travel, renewable energies, etc. within decade of the publication, which obviously isn’t true, but I wish it were. Definitely the work of a futurist.

While, I agree that this is possibly likely (though I don’t have the exact sources for that), the logic used in this passage continues on in the book but goes off the deep end. The author, Erich Von Däniken, doesn’t actually provide any sources for his assertions and continues on in a repetitive pattern throughout the book.

From Chapter 2 on, the book goes from reasonable points to outrageous points that maintain this flawed logic that would make a moderate Christian double-take, such as when he’s speaking about large rocks in Sacsahuamán, Peru that are 100 tons.

Our imagination is unable to conceive what technical resources our forefatehrs used to extract a monolithic rock of more than 100 tons from a quarry and then transport it and work it in a distant spot.

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This goes on and on in loops of inane logic, but what’s the worst is that the author of the book takes all sorts of ancient literary works from The Bible to the Epic of Gilgamesh and treats them as historical fact. That’s his greatest error. If Von Däniken could be even remotely skeptic then this book would no longer exist. It is an amalgam of logical fallacies and gross errors in judgment that go in such a way that I couldn’t get past 50 pages into it. It’s preposterous.

But why am I mentioning this at all? It’s because the author uses the exact same argument many theists use and that is the God of the Gaps argument. He goes over and over again saying that just because science can’t explain something now that it must be something miraculous or something incredible that did the things that have happened. He isn’t happy with the ignorance of science that makes science so great. He can’t accept the fact that his logic is laughable and that while we don’t know everything now, and probably will never know anything, every day we learn something new and every day we learn something better that refines our knowledge of the way things work in this world.

Just because we don’t understand how the Egyptians built the pyramids for sure, or just because we don’t know how a 100 ton rock was moved from a quarry and sculpted, or just because we don’t know how the Greeks were so precise with their columns doesn’t mean that it was paranormal or extraterrestrial of GOD or gods or anything. It just means we don’t know yet, but there are people working on these sort of things day in-day out and I’m sure at some point in the future we’ll have a much better understanding of how stuff works.