Something I was never sceptical about for some reason

A Christian Sceptic

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A Christian Sceptic
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There's been many times someone has brought up to my attention how backwards the medieval church was for believing in a flat earth and refusing to change with and support science. Specifically, it's often used with Columbus and his lofty goals of sailing off.

I just finished reading Rock of Ages by Stephen Gould and in it he has a chapter about how this whole conflict between science and religion in regards to earths shape was a myth. Specifically he states that since the greeks time when they calculated the earth's diameter the majority of leaders and authorities since then have never in fact disagreed with the concept of a spherical earth. It was only minorities on the outskirts of the leadership that thought and taught this.

He even narrows down to sometime in the late 1800's when the myth really took hold in an attempt to create a rift between science and religion.

Anyway, I've always just figured this flat earth vs. round earth situation was simply an example of an authorities pride and resistance to change. I was never sceptical about the whole thing. Shame on me. :)

Doh! I should have just looked on Wikipedia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
 
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A Christian Sceptic said:
There's been many times someone has brought up to my attention how backwards the medieval church was for believing in a flat earth and refusing to change with and support science. Specifically, it's often used with Columbus and his lofty goals of sailing off.

I just finished reading Rock of Ages by Stephen Gould and in it he has a chapter about how this whole conflict between science and religion in regards to earths shape was a myth. Specifically he states that since the greeks time when they calculated the earth's diameter the majority of leaders and authorities since then have never in fact disagreed with the concept of a spherical earth. It was only minorities on the outskirts of the leadership that thought and taught this.

He even narrows down to sometime in the late 1800's when the myth really took hold in an attempt to create a rift between science and religion.

Anyway, I've always just figured this flat earth vs. round earth situation was simply an example of an authorities pride and resistance to change. I was never sceptical about the whole thing. Shame on me. :)

Doh! I should have just looked on Wikipedia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
Click to expand...

I remember being taught that in class as a child. I hope they don't still do that.
 
One criticism of Columbus that many in Europe were right about: He wasn't going to reach India by taking that route. Even assuming the Americas weren't in the way, he and his men would have starved to death long before making it even halfway there. Had he not discovered the Americas by pure accident, he wouldn't be famous at all.
 
Cello Man said:
One criticism of Columbus that many in Europe were right about: He wasn't going to reach India by taking that route. Even assuming the Americas weren't in the way, he and his men would have starved to death long before making it even halfway there. Had he not discovered the Americas by pure accident, he wouldn't be famous at all.
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Some suggest he knew they were there from discovering and analyzing old writings from people who had supposedly gotten that far, specifically, from stuff (again supposedly) found on some known islands out in the Atlantic off west Africa, which he had visited earlier.

It's highly speculative, though. I wonder, were his known rations markedly inferior for the full trip absent an America?
 
Piscivore said:
The whole "burning witches in Salem, Mass." is one a lot of people repeat without question, too.
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Burning at the stake was a European thing. We Americans wanted to show how enlightened and progressive we were so we hanged our witches.:D

But yeah, the flat earth/Columbus issue is a myth.
 
Cello Man said:
One criticism of Columbus that many in Europe were right about: He wasn't going to reach India by taking that route. Even assuming the Americas weren't in the way, he and his men would have starved to death long before making it even halfway there. Had he not discovered the Americas by pure accident, he wouldn't be famous at all.
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What? are you saying that "Chris and crew" didn't have phishin' poles?

I know, off topic......please don't send the "warning".
 
Fishing for food is one thing. What do you do when you're surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and you run out of drinkable water/beer?
 
You seem to have two topics blurred here, ACS. One is the changing the belief in a flat Earth to a sphere and the other is the problem that created for the church and the church's reaction to the spread of evidence based beliefs.

If you think about it, it would be so unlikely for a single event or small group of people to change the beliefs of the entire population on such a major paradigm shift. If you look at what is going on today with the theory of evolution there are many parallels. Darwin formalized the idea over 100 years ago. Slowly over time the population absorbs the evidence and the concept. It didn't happen when Darwin wrote his book. It still isn't a complete transition. AND, you have the religious community resisting the paradigm shift to varying degrees. The concern some have that such a shift in evidence based beliefs contradicts their god beliefs is a big hurdle for them.

We have been fed history from children's books in our elementary schools where people are portrayed as either heroes or villains and the events are grossly over simplified. You get a whitewashed hero Columbus from grade school history books. It is not considered appropriate to teach kids that Columbus enslaved and slaughtered entire Caribbean Island populations when he returned after the first voyage.

The concept of a spherical Earth probably took a couple centuries to become common knowledge and it is likely Columbus sailed about the middle of the paradigm shift. It is also still a fact there was resistance to adopting the evidence based belief for the same reasons people resist evidence based beliefs today. Those belief contradicted church doctrine. And in Columbus' time, those beliefs challenged the church's authority. The politics of evidence based beliefs was a real problem leading to persecution of many scientists.

100 years after Columbus, Giordano BrunoWP was burned at the stake for whatever it was he believed that contradicted church doctrine at the time. Galileo GalileiWP did have to retract his published works on heliocentrism or face the same fate.

It is generally accepted by anyone who has read beyond their grade school history books that by the time Columbus sailed to the Americas, many people had come to accept the fact the Earth was not flat. OTOH, if you have come to the conclusion the church did not interfere with the spread of evidence based beliefs which contradicted their god beliefs because part of the Columbus myth you learned as a child was not true, I suggest you take a second look. Not only did they interfere, they continued to do so a century later when observations revealed the Earth was not the center of the solar system, and they continue to do so today with this silly notion they can ignore the evidence for evolution and it will go away.
 
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Cello Man said:
One criticism of Columbus that many in Europe were right about: He wasn't going to reach India by taking that route. Even assuming the Americas weren't in the way, he and his men would have starved to death long before making it even halfway there. Had he not discovered the Americas by pure accident, he wouldn't be famous at all.
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I've always understood it that he was searching for a western passage to the spice islands of the East Indies and had miscalculated the circumferance of the Earth, hence why he thought he was in the "Indies".
 
skeptigirl said:
You seem to have two topics blurred here, ACS. One is the changing the belief in a flat Earth to a sphere and the other is the problem that created for the church and the church's reaction to the spread of evidence based beliefs.

If you think about it, it would be so unlikely for a single event or small group of people to change the beliefs of the entire population on such a major paradigm shift. If you look at what is going on today with the theory of evolution there are many parallels.
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Hey Skeptigirl - you really should read this book Rock of Ages by Stephen Gould. He is talking about these very same supposed parallels and they do not exist in any meaningful way. What is happening with evolution is somethng quite unique to America in particular at this time.

And yes, I wouldn't be surprised if powers in authority were threatened as new ideas and facts came to light, but it never appeared to happen to the extent somewould like to think, and the belief the earth was flat doesn't appear to have even been as strongly held as some would like to believe either.
 
skeptigirl said:
The politics of evidence based beliefs was a real problem leading to persecution of many scientists.
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No, it bloody well didn't. That is a 19th century myth which modern historians have refuted. Galileo is pretty much a lone swallow (and even that case is nowhere near as black and white as most people seem to believe.)
 
I thought it was Washington Irving's tales about Columbus' voyage that led most people to believe "the earth is flat" was de facto reasoning back in the 1400's.
 
I see the conflation of geocentrism, flat-earthism and general scientific Luddism raises it's ugly head.

My bandwidth prevents me from having a link, but I remember the Time article where they interviewed some Jihadist detainee (migh have been in Gitmo, don't remember) where he asked of dinosaurs really existed or if the Earth actually orbited the Sun.

I hate to play the cultural superiority card, but if kids attending Catholic schools in the west are taught that evolution happened - even if they believe a magic wafer turns into Jesus' body in their tummy - I consider them head and shoulders scientifically above people who accept geocentrism.
 
Beerina said:
Some suggest he knew they were there from discovering and analyzing old writings from people who had supposedly gotten that far, specifically, from stuff (again supposedly) found on some known islands out in the Atlantic off west Africa, which he had visited earlier.
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Worse: he thought he had reached Asia so strongly that he had his crew sign a document swearing they had been in Japan under threat of execution.

However, some of his crew had been to Japan and India, and knew that Hispanolia was an entirely different island, even if it was in Asia, which their navigational experience suggested was not the case anyway.



Beerina said:
It's highly speculative, though. I wonder, were his known rations markedly inferior for the full trip absent an America?
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Yep. The reason nobody else wanted to do the Western route was that they thought the planet was about 24,000km in circumference (it is). Columbus had subscribed to the 'alternative' view that it was just over 16,000km in circumference, so he provisioned for a short Atlantic crossing to Japan. The gamble paid off in a different way.
 
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A Christian Sceptic said:
Hey Skeptigirl - you really should read this book Rock of Ages by Stephen Gould. He is talking about these very same supposed parallels and they do not exist in any meaningful way. What is happening with evolution is somethng quite unique to America in particular at this time.

And yes, I wouldn't be surprised if powers in authority were threatened as new ideas and facts came to light, but it never appeared to happen to the extent somewould like to think, and the belief the earth was flat doesn't appear to have even been as strongly held as some would like to believe either.
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What??? Columbus did not endlessly fight off mutinies because his blokes had been afraid of falling down the edge of the earth's plate? :D

I don't know Gould's book but I also recommend to not take any popular anti-religious stance for granted. That with the flat earth is well known, I would also thoroughly look into the Galileo case and into claims about the RCC's policies causing "millions of AIDS deaths", suicide bombings being caused by religion and other urban legends.

Don't take all this for granted, like many 'skeptics' do. The world is not black and white.

Sapere aude.
 
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George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree and then say "I cannot tell a lie"--that comes from a 20th century children's story. There is no evidence what so ever that Betsy Ross sewed the first flag. There are a lot of myths in recent history that people take as fact... as Penn Jillette notes, different books have different recipes for Elvis famous favorite chicken dish-- hence it's really speculative when we try to imagine that ancient texts are to be taken as "truths". Most people are very shaky on current history. We still don't know all the details that lead to 9-11 or why America really went to Iraq...

Evidence is better means of knowledge than faith, fiction, anecdote, urban legend, and so forth. One truth-- lots and lots of opinions, spin, versions, and so forth about that truth.
 
A Christian Sceptic said:
T
Anyway, I've always just figured this flat earth vs. round earth situation was simply an example of an authorities pride and resistance to change. I was never sceptical about the whole thing. Shame on me. :)

Doh! I should have just looked on Wikipedia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
Click to expand...

Ah, but the book of Enoch appears to support the flat earth idea.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm

Granted, it is non-canonical. :)

My understanding is that your assessment is correct, by the middle ages pretty much everyone agreed that the earth was spherical except for the fringes. The real argument was over geocentrism.
 
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