Elements of Cosmography

There are three recognized disciplines designed to provide a description of the world, or cosmos, and these are often badly mixed up and even used interchangeably. Cosmogony attempts to document the origins and history of the cosmos, mainly in terms of myths and theology. Cosmology is that part of metaphysics that views the world as the totality of all phenomena in space and time. Plato distinguished between opinion or belief and knowledge by identifying objects of opinion as appearances and the objects of knowledge as realities. The role of metaphysics is to identify the ultimate realities at the basis of knowing the whole world. It is necessary to challenge all assumptions before finally arriving at an account of the nature of all things that is fully coherent and fully thought out. Modern cosmology has failed this objective by embracing the concept of an expanding universe as first-principle reality, without question. The third discipline, known as cosmography, is the science that describes and maps the general features of the universe. It is, by definition based on observation, mainly astronomical, from which it derives its theories.