Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'tricks atheists play'.
-
Recently, a well-educated individual posted a great response to a exegetically fallacious rendering of a passage. He was technically astute and handle the hermeneutics flawlessly, then he made one of the most ignorant remarks I have heard in a long while. "The majority of Western culture has held a false scientific view of the world as being flat, due to the influence of the Bible on our science understanding." Here is the research: False Flat Earth Myth According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[1] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".[2] Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, andWashington Irving.[3,4,5] Atheists in the late 18th and 19th centuries were largely responsible for falsely propagating this myth in order to support an ad hominem attack on theists and especially Christians. Don't be suckered by myths invented by atheists. Call them on this fallacious trick to claim all Christians come from a scientifically ignorant culture. Notes: 1. Gould, Stephen J. (2011) [1999], "Columbus and the Flat Earth: An Example of the Fallacy of Warfare between Science and Religion", Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (e-book ed.), New York: Random House LLC,ISBN 978-0-307-80141-8 2. Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (1986), "Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science", Church History, Cambridge University Press, 55 (3): 338–354, doi:10.2307/3166822,JSTOR 3166822 3. Russell, Jeffrey Burton (1991), Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and modern historians, New York: Praeger, ISBN 0-275-95904-X 4. Russell, Jeffrey Burton (1993), "The Flat Error: The Modern Distortion of Medieval Geography", Mediaevalia, 15: 337–353 5. Russell, Jeffrey Burton (1997), "The Myth of the Flat Earth", Studies in the History of Science, American Scientific Affiliation, retrieved 2007-07-14