Hokay!
It's part of what I do, and love doing, to take what people of old have said and trying to make sense out of them.
A rational position, I believe. It means you are a
Scholastic whereas I would probably be better characterized as a
Sceptic, at least insofar as I am interested in uncovering truth.
Others, in who's camp I put myself (though I'm not an historian yet), don't take these people for morons until they have sufficient proof against them, especially if they only have one account of an event.
I certainly don't take Biblical authors as morons or lunatics, just as I don't take people who claim to have crossed Antarctica as morons or lunatics. However, if somebody two thousand years from now found a copy of 1984 (with the front and back cover and title page etc. destroyed) I would hope they would not take it for historical fact. Ditto for any books by Dr. Seuss.
Certainly as a person who endeavors to understand history -- an unquestionably virtuous pursuit -- you agree that understanding context is essential. Only if you assume that the more FE-sympathetic portions of the Bible need to be taken in a literal historical context do you find that the Bible is an argument for FEism. If, on the other hand, you take its mysticism as social message rather than as a record of observations, then while you lose a bit of "history", you gain a *great* deal of understanding of a culture, and of culture in general, which as knowledge is probably almost as treasured by you as facts are.
In the case of the Bible, we really have no other accounts of these specific "four corners of the Earth" statements because no one else was there,
Case in point: you don't know that this was an account, though your wording implies the assumption. I have argued elsewhere that the Bible has passages which could not have been accounts of events, but were added for literary or theological value (cf. the Garden of Gethsemene).
"four corners of the kingdom"
Aye, but now we're speaking in English. Let's grab the word in the original language, shall we?
Indeed we are, just as those who translated the Bible into English were speaking English.
...the word "kanaph" can mean compass points rather than corners.
The compass didn't exist in the Judeo-Christian world at the time of the Bible's writing. ... One could argue that by "compass points" they simply mean "in all directions," of course, in which case it becomes believable.
Indeed, "compass points" refers to "cardinal directions", which certainly did exist at the time.
I don't consider that statement [about the four corners] a necessary part of my argument.
Brackets mine. Great, then let's forget about it entirely, but I certainly feel it supports your argument in no way.
The burden is on you to provide a complete explanation of these phenomena. In the absence of a complete phenomenon, a partial one will do temporarily. Thus far, FE has utterly failed to provide any explanation.
Well, I am not and don't claim to be a physicist or astronomer, so this may be difficult.
More importantly, by your claim, you are not a scientist of any bent. It is likely then that you are unaware of a certain debate that has raged constantly in science: that of determining what sorts of theories are good, and what are bad. The ancients were interested in the
explanatory power of their theories. They believed theory A was better than theory B only case that A explained more than B per unit complexity. That is, If A is "simpler" (which often means "more aesthetically pleasing" but can also mean "easier to explain to a layman) than B but explains the same phenomena, A is better. If A and B are equally simple, but A explains more, then A is better.
Since Popper, however, scientists agree that theories are better that make more falsifiable predictions, assuming that the theories in question have not been refuted.
FE, as described by Charles Johnson, is not justifiable under Popperian metric (I would argue, not under the Aristotelian metric either). All it does is explain the way world is. It makes no predictions that we can test -- we can't go to the ice wall, because of how far it is, or how difficult the journey is, or because we can't navigate, or because the government will stop us. We can't go into space for the same reason. Any time a test for FE is proposed, FEers rearrange their beliefs so that the test will not work. So you really, you can believe it or RE; there is no way to tell the difference.
Conclusion: the only thing FE prides itself on is its explanatory power. Any loss of explanatory power would be devastating to the philosophy propping up the theory; it would be tantamount to a modern, Popperian scientist claiming that you, Chaltier, have a purple dragon living in your garage, but it becomes invisible and undetectable whenever you open the door.
That being said, I should reiterate that several
scientific tests have been proposed on these fora that would refute the FE, and can be performed will tools available to the common man.
I do realize that inability to explain a phenomenon creates a weakness in my positon, however, if you put an REer with my level of training in physics and astronomy in your place, and I debated him, he'd be in no better position to explain his RE physics than I am in explaining my own.
This implies that there is somebody who understands FE science to a much greater degree than you, who has published his ideas, which you have absorbed only indirectly. This FE scientist could explain his beliefs to a debate opponent in a way you could not.
As it turns out, no such person exists, or ever has.
The best I can offer for now is that the same phenomenon that governs the sun's movement governs that of the stars.
Entirely plausible. However, that this in no way explains the circular motion of stars around a point in the sky being
opposite in opposite hemidiscs. Nor does it explain why the stars rotate around
different points in the sky in different hemidiscs -- different in the sense that the nearby constellations are entirely dissimilar.
In other words, assuming that the stars revolve around the Earth's central axis, as the sun does, please explain why they appear to revolve in a different direction depending on which hemidisc I am in. Pictures would be invaluable here: more for you than for me.
Of course there would be stars only visible in one particular hemisphere, as, in FE, they rotate closer to the Earth than RE would have us believe,
As it turns out, there is a robust methods for measuring distances to celestial bodies, practically by the naked eye. I
strongly suggest you investigate the notion of
parallax.
and they likely rotate directly over, or at least staying very close to, a single line (one for each star, that is).
Could you clarify this suggestion? Which line is a given star close to? One perpendicular to the plane of the Earth and intersecting the Earth at a fixed point?
If someone sees something, and a scientist subsequently tells him that no, he didn't, because no such thing exists, who was right? Of course, the person that saw it.
"Of course"? Is this statement meant to be as blanket as it sounds? How do you account for optical illusions (of the purely physiological sort), mirages, hallucinations, and the like? Science is sometimes much more powerful at knowing what a person is really seeing than is that person himself.
If a scientist walking down the street overhears a person saying, "I saw a copy of the Gospel of Ethel," and the scientists bursts in with, "no such things exists," then certainly that scientist is being foolish; what does he know of the Gospel of Ethel? This circumstance, however, is a straw man. What if the claim were, "I saw a superstring"? Would the scientist be wrong in saying, "No, you didn't?" What if it were, "I saw a flying unicorn," or better yet, "I developed a compass-and-straightedge construction for the trisection of an arbitrary angle"?
What if the person were blind?
I do take historical accounts far more seriously than you, I can tell, and you take mainstream science far more seriously than I.
I think I do not take historical accounts as sceptically as you think I do, when the accounts are
1) Coherent
2) Internally consistent
3) Externally consistent
4) Intended as historical accounts
I am will to be flexible -- to different degrees -- on all of these requirements. The relevent passages in the Bible, however, fail on points 3 and 4.
Do you have a particular gripe about mainstream science? It is not really fair for you to simultaneously claim not to understand science, and yet refuse to take it seriously. It is possible that the former is the cause of the latter.
But you must remember that at least some of these people are, as I've asserted before, part of the conspiracy.
This is an untenable position, aside from the fact that you have not provided any reason to believe this to be the case other than that it conflicts with your desire to believe in a certain hypothesis.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but I sense that your impression of the academic community is that there are Twelve Invisible Masters who have final say on the publication of all results, along with the power to modify any findings before publication. Furthermore, there is (I believe, in your view) a hierarchy of priestlike individuals shuttling dogma from the Twelve down to the lowly acolytes working in labs, and they frequently save the Twelve the trouble of punishing heretics in the ranks by doing it themselves. I think this is a sadly common view of academia.
Trust me; it is not so. The community is in fact very open and dynamic. People are for the most part quite rational and when presented with evidence refuting the ideas -- after an agonizing struggle to save their brainchild -- concede the loss. I personally have been on both sides of such exchanges, both with fellow students and with professors.
No small group of scientists could prevent the community at large from discovering that the Earth was flat.
Bringing this post to a close, I'd like to touch on scepticism vs. scholasticism again. Neither position is satisfactory on its own: the former is fruitless whereas the latter is blind. Good scientists must give some credence to eyewitness accounts, just as good historians really must sort fact from fantasy and parable. One of my favourite books is
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco; it examines the latter end of this spectrum in some depth, among other issues, and is otherwise an engaging novel. I highly recommend it.
Keep in mind, however, that it is not an account of actual events.
-Erasmus