How would a person go about discovering a "new" God?
In 1781, William Herschel noticed an object he first suspected to be a comet. The object had been catalogued before, but the motion had not been detected. Herschel eventually recognized it as a new planet circling the Sun, and after several years, wherein astronomers had established the orbit of that new planet, it was named Uranus, for the Greek god of the heavens.
Now, let us assume that the "god of the heavens" is the Christian God, which was only discovered to be the "one and only God" roughly two thousand years ago, since for countless thousands of years before that, the vast majority of people on the planet (that we know anything about) believed in the existence of multiple gods.
So how would one then go on to test that "monotheism" is correct, and that polytheism is incorrect? How do we discover, in other words, whether the "monotheism" hypothesis is true or false? After all, it is not as if people had come up with some scientific method for "testing" how many gods there were.
In 1820, more ancient observations of Uranus were uncovered, and they raised a problem, because they were at variance with the orbit that had been established. While various hypotheses were put forward in the 1830s to account for the difference, astronomers eventually settled on the idea that an unknown planet, beyond the orbit of Uranus, was causing it to deviate from the established orbit.
That planet, they eventually discovered, was Neptune.
In 1781, William Herschel noticed an object he first suspected to be a comet. The object had been catalogued before, but the motion had not been detected. Herschel eventually recognized it as a new planet circling the Sun, and after several years, wherein astronomers had established the orbit of that new planet, it was named Uranus, for the Greek god of the heavens.
Now, let us assume that the "god of the heavens" is the Christian God, which was only discovered to be the "one and only God" roughly two thousand years ago, since for countless thousands of years before that, the vast majority of people on the planet (that we know anything about) believed in the existence of multiple gods.
So how would one then go on to test that "monotheism" is correct, and that polytheism is incorrect? How do we discover, in other words, whether the "monotheism" hypothesis is true or false? After all, it is not as if people had come up with some scientific method for "testing" how many gods there were.
In 1820, more ancient observations of Uranus were uncovered, and they raised a problem, because they were at variance with the orbit that had been established. While various hypotheses were put forward in the 1830s to account for the difference, astronomers eventually settled on the idea that an unknown planet, beyond the orbit of Uranus, was causing it to deviate from the established orbit.
That planet, they eventually discovered, was Neptune.
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