Did I say anything like that? We use our imagination, along with all our other facilities to try to help us appeciate and make sense of of the things that aren't in front of our eyes, but that's something else completely.

You really think that religious painters through all those centuries, painting pictures of nativities in Flemish cowsheds and Italian barns and all that, with everyone wearing contemporary local costumes, thought that they were showing things the way they actually were back in First Century Palestine? (For example.) Except that, getting down to what matters, and leaving aside the superficial stuff, that is precisely what they were doing.