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Originally Posted by mark12_30
... did they in a sense give off revelation?
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Hah!
That would be opening a can of tree-worms, or worse, splitting wood.
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Originally Posted by alatar
We now can see farther. Should we base our understanding on our solar system pre- or post- telescope?
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Are you suggesting that because we have the telescope, any pre-telescope record of the solar system should be discounted or dismissed? ... or just treated with a great deal of suspicion? ... or some other tool of the skeptical mind?
Alatar, let's suppose that there's a ship on the ocean on which no one has a spyglass. On the voyage, a storm of hurricane proportions passes by but just misses the ship's route. Everyone onboard ship sees it, and they bring back stories about it. Meanwhile, there was another ship on the ocean and these folks had spyglasses, but they were miles and miles farther away so that even with their spyglasses they didn't see any hurricane. They came ashore and insisted that the people on board the ship without spyglasses obviously were at a disadvantage and couldn't know that there was no hurricane.
If something cataclysmic did happen that could be seen by the naked eye from earth, within cultural memory of the ancients, and they recorded it to the best of their ability, that we have telescopes now with which to view the CURRENT make up of the solar system matters not a whit unless we admit that perhaps they DID see something we would do well to acknowledge, to help our understanding of the solar system.
There are so many signs of violent disruption throughout the solar system that to posit that nothing unusual has happened for billions of years is simply ridiculous. What happened to the planet that used to be the asteroid belt? How did the same kinds of crazy markings appear on Mars and other planets but not others? How is it that some moons and asteroids and planets have one kind of geologlical make up while another set, mixed through each other has a different geological make up? It's like two sets of pool balls had been sent flying across the pool table from different ends, bouncing every which way until they came to rest where they currently are.