Ancient Aliens And Occam's Razor

One byproduct of my conversion to Roman Catholicism has been a much greater appreciation for Aristotle, who was a major influence on Aquinas and other Scholastic thinkers. An Aristotelian looks for causes. On the other hand, William of Ockham, a prominent Scholastic, established the Law of Parsimony, which says that entities should not be multiplied without necessity.

This brings us to the popular idea that at some time prior to written history, space aliens came to the planet and built the major ancient monuments in both hemispheres. This is a semi-Aristotelian view, since proponents are actually raising worthwhile and reasonable questions about causes. Why the widespread ancient interest in astronomy, which appears to have been remarkably precise? How was this information transmitted through generations without what we currently understand as writing?

Why do so many ancient structures in both hemispheres take the form of pyramids? Why are they precisely laid out according to astronomical orientation? Why are even those that aren't pyramids laid out accoding to the solstice?

It seems to me that these are all very good questions, that I think Aristotle and Aquinas would think well worth asking, although the information that raises them probably wasn't available in their time. On the other hand, Occam's Razor suggests that the current popular theory that ancient aliens brought technology to humans from outer space multiplies entities without necessity. We have absolutely no evidence of intelligent life anywhere but right here, despite enormous national treasure expended in space telescopes and Mars missions explicitly intended to discover just that.

I think back to my high school and college world history courses, and while they predate von Däniken and Chariots of the Gods, I have a sense that if I'd posed those questions in class, much less written about them in an assignment, even leaving out the space aliens, I would have been dismissed as impertinent and unserious.. Why? These are good questions. Just because space aliens are the only current systematic answer to them doesn't mean they can't be asked without reference to the aliens.

As I wander the web, I run across a number of related question groups that don't have good answers. They range from whether human settlement of the western hemisphere dates only from migration over the Alaskan land bridge less than 20,000 years ago, to how much European and Asian exploration of the western hemisphere took place before Columbus, to more recent and more mundance questions like just what went in at Oak Island before the late 18th century, because irrespective of pirate or Templar treasure, it's plain there was a lot of mysterious activity.

I guess I've always been a contrarian, so I like these questions. Even without clear answers, they're intriguing in themselves. As the opportunity arises, I want to start looking at them here, observing good Aristotelian principles like the Law of Parsimony.