How would the atheist community debunk this particular evidence?

2014-03-11 14:41:22 UTC

I know how some people here have difficulty reading more than a few sentences, if this is too much for you to read, please don't bother to respond, thanks.

In the 1940s an Italian mystic, Maria Valtorta, had a series of visions about the life of Christ which she recorded in notebooks and which were later compiled into books known in English as The Poem of the Man God. In some of the visions Valtorta gives offhand descriptions of various stars, planets, and constellations which she sees in the sky.

In the 90s a Purdue physics professor, Lonnie VanZandt, used modern planetary software to determine whether these astronomical observations Valtorta makes of the night sky were internally consistent chronologically and if they could be used to date the narrative. He wrote his findings in a report which can be found here at the Purdue website:
https://engineering.purdue.edu/~zak/Van_Zandt.pdf

In the report he writes the following:

"As it happens, if we make use of a number of incidental bits of information the Poem provides in various places about the skies, we can unambiguously date the narrative solely by astronomical calculations. The only internal inconsistencies encountered are occasional confusion about the precise phase of the moon. That is, in at least one place, Valtorta, seeing a half-disk of the Moon in the sky calls it first quarter when subsequent developments show it to be actually in third quarter. Such irregularities in interpretation in no way threaten the validity of the Poem; the actual observed conditions are all self consistent.
...
The calculations which have led to such precise answers have been performed on a personal computer using one of a number of available planetarium programs. This wonderful software has more than simplified the chore of reducing Valtorta's accidental mentions of celestial objects to a definite calendar, it has made it the work of a few evenings rather than a long career. Although I am by profession a theoretical physicist and trained in such mathematical manipulation, the sheer bulk of it would have been daunting. I doubt that the work would have been done without the computer.
...
That Valtorta, who was by all accounts mystified by a slide rule, and had no personal computer nor any other sort of calculating engine to use, could have carried out the sea of arithmetical operations necessary ... must tax the credulity of even the immovable atheist more than the alternative that Jesus showed it to her. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, when you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however merely improbable, must be true."

I certainly don't expect any instantaneous conversions or anything, I am just very curious, how would the atheist community debunk this one? This uneducated and bed-ridden women accurately described the night skies of 2,000 years ago without any sort of calculating device or astronomical expertise. And not only that but also intriguing is the fact that she mentions various villages of ancient Palestine which were unknown at the time of her writing and were subsequently discovered by modern archaeology after her death. Barring the supernatural, how can this be explained?

More info can be found here on the wiki page about these books:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poem_of_the_Man_God#Astronomical_analysis