Atheist Flat-Earth Myth Debunked

[Uber Genius]

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

 

[masonlandry]

I can see why someone would think, in the time period during which the books of the Bible were written, the understanding of Earth was that of a flat disk, held up by pillars of earth, topped by a dome-shaped firmament that separated the rain waters from the waters on Earth, over which the angels draped the night sky. That was a common view of Earth in the Middle/Near East thousands of years ago, and it's completely understandable why they would have thought that way. If you stand out in a field, what you see around you is a circle of land that encompasses your vision, and until you master seamanship, the world as you know it is surrounded by water. Plus, if you don't have a comprehensive understanding of the water cycle and all you are working with is an observation that water is coming out of the water-colored sky, there would be some invisible solid barrier between the sky water and the ground water. It's a reasonable view to take just based on observations.

That is a completely different issue than whether the Bible caused people who had better evidence and better tools to work with to ignore that evidence in favor of a flat-Earth view. Unless you could find evidence of churches (back when the church and the state were inseparable entities, especially) supporting a flat earth as doctrine for the majority of western history. 

By the way, I'm agreeing with you, just adding to what you already stated. Although, it does blow my mind that there has been a legitimate resurgence of flat-Earth believers in the era where you can literally watch the Earth on a live feed from the international space station on your computer.

[nebula]

If the earth was flat, cats would have knocked everything off of it by now.

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[The Barbarian]

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[Isaacsname]

It's odd so many make the claim " the ancients thought the earth was flat ", this is certainly not true at all

[Still Alive]

35 minutes ago, ἔκλειψις said:

It's odd so many make the claim " the ancients thought the earth was flat ", this is certainly not true at all

Actually, if you go back far enough, they did. 

 

But Michael Heiser nails the whole thing here: http://drmsh.com/christians-who-believe-the-earth-is-really-flat-does-it-get-any-dumber-than-this/

And a sort of follow up: http://drmsh.com/modern-flat-earth-theory-exposed-part-i/

[Isaacsname]

No, they didn't, and " Dr. Heiser ' should familiarize himself with the use of the horizontal coordinate system in Mesopotamian mathematical astronomy

 

 

[The Barbarian]

19 hours ago, Still Alive said:

Actually, if you go back far enough, they did.  

 

It would have to be really, really far back.   The Greeks knew about it before they were writing; at the very beginning of Greek history, they cite a number of ways to know the Earth is spherical.   Hundred of years before Christ, one of them very accurately calculated it's circumference.

 

 

[Still Alive]

3 minutes ago, The Barbarian said:

It would have to be really, really far back.   The Greeks knew about it before they were writing; at the very beginning of Greek history, they cite a number of ways to know the Earth is spherical.   Hundred of years before Christ, one of them very accurately calculated it's circumference.

 

 

I'm talking about the first temple period. The old testament was written by people who thought the earth was flat. This is why I  referenced the Michael Heiser articles. He explains why and how that thinking is in the bible and why it is irrelevant.

[Isaacsname]

Guys, there was never a period where they thought the earth is flat

Once again, horizontal coordinate system