Right, terminology mistake.
OP: Are you proposing that all the force we think of as gravity is celestial gravitation, and that none of it is UA?
I'm saying that there is no need or empirical justification for UA in FET.
I strongly suspect, based on the choice of terminology (
universal acceleration) and the deafening silence that has greeted my last few posts, that its proponents have never followed the logic of it through to the point of realising none of the matter we see can be undergoing UA. All matter we can inspect has weight, and weight (absent gravitational effects) is the result of something that
isn't innately accelerating being pushed by something that
is.
Meanwhile, FET invokes CG to act upon terrestrial matter and explain tides and other phenomena. Empirically, it is not possible to attribute any particular proportion of an object's weight to CG. Heck, I could just as easily claim that UA is acting
downwards to alleviate hundreds of gees of CG - or sideways for that matter.
So while it's possible to
imagine that somewhere below us, a force is acting upon matter we can't see and pushing everything else ahead of it, that's pure speculation and quite unnecessary.
I agree with the opening post. Instead of reaping all the confusion caused by UA, why not just postulate that the flat earth is many times bigger than our known world so that the gravity "lines" are for all intents and purposes parallel and vertical for us (in other words, so that gravity acts essentially straight down for all of us)?
This is part of the reasoning behind the infinite flat Earth theory.
That's not necessary either. A distant, powerful source of CG below the earth would suffice.