[alatar]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Are you suggesting that because we have the telescope, any pre-telescope record of the solar system should be discounted or dismissed?

We hold to what is true. The earth revolves around the sun and not the converse. Regardless, as I was saying, to me the sun "rises in the east and sets in the west," and knowing that this isn't exactly accurate does not diminish its beauty, as surely the ancients thought as well.

... or just treated with a great deal of suspicion?

I treat everything with a great deal of suspicion...except my own pet theories and sacred cows.

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.

I'm in. We have a boat in the Atlantic and a boat in the Pacific. Boat in the Atlantic sees a hurricane and reports said event, though only has eyewitness accounts. Boat in the Pacific, with spyglasses, does not see same hurricane. As this boat was chartered through "Alatar Cruises," and so is filled with a bunch of closed-minded wet blanket skeptics. So far so good.

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.

Here are the issues:

• Eyewitness accounts are unreliable.

• Hearsay even less so.

• People are easily fooled (i.e. illusions).

• Some people do not have the knowledge/words to accurately describe an event. Sometimes we get, "It was like..." and after time we lose that it wasn't exactly that.

• Information passed through and down through time has the possibility of becoming distorted.

On the other hand:

• Independent observations can shore up others'. If islanders in the Atlantic also witnessed a hurricane...

• Some events are common or are easily extrapolated from what is known. A storm is something that many people, from many different backgrounds and from many different observation points have witnessed. However, they may disagree to the cause. If the boat in the Atlantic had went up into the water spout and landed in the Pacific; well, this may have occurred but is not even close to the norm, and so the other ship in the Pacific would be asking for more data etc before believing that (not that they would ever believe...).

• Storms in 10,000 BC are very similar to those we have today. There's no known reason (at least to me) to posit that they would not be otherwise. I think that you may have referred to this before as 'uniformitarian.'

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.

I am so with you (I think), and like the analogy. Just recently in the news, a group reported its findings about an asteroid that hit the Chesapeake Bay (USA) area about 35 million years ago. Every time I look at the Gulf of Mexico, I think about how fragile our existence is here on this one planet.

Maybe we are talking about something like the Noachian flood, which even to me must have some historical basis, though what the truth is I may never learn. Surely you too wonder what these ancient people lived through, what they saw and were thinking when any interesting event happened. Why did they choose to explain certain processes in nature using 'gods?" Was it extrapolations from the 'strong leader' and anthropomorphizing of other things in their environment? Was the explanation correlated with the current technology (i.e. sun and moon are natural things, then persons riding on chariottes, and so on)?

I want to thank you for opening this up in my head, as it's given me much to think about. And sorry, still working on Santa-dragon-witch.