The recent movie entitled Matrix presents to its audience the rather ancient view that reality cannot be grasped. In a literary sense, this can be traced to Plato's Republic and his cave allegory where the people in the cave could only see the shadows of reality but not the real thing. The confusion begins with the interpretation of those unclear shadows, and hence we have those long and boring Socratic dialectics. In ancient times this notion was combated in a secular way by Aristotle's observational science, and in a theological way by the Bible.

Modern science has similarly taken leave of its senses, and launched into the Platonic world of thought experiments in which the thought, however counter-intuitive, becomes the reality. We see this rather easily in the thoughts of Sigmund Freud who uses the Platonic shadows of the unconscious, which by definition cannot be available to sensory perception, to base the idea that out of the unconscious comes the Oedipal complex, which postulates the unconscious desire of a son to kill his father and marry his mother. As revoltingly counter-intuitive as this is, aside from the fact it constitutes two mortal sins and capital crimes, namely murder and incest, it was foisted on the unsuspecting masses by constant propaganda. Karl Marx's counter-intuitive madness is that wages should be equal despite unequal effort and ability in a counter-intuitive effort to judge everything by money and to create a mathematical ideal that equal division of that wealth will solve societies' problems. While the Bible encourages equal opportunity by dividing the land equally, it does not mandate equality of result which is destructive of initiative. Another modern thought experiment is Darwin's view, or really Anaximander's idea, that mankind descended from animals without any visible evidence.

It is easy for us, whose reason is uncorrupted, to see such major errors as these. But it is harder for most to spend the intellectual effort to fathom modern astronomy. While we see the sun rise and set, and it appears to move just as the Bible tells us, the modern scientist tells us it does not move by using the unprovable idea of relative motion to save the appearances of the ancient thought experiment of Aristarchus that the earth rotates. The contribution this short paper seeks to make is to demonstrate that the evidence of one of the supporting legs of evolutionary doctrine, the humongous universe, is also unprovable, and can be just as easily a small universe with the stars being simply smaller than the sun, and therefore very nearby.

When we use the word theory in astronomy, we are using an unprovable explanation of the observed phenomena that will translate itself, at least in modern astronomy, into Plato's cave shadows.

It is important to understand that, according to Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington in his The Nature of the Physical World, that when dealing with astronomy you are dealing completely with theory, and if we do not accept the theories, you cannot understand anything about astronomy. Strange how the masses abandoned the Bible over unproven theories. Theories are developed by making measurable scientific observations on the earth and applying them to outer space. For example, the speed of light in a vacuum is 186,000 miles per second, but less in other media. Yet, when we calculate the speed of light from Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri, the stars nearest to our solar system (using heliocentric terminology), the distance is measured as 4.3 light-years. A light-year is about six million million miles. We are using this 186,000 miles per second measurement because it works on earth, and it is assumed that space is a vacuum. We cannot prove those speeds in outer space because no one is there.

We are also using measurement systems that can be checked on earth by triangulation (trigonometry) but cannot be checked in space because we cannot travel the distance between the earth and Alpha Centauri by aircraft or spaceship using a measurable speed of flight between the two points. The use of triangulation requires us to know two angles and a base line to calculate the distance. So let's say we have a distance between two points far away from each other on earth, and then we have to determine the angle at each end pointing to the star. The problem here is the margin of error even with out best instruments can destroy the calculation's accuracy in every case.

There is another method of measurement of distances, based on the Hertsprung-Russell diagram, used to measure distances too far to triangulate, although we have already pointed out that such measurements are inaccurate. The measurement of the H-R diagram is done by determining the absolute magnitude of the nearest stars' luminosity in relation to its apparent magnitude, the latter determined through telescopic observation. The absolute magnitude is found by determining the surface temperature of the star's surface, again through telescopic observation. Although triangulation is inaccurate, and probably without meaning, it is used to measure the distances to the nearest stars, and these distances create a relationship between absolute and apparent luminosity that is extrapolated to measure the distance to stars that are too far to triangulate. In a sense the H-R methodology indulges in circular logic as the originating trigonometry or triangulation methodology creates an erroneous working premise distance as we find is used in determining a star's age since a star's age is not a directly observable characteristic but must be inferred from the very evolutionary theory that the atheistical scientist is trying to validate.

Therefore, the size of the stars may not be bigger than the sun if they are very close, but they could easily be smaller than what the Bible describes as the "greater light," the sun. Those stars which are brighter could be larger, and those dimmer could be smaller. And the universe could be very small. The problem of stellar parallax in relation to distance can be explained by stars moving differently in relation to the earth rather than in fixed unison.

This takes us to the question of the red shift, the Big Bang and the expanding universe. But first, some history. Under the ancients such as Aristotle and Ptolemy, the universe was considered finite, and the stars, sun, planets, and moon revolved around the earth in a static system. When Sir Isaac Newton developed his system, he could not deal with the fallacy that the gravitational force of the larger mass would attract all other heavenly bodies to it, and implode the universe. So, he used a pagan notion of materialistic infinity to balance it by saying that it balanced because the heavenly bodies were an infinite distance from each other. This is rather illogical as I will show.

Now I don't know if Sir Isaac was reading Benedictus de Spinoza's Opera Posthuma, but to say the universe is infinite in size is to ascribe a characteristic of God, infinity, to a material universe. Spinoza insanely said the universe and all that it contains was God in his Opera Posthuma and thereby forces anyone to conclude that an evil man's actions are an extension of God, which is demented. By the way, Albert Einstein said he believed in Spinoza's god.

Sir Isaac's system, by using infinity, escapes logical scrutiny. Also, by saying distances between heavenly bodies are infinite, you are saying the earth must rotate, for Aristotle established in his Physics that an object at an infinite distance to the earth could not travel an infinite distance around it at an infinite speed, for that was impossible. While Sir Isaac never said the heliocentricity of the universe was true, his absurd scientific system of gravity required it, and as foolish as it was, became the rage merely because it provided relatively accurate measurements of the motions of heavenly bodies.

When Albert Einstein came along, he found all physics had collapsed because Michelson and Morley had demonstrated that earth's motion through space was unprovable. Although either the earth's rotation, or aether's rotation (the Sagnac effect), has been demonstrated by the interferometer, geocentrists believe that the aether rotates. While to geocentrists the Michelson-Morley experiments pointed to the truth that the earth was not moving, this observation was unthinkable to atheists.

Einstein created many assumptions that are difficult to understand, such as there is no aether (that space is the empty of emptiness) or that light that traveling at 186,000 miles per second is the fastest phenomenon, and that all motion is relative. We do not know why he got rid of the aether unless he found the Lorentz transformation untenable, but what could be more untenable than space which has nothing in it, or really doesn't exist? We are interested in his theory that light is the fastest phenomenon because that undermines Newton's action-at-a-distance at infinite speed for gravitation, between objects of infinite distance. Einstein substituted curvatures of space, through which the heavenly bodies fall describes their orbits. Gravity is relegated to superstition, and this device avoids using infinity in balancing the universe. We could say curvatures of space are an improvement although the term really means nothing, and we are left with the holy observation that God made it that way.

And last, but not least, we come to the Big Bang. This evolutionary idea could have said everything expanded from this explosion and stopped, then went into perfect balance, and then we could have our old static celestial system, but there was observed through a spectroscope a redshift phenomenon whereby objects moving away from the observer are revealed by telescopic observation to have spectral lines shifted toward the red, or longer wavelength end of the visible spectrum.

However, the work of Halton Arp showing discordant red shifts undermines the expanding universe hypothesis. If this could have been proven, it would not have gotten around Newton's use of infinity because either space would have had to expand from infinity to continually absorb the expansion, which is logically absurd, or the expansion must stop when it reaches the end, either crashing into the end of the universe, or reversing its course before this, based on gravitational pull; or rebounding off the backboard of the end of the universe and going back in the direction it came from. These are the thought games atheists play.

Therefore, we have shown that thought experiments, theory, or in other words Plato's shadows of reality, are no substitute for observable reality and Einstein's, Newton's, or Galileo's thought experiments are not reality; but what we see is reality. When a modern court jester like Einstein comes along and tries to pull the wool over our eyes by saying the heavenly bodies travel in relative motion to each other, and we cannot be sure that the earth rotates or not, and thinks he has thus saved appearances for heliocentricity, we can reply that he has proved nothing, and our scientific Bible stands in its geocentricity without a scintilla of proof against it. We can say the same about spatial distance. The idea that the sun is smaller than the stars because the stars are so far away does not have a shred of observable truth behind it, and the Bible's greater light, the sun, still stands us the largest light in the universe as the Bible tells us it is. And no one can prove it otherwise now or forever!