CathInfo.com

Quote from: BumphreyHogart

You know, when a suspect of a crime has an alibi, proving he was living in Australia when a murder occurred in Florida, nobody need look at any other alleged evidence against him. It is what is called the "argumentum ad absurdam" or "reductio ad absurdum", meaning it has already been proved absurd and nothing else can change that.

The flat earth claim is absurd. I don't need to see any so-called evidence of that....because I know that when the sun rises upon a plane, the whole plain would see the sun at the same time. But on this earth, the sun is seen to rise in one location and due west 100 miles the sun is still below the horizon.

I think non-Catholics, and disgruntled, fallen-away Catholics, just come here to bring laughter upon Catholicism by posting such nonsense. Either that or they have Internet access from a mental institution.

Here, an obvious fallacy.  Visibility of the sun from all points on a plane is dependent on several things.  Firstly, the size of the plane in relation to the size of the sun, the relationship of the position of the sun over the plane as well as the distance from the plane to the sun.  If indeed, the sun is small and relatively close to earth as it measurably is, then, the farther from the sun that a place on earth is, not only the darker it will be but the sun's proximity to earth prevents outer areas from seeing it because all visible things converge at the observer's horizon.  The convergence of sun and earth is known as sunrise and sunset.  When the sun goes beyond these points, being too low to be resolved by the eye from that level, it thus disappears.  This is proven true as one chases the sun in airplane.  As the sun sets for the people in Phoenix, for instance, it doesn't set for the airplane that chases the sun on to LAX where the airplane lands and is then forced to watch the sun set over the ocean.  Of course, had the plane chased the sun further, like to Hawaii, the sun would never set.  

Now, it is agreed that the sun drives a little faster than the airplane--3-500 mph faster. However this "chasing" the sunset has been observed during the time the sun is visible to the plane and until it outpaces it.    

In the southern hemisphere navigators use the Southern Cross instead of the north star, because the latter cannot be seen from south of the equator at sea level. At the equator, Polaris appears to be just on the horizon due north, and the Southern Cross rotates (clockwise) due south.

Some flat-earther in a previous thread claimed that the north star can be seen up to 20 degrees south of the equator but provided no reference or evidence of this. Perhaps it is visible from the highest peaks of the Andes mountains, but most certainly not from the surface of the ocean or anywhere close to sea level. The curvature of the earth at the equator prevents a view of Polaris south of that latitude.


So when you travel to a different location, your horizon tilts with respect to the stars. Today every school child is taught that the earth is (approximately) a sphere. Even in ancient times, however, astute travelers realized that the changes in the stars as you travel north or south must be caused by the curvature of the earth. The ancient Greeks even reasoned that the earth must be a sphere, and thus pictured the universe as a pair of spheres: an enormous celestial sphere, carrying the stars around us once a day, and the much smaller spherical earth, fixed at the center of the universe.


The ancient Greeks used this principle to estimate the diameter of the spherical earth, and they got surprisingly close to the reality. They measured shadow of a vertical pole at each of two locations at the same day of two years, since it took them about a year to travel to the second place in the south. This same experiment has been done in our time as well, and the same results are obtained, since the earth's axis has not changed (appreciably at least) since the time of the Greeks.

Either that or they have Internet access from a mental institution.