Originally Posted by Amedeo

BRIEF OUTLINE OF HISTORICAL COSMOGRAPHY
-- for any curious general reader, not a reply to the hopeless in "reading comprehension" or pokers of holes in water --

(In order to avoid current confusions, let us momentarily ignore the words "earth" and "universe.")

(A) The Pristine World

In the beginning, a man stood on a mountain (or esperientially build up to this point) and saw LAND around him, with plains and mountains, volcanoes and rivers, and a surrounding SEA. He saw the SKY with its moving sun or, at night, a multitude of stars. [I omit the telling of the actual gnoseological genesis of this comprehensive view of the world.]

The sky was like a dome or a half a sphere -- to use own own language. The earth and the sea were uneven, but they were generally flat, as compared to the sky, like the sea or lakes.

To use our own language, his WORLD was a hemisphere. This is the pristine world, of which he knew innumerable details. But for instance, he did not know how deep the land was. However, since volcanos emitted fire, he INFERRED [by analogy with certain things and situations of his daily life], that it must be quite thick and includes what is not normally evident. Furthermore, there are caves that go deep down: There are underworld habitats. [This pristine world is also taken for granted by non-Greek ancient writings, such as the Bible.]

This Pristine World remained for all intents and purposes the world, for the unlearned people before the 17 century. Thereafter, the divulgation of science, increase in universal schooling, the press, and television shattered the pristine world, except for those whose pristine world was learned from the Bible.

(B) The Homeric World

There is a World we learn from the Homeric writings such as the Iliad: The sky above is complemented by a sky below, wherefore the world is a SPHERE at whose center there is land. The LAND is CIRCULAR (like a dish); its plane is uneven but is generally FLAT; and it extends all the way down to the world-sphere. The land is surrounded by water, the OCEAN. The distance between the surface of the land and the bottom of the sphere is the same as the distance between the land-surface and the top of the sphere. The Ocean touches the equator of the world-sphere, and the land is slightly above the waters.

(C) The Thaletan World

By the 6th century B.C., Thales held that the Homeric World was slightly different: The land does not reach all the way down; if floats on water like a piece of wood. (Earthquakes could be better understood, if the land floats on water. Here we begin to see already the beginning of "natural explanations" instead of just saying that a god shakes the earth or that Neptune shakes the waters of the ocean.) He also exponded an acient view that the earth emerged from water. So water is that out of which things emerge or are born.

(D) The Anaximandrian Cosmos (ca. 585 B.C.)

The first philosopher and speaker of Physis {Nature} was also concerned with the overall World, the Cosmos. [Aristotle gave an account of his predecessors and stated that Thales was the first philosopher. Actually Thales was one of the seven sages of Greece -- wise and learned but not a seeker of wisdom -- and Anaximander started out as one of his pupils.]

The major intellectual problem with the Homeric and Thaletan World is, What happens to the sun between sunset and sunrise? The pre-philosophical Greeks had envisioned the sun setting far away on the Ocean as taking a boatride from west to east, just as in daytime Helios or Apollo carried thew sun across the sky on a chariot. While starting to break away from theological explanations, Thales and others envisioned the sun (fiery) becoming extinguished every day and being reborn every day. Anaximander invented a cosmos that lasted, with secondary modifications until Copernicus (for the few men in history who were educated):

There is a cosmic sphere indeed, with its stars and the wandering stars (the planets -- sun, moon, and 5 others). At its center there is the Earth [Gea], one body which consists of lands AND water. There is empty space between the earth and the cosmic sphere. "The earth is a cylinder in form, and its depth is one-third of its breath." The sun and the other planets circle around the Earth. Etc., etc., etc.

So, Anaximander's Cosmos (Universe) is geocentric and the Earth [land + ocean] is flat at its top surface. Anaximander laid the foundation for the possibility of a non-theological astronomy: the Ocean no longer bathes the shores of Europe, Asia and Africa AND the equator of the cosmic sphere; and the planets move of their own accord [motion-power] around the earth. (Motion is not just the translocation of a thing; in our language, it is the force whereby something moves.)

{{Practically all educated men in history -- few and far in between -- after Anaximander were gloablists: the earth is spherical. Greek philosophers and astronomers propounded or demonstrated that the earth is spherical. The Arabs, Spaniards or Italians who produced pictorial [not portolan] any "world-map" (mappa mundi: map of the world), show the 3 continents surrounded by water; presumably the other side of the globe was water: the solid land is on the upper hemisphere, so that lose things stay ON the land and the seas. Practical navigators who made and used portolan geographic maps, were practically flatearthers, as they crossed and measured that flat sea. But in 1474, Toscanelli constructed a geographical map of the global earth, which is the one Columbus used for his voyage around the global earth. He himself wrote of crossing the Ocean, namely the water that surrounds the 3 continents.// Aristotle explained the fact that the planets do not fall on the earth by envisioning crystalline (transparent) orbits on which the planets forever roll. This theory was made obsolete by Newtonian physics and not before.}}

The word "world" or "mundus" is ambiguously used, to our own day, to mean either the cosmic sphere or the global Earth. (Some of the imperial orbs have a band around it to represent the constellations of the zodiac at the equator of the cosmic sphere -- not of the Earth. An orb was also pictorially places on the left hand of the royal Christ; it represents the universe, not the earth, which was flat for the pre-philosophy Bible people, the Nazarene Jesus included.)

E) The Pythagorean Cosmos (6th century B.C.)

The cosmos is presumed to have a central fire, which would be the sun. This heliocentric theory
was not favored by the ancient philosophers and astronomers, and therefore neither by the Christian scholars before the 15th century. [None understood that globalism is correlated to heliocentrism, as I explained in an above post.] During the Renaissance, the heliocentric theory was taught at the university of Ferrara, where Copernicus learned it and then developed it.

The Copernican cosmos is precisely like that of Anaximander, except that sun rather than the stationary earth is at the center of the universe. And the earth had already become spherical long before Copernicus.

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(F) The Scientific Cosmos

From the 17th century on, we have "scientific cosmology," which comprises the physics of the cosmos and the anatomy or cosmography of the cosmos.

Galileo showed that the matter of the celestial bodies is like the natural one [corruptible, etc.] He also discovered the law of the motion of freely falling bodies, of parabolic projectiles, etc. Newton produced the gravitational physics of what then became known as the solar system. Continued studies decentralized the universe; so, strictly speaking, the cosmos or universe is neither geocentric nor heliocentric. There is no physical cosmic sphere; what used to be called the cosmic sphere is only an optical one. Therefore, new geometries of the universe had to be devised. And while Giordano Bruno argued for the time infinity and space infinity of the becoming universe (before his death in 1600), the scientists/astronomers have being giving the picture of the boundless universe, held back in time by the creationist theologians.

As of today, no scientist has yet proposed a Cosmogenesis -- NOT "how the universe was generated," but how the eternally becoming universe generates, how it does its forming of itself ["natura naturans"], from the simplest sub-atomic particles to human organisms well as to the system of all galaxies... while the whole evolution is organismic (not of isolated many atom or many animals). The Renaissance people, after Heraclitus, conceived the UNIVERSE or Macro-cosm as an Organism -- a rationally organized, interwoven, universe. (Its two vectors, time vectors, are the just mentioned EVOLUTION and TRANSFORMATION, as in the case of the birth and death of individuals [etc.], which involve changes at any tier or level of the cosmic hierarchy. The things that evolve do not eliminate the kinds of things which existed before. So, a whole spectrum or hierarchy of things is present all at once before us -- atoms, amoebas, and humans.)