Flat Earth or Flat-Out Lie?
By Gary DeMar

THE DEBATE over evolution continues to rage. All the stops are being pulled out by the Darwinian community to stifle the inevitable demise of evolution. Intelligent Design advocates are making headway in exposing the soft under--belly of the supposed scientific veracity of Darwinian evolution. Evolution advocates are worried because intelligent design arguments make so much sense. Knowing this, garden variety evolutionists try to paint creationists as medievalists. This is most evident in the way they argue for St. Darwin and the vitriol they use in their attempts to discredit the creationist paradigm. Evidence for their desperation is the way they poison the well by claiming that creationism is synonymous to a belief in a flat earth. The argument goes something like this:

For millennia, people believed that the earth was flat. As science broke free from the dark ages of superstition and medieval theology, true science was born and old-world cosmologies protected by an autocratic church dismissive of empirical arguments were finally removed from science textbooks. But a new form of medievalism has returned masquerading as science. It goes by the names of "creation science" and "intelligent design." Advocates of this "new science" are little different from their flat-earth counterparts.

Two recent "letters to the editor" recently published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will be enough to show that there is a general ignorance of history and science on this topic. It's no surprise that creationists have to chuckle when they read such absurd comparisons. Their understanding of science is as bad as their understanding of history:

• Why should the media give any form of creationism --the flat-earth variety or the seemingly more sophisticated "intelligent design" species--equal time [with evolutionary science]?
• Five hundred years ago, virtually everyone on Earth believed the sun revolved around the Earth and the Earth was either flat, square or rectangular. The fact that both the sun and moon appeared to be round didn't seem to have any influence on our ancestors' views regarding the shape of the Earth.

A point of clarification on the comments made by the second letter writer needs to be made. Something can be round and not be a globe. The sun and moon look like discs rather than balls or orbs. As we will see, educated people in the church did not teach that the sun was a fiery plate hanging in the heavens. On the heliocentric question, the Church doctors wanted Galileo to back up his theories with empirical data. Unfortunately, the Church had adopted the geocentric cosmology of Aristotle and used it as the standard to evaluate any competitors. It was Aristotle, not the Bible, who was the cosmological standard.

Disc or Sphere?

The notion that the majority of people believed that the planet that they lived on was a disc is a myth that just won't go away. Certainly the cartographers and scientists in Columbus' day did not believe that "planet earth" was flat. Anyone who watched a ship sail beyond the horizon noticed its gradual descent. They also knew that if they watched the same ship from a hill or a tower, they could view the ship longer. If the Earth were flat, the seas would drain and ships would fall rapidly, never to return to port.

The dispute with Columbus was over how big around the Earth was not whether it was round or flat. The scientists and doctors of the church were aware of the calculations of the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes (176 B.C.-194 B.C.) on the circumference of the Earth. Columbus’ calculations led him to believe the Earth was about 18,000 miles around. He was off more than 6,000 miles. On this point, the cartographers were correct. The intrepid globetrotter was indeed fortunate that an unchartered land mass-- America --stood in the way of his ultimate goal to find a sea route to the east by traveling west.

It's not just ill-informed letter writers and Darwinian dogmatists who have succumbed to the fiction of a flat--earth advocacy by Christian writers and scientists. Former librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, wrote this sweeping assessment of Christian historiography:

After the death of Ptolemy, Christianity conquered the Roman Empire and most of Europe. Then we observe a Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia, which afflicted the continent from A.D. 300 to at least 1300. During those centuries Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully, and so scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers.

This "scholarly amnesia," as Boorstin sees it, was a supposed general Christian consensus that Jerusalem was the center of the world (Ezek. 5:5) and that the world was shaped like a box having "four corners" (Isa. 11:12) out of which blew "four winds" (Matt. 24:31). Of course, Jerusalem was the center of the world for a Jew living in Israel, just like New York City is the center of the world for New Yorkers, Paris for the French, and London for the British. Boorstin admits that Christians putting their Holy City at the center is not surprising or unusual. What he finds "remarkable" is that even after the "growing mass of knowledge," advances in geography came to a standstill. This is hardly the case. Like the flat earth mythology, the contention that science emerged overnight "when the iron grip of the church was relaxed and the freedom of rationality of the ancient world were restored to the human race. An assessment in these terms is not merely far too simplistic; in important ways it is just wrong. . . . [S]cience was indebted to Greek thought" and "was also heir to crucial ideas and attitudes enshrined in Christianity." Actually, science began to blossom "when Greek and other ‘pagan’ ideas of nature were shown to be inadequate in the new climate of biblical awareness brought about at the Reformation."

Do Trees Have Hands?

Skeptics are quick to point out that the Bible should not be interpreted literally until they come across passages where a literal interpretation will suit their purposes. The Bible, so the skeptic says, teaches that the earth has "four corners" (Isa. 11:12; Rev. 7:1; 20:8). The three occurrences of "four corners" appear in literature that is largely poetic and symbolic. This is hardly enough biblical evidence to warrant the claim that the Bible teaches that the Earth is either shaped like a box or a platter since the Bible also says that trees (Isa. 55:12) and rivers (Psalm 98:8) have hands and hearts have highways (84:5). These examples could be multiplied. The fact that some misguided individuals saw such language as literal descriptions of either geography or cosmology in no way supports the claim made by many that the church dogmatized a flat-earth belief.

The Bible is a book of literature. It speaks in literary ways. No one should expect it to read like a science journal. Again, the fact that some read it this way is not the Bible's fault. Our everyday speech is peppered with easily understood metaphors. How should we understand Moshe R. Manheim who wrote a guest editorial for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution just two days after the above two letters to the editors were published?:

In the 2,000 years since the destruction of the second Holy Temple that scattered Jews to the four corners of the Earth, there have been few times that Jews have been able to live in the land of Israel.

Are we to assume that Manheim believes the earth is a box because he writes that the earth has four corners? Describing a four-cornered earth is obviously metaphorical, and no one considers it otherwise. All maps are flat and have four corners, and they work well enough to get us around the world. Airplane pilots carry flat maps into the cockpit even though they are flying around the globe.

If a time capsule that included an atlas of our world as it exists today were unearthed two thousand years from now, would these future earthlings suppose that we believed in a flat earth? Would they think we were geocentrists if they read the Sunday, August 12th, 2002 issue of any Atlanta, Georgia, daily newspaper that reported the sun rise was at 6:58 a.m. and sun set at 8:27 p.m.? How unscientific! But it's like this every day, in every newspaper around the world. Haven't these editors ever heard of the Copernican Revolution? James B. Jordan's comments are helpful:

Consider. If I say, "The sun rose at 6:01 this morning," that statement is perfectly true and communicates perfectly what is meant. I can also say something more precise, like: "At exactly 6:01:49 A.M., Greenwich Mean Time, the horizon of the earth dropped to reveal the upper tip of the sun as observed from 41◦14'22.18" latitude and 55◦21'45.44" longitude." This second statement is more precise, but not more true than the previous one. We understand the first statement perfectly well.

In fact, the more scientifically precise statement is the less clear in terms of what the majority of people understand. Even though we know that the sun does not rise in the morning and set in the evening, there is no better way to describe what happens each and every day. Copernicus himself is not opposed to using metaphors to describe certain elements in the cosmos:

In the very centre of all the Sun resides. For who would place this lamp in another or better place within this most beautiful temple, than where it can illuminate the whole at once? Even so, not inaptly, some have called it the light, mind, or the ruler of the universe. Thus indeed, as though seated on a throne, the Sun governs the circumgyrating family of planets.

The sun is not the center "of all." It's more than a "lamp." It is not a "temple," and it is not "seated on a throne." Copernicus uses language that sounds very much like the Bible. Apparently he saw no conflict with the use of metaphors and his more precise scientific terminology.

The language of scientific imprecision does nothing to alter the way each and every one of us lives in this world. The fact that we know the more precise scientific reality that there is neither a sun rise nor an earth rise, and that our way of describing these daily occurrences has not changed in millennia, is a testament to the timelessness of biblical descriptive language.

Stephen Jay Gould Agrees

But the question remains: Did students of the Bible and doctors of the church transform this obviously metaphorical language into a scientific creed? Boorstin traces the flat-earth topography dogma to "a fanatical recent convert, Cosmas of Alexandria, who provided a full-fledged Topographia Christiana, which lasted these many centuries to the dismay and embarrassment of modern Christians." What Boorstin does not tell his readers, is that almost no one followed the fanatic's views. Medieval scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell's observations are important:

It must first be reiterated that 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.
A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates (2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.
Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few--at least two and at most five--early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.

There you have it. Three, and at the most five, early Christian writers, most of whom are obscure and are rarely if ever quoted by later doctors of the church, believed in a flat earth while "tens of thousands" held to a spherical earth. Even the late Stephen Jay Gould admits that Christians were not flat earthers. "Virtually all major Christian scholars affirmed our planet's roundness. The Venerable Bede referred to the earth as orbis in medio totius mundi positus (an orb placed in the center of the universe)." Roger Bacon (1220–1292) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) also believed that the Earth is round.

Conclusion

The debate over science and religion today is most often portrayed as faith versus fact. There is a great deal of myth-making among supposed objective scientists. The albatross of flat earth beliefs and its continual attribution to modern-day Christian Creationists is little more than an attempt to poison the well. "Why should we pay attention to so-called Christian scientists," critics of creationism smugly ask, "since they are not much different from their ‘scientific’ flat-earth predecessors?" And what about the self-created myths of scientific history used to prop up the teetering edifice of evolution? There's the hoax of Piltdown Man and the fraudulent studies on the peppered moth. Piltdown Man is the most infamous and embarrassing pro-evolution hoax. But the "evolution" of the peppered moth, the touted "slam-dunk of natural selection," is still found in nearly every biology textbook promoting evolution even though the two-year observational experiments are known to have been staged. Simply point, the evidence was manipulated to get the desired result. Since scientists know this, then why is the peppered moth still considered an "icon of evolution"? For the same reason that the Christian flat-earth myth is perpetuated. Materialist science is paradigm driven in spite of the evidence. Anything that does not fit the paradigm is dismissed as non-science.

Notes

1. Malcolm Craig, "Creationism is Mythology" (Letters), Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 10, 2002), B4.

2. Bruce Wright, "We are God and God is Us" (Letters), Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 10, 2002), B4.

3. The Earth is 24,901.55 miles at the equator.

4. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself (New York: Random House, 1983), 100.

5. Colin A. Russell, Cross-Currents: Interactions Between Science and Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 22-23. Also see chapter 4.

6. Russell, Cross-Currents, 55.

7. Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman III, gen. eds., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

8. Moshe R. Manheim, "Faith, conviction give father strength to send son to Israel," Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 12, 2002), A8.

9. James B. Jordan, Creation in Six Days: A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 1999), 109.

10. Quoted in A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500 - 1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1954), 67.

11. Boorstin, The Discoverers, 108.

12. Jeffrey Burton Russell, "The Myth of the Flat Earth," Summary by Jeffrey Burton Russell for the American Scientific Affiliation Conference (August 4, 1997) at Westmont College.

13. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 114.

14. Paul Raeburn, "‘Of Moths and Men’: The Moth That Failed," The New York Times (August 25, 2002). www.nytimes.com