If you ask me, that's a point for Flat Earth right there. Scripture can't err. Any cosmology which tends to erode confidence and faith in the Scriptures (Word of God) has to be from the devil.
Some say "who cares? It doesn't matter!" but right here you're proving just how much it DOES matter. Someone believing in Flat Earth would (according to you) be much more comfortable with Scripture on this specific point.
Which will help you save your soul: having tons of doubts about God, religion, and Scripture -- or the opposite?
Thank you. Scripture is inerrant. Period. Catholics believe that the Holy Ghost is the PRIMARY author of the Sacred Scripture, and that the human authors are instrumental authors. In other words, they were the pens held by the Holy Ghost to write the Scriptures. Now, there's an interesting dynamic between their intellects, etc., but there isn't a single word in Sacred Scripture that wasn't intended to be there by the Holy Ghost.
Scripture's inerrancy is not limited to the "spiritual" content as a few here have implied.
That is why St. Robert Bellarmine and the Holy Office condemned heliocentrism as HERETICAL. He clearly stated that even if it's not a matter of faith in and of itself, it's a matter of faith due to the fact that it was taught by Sacred Scripture and therefore would impugn the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture.
Now, certain things could be metaphors. So, for instance, the Holy Office said it was permissible to hold that creation took longer than 6 calendar days because the sun and moon weren't created until day 4. So perhaps day is a metaphor for period of activity vs. night being a period of inactivity. But that's about as far as it goes. St. Augustine points out that the tone and intent of Genesis is clearly historical in nature and not some kind of poem or parable, etc. And this is what all the Church Fathers held. So we are bound to treat it that way. As St. Robert Bellarmine pointed out, Trent teaches that we must accept the unanimous consensus of the Church Fathers as the authoritative interpretation of Sacred Scripture.
There's no way to "metaphor" your way out of the fact that man was created roughly 6,000 years ago. I've asked the globe earthers whether they believed this. I don't recall seeing a response (but then I haven't looked at every response in this thread). In fact, right after I asked that, one of the globers dropped off the thread. Was man created from the clay/dust of the earth or from a monkey? There's no way to turn "clay of the earth" into a metaphor for "monkey". You could say that earth is a metaphor for matter in general, but there's no way to make it a metaphor for a monkey. [Sorry, Pope Pius XII, you made a tragic error by allowing Catholics to consider that.]
One could argue that some of the passages which suggest a flat earth are metaphors. And some of the Church Fathers did. But some didn't. So one doesn't have to believe in flat earth as a matter of faith, since we don't have a consensus of the Church Fathers. But it's very obvious to me that Sacred Scripture taught that there was a SOLID firmament above the earth. In one passage in Job, it's described as being "hard like brass" (I think some translations say glass). Not sure how to turn that into a metaphor for the thermosphere or ionosphere.
Topic: Any Heliocentrists on CI? (Read 7870 times)