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 astro...