The story of Atlantis has been examined from a variety of perspectives, with some viewing the story as myth and some as history waiting to be proven true. For those who are going to try to prove the truth of Atlantis, though, the evidence they offer must be of a compelling nature to overcome skepticism and to demonstrate that what appears to be only an ancient morality tale has a basis in reality. Many of those who believe most strongly in the story of Atlantis as fact, however, do so as a matter of faith rather than because of any stringent historical or scientific analysis. They also may begin their investigation not by asking whether the story is true or not but by assuming that it is true and then shaping the evidence to fit this preconception. One instance of this sort of presumptive analysis is found in the book Atlantis: The Eighth Continent by Charles Berlitz. An analysis of this book along with a look at the story of Atlantis and some of the other writers to address the issue will show how Berlitz fails at proving his conclusions in an objective way. Berlitz is better at framing the issues involved than he is at offering compelling evidence. In the final analysis, his book does little more than retell many of the details of the story as they have been developed over the centuries and point to the bottom of the sea as the repository of the ultimate solution to the issue, which is precisely where the matter stood before this book was written. The book is valuable for bringing together many of the ideas underlying the Atlantis legend, but it does not settle the matter by any means.
The story of Atlantis comes down to us through a description offered in Timaeus by Plato. Kukal (1984) notes that while the original description by Plato ran only about 30 pages, some 130,000 pages have been written on the subject since. According to what Plato wrote, Atlantis was a large island or group of islands that existed 9,000 yea...