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Author Topic: Catholic Flatearth Believers  (Read 16571 times)

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Offline Jaynek

Re: Catholic Flatearth Believers
« Reply #55 on: December 02, 2019, 07:52:54 PM »
Quote from: Tradman on December 02, 2019, 06:55:43 PM
Apologies to you. You're right, your words didn't say the Fathers were heretics. Bede seems in this quote to be a bit of an anomaly, but the entire article is not present to view for context and its doubtful he would be the lone saint to deny what all the others taught, especially when the moving globe always has been the teaching of pagans.  By the way, apology accepted.      
There is no reason to think that all the other saints taught something different from St. Bede. (I can not find an English translation of his case for spherical earth online, but I can point you to the Latin.  There is no question that he is unambiguously teaching a spherical earth.) Nobody can produce more than a few quotes from Saints who said the earth was flat.

St. John Damascene is considered the last Father of the Church.  He wrote of summary of Christian doctrine as presented by the Fathers who came before him.  He wrote: "Further, some hold that the earth is in the form of a sphere, others that it is in that of a cone. At all events it is much smaller than the heaven, and suspended almost like a point in its midst. And it will pass away and be changed." This has got to be the most authoritative statement possible on what the Fathers thought.  And this source says that some of the Fathers believed the earth is in the form of a sphere.  Therefore we can safely say that all of the Fathers did not teach that the earth is flat.

Many cosmological models have been taught by pagans.  A stationary flat earth model was taught by pagans, as was a moving globe and as was a stationary globe.  We can't just rule out a model simply because pagans have taught it.  There wouldn't be any left.

Far more important than what pagans taught is looking at what has been believed by Catholics throughout history.  In the first centuries, as St. John Damascene said, Catholics disagreed.  Early in the 5th century St. Augustine taught that Scripture did not teach the shape of the earth and this seems to have been accepted by everyone except Cosmas (who may not have known).  Starting from St. Bede around 700, we see Catholics treating the question as a matter of science and teaching a stationary globe in a geocentric system.  This belief lasted for about a thousand years and is what was taught at Catholic universities.  If any model is to be identified as the traditional Catholic one, it should be this one.  

Thanks for accepting my apology.  I accept yours.
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Offline Tradman

  • Supporter
Re: Catholic Flatearth Believers
« Reply #56 on: December 02, 2019, 09:58:31 PM »
Quote from: Jaynek on December 02, 2019, 07:52:54 PM
There is no reason to think that all the other saints taught something different from St. Bede. (I can not find an English translation of his case for spherical earth online, but I can point you to the Latin.  There is no question that he is unambiguously teaching a spherical earth.) Nobody can produce more than a few quotes from Saints who said the earth was flat.

St. John Damascene is considered the last Father of the Church.  He wrote of summary of Christian doctrine as presented by the Fathers who came before him.  He wrote: "Further, some hold that the earth is in the form of a sphere, others that it is in that of a cone. At all events it is much smaller than the heaven, and suspended almost like a point in its midst. And it will pass away and be changed." This has got to be the most authoritative statement possible on what the Fathers thought.  And this source says that some of the Fathers believed the earth is in the form of a sphere.  Therefore we can safely say that all of the Fathers did not teach that the earth is flat.

Many cosmological models have been taught by pagans.  A stationary flat earth model was taught by pagans, as was a moving globe and as was a stationary globe.  We can't just rule out a model simply because pagans have taught it.  There wouldn't be any left.

Far more important than what pagans taught is looking at what has been believed by Catholics throughout history.  In the first centuries, as St. John Damascene said, Catholics disagreed.  Early in the 5th century St. Augustine taught that Scripture did not teach the shape of the earth and this seems to have been accepted by everyone except Cosmas (who may not have known).  Starting from St. Bede around 700, we see Catholics treating the question as a matter of science and teaching a stationary globe in a geocentric system.  This belief lasted for about a thousand years and is what was taught at Catholic universities.  If any model is to be identified as the traditional Catholic one, it should be this one.  

Thanks for accepting my apology.  I accept yours.
What pagans taught is almost as important as what the Fathers taught, because Catholics and pagans were at odds about creation throughout the centuries with the pagans consistently teaching earth was a moving globe. Still do.  
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Offline Jaynek

Re: Catholic Flatearth Believers
« Reply #57 on: December 02, 2019, 10:25:11 PM »
Quote from: Tradman on December 02, 2019, 09:58:31 PM
What pagans taught is almost as important as what the Fathers taught, because Catholics and pagans were at odds about creation throughout the centuries with the pagans consistently teaching earth was a moving globe. Still do.  
Where did you get this idea?  It is not true at all.  Pagans at different times and places had different ideas.  In the centuries just before and after the time of Christ, the Romans believed in a stationary globe in a geocentric system, just like Catholics did for most of our history.  

While there have been some pagans who believed in a moving globe, that is one of the least common ways to think of it.  The most common view among pagans is flat earth.  Here is what Wikipedia says: 

The flat Earth model is an archaic conception of Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD), and China until the 17th century. 

If we need to reject ideas just because pagans held them, then flat earth would be the last thing we should accept.  All the pagans mentioned in the Old Testament believed in flat earth.
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Offline Tradman

  • Supporter
Re: Catholic Flatearth Believers
« Reply #58 on: December 03, 2019, 09:43:02 AM »
It is true that most civilizations believed earth was flat prior to 1500's but it was the pagans who promoted and elaborated on the moving globe and the subsequent Copernican Revolution (that the Church condemned) that ultimately changed the minds of most.    
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Offline Jaynek

Re: Catholic Flatearth Believers
« Reply #59 on: December 03, 2019, 12:03:49 PM »
Quote from: Tradman on December 03, 2019, 09:43:02 AM
It is true that most civilizations believed earth was flat prior to 1500's but it was the pagans who promoted and elaborated on the moving globe and the subsequent Copernican Revolution (that the Church condemned) that ultimately changed the minds of most.
  From Wikipedia:

Quote
While the sphericity of the Earth was widely recognized in Greco-Roman astronomy from at least the 4th century BC,[3] the Earth's daily rotation and yearly orbit around the Sun was never universally accepted until the Copernican Revolution.
While a moving Earth was proposed at least from the 4th century BC in Pythagoreanism, and a fully developed heliocentric model was developed by Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BC, these ideas were not successful in replacing the view of a static spherical Earth, and from the 2nd century AD the predominant model, which would be inherited by medieval astronomy, was the geocentric model described in Ptolemy's Almagest.

Christendom did not believe the earth was flat up to the 1500s.  By 700 St. Bede explicitly taught a spherical earth and there is no record of any other view among Catholics after that point.  Catholics of the middle ages believed in a stationary globe earth.

It is true that Copernicus linked his theory to the Pythagoreans, but this does not really have anything to do with the shape of the earth. Everyone at the time of Copernicus agreed that the earth is a sphere. This was already a thousand years past the last Catholic proponent of flat earth.  Copernicus disagreed on the movement of the earth.

If you want to reject the position of Copernicus as pagan and go back to the Catholic position which preceded Galileo's condemnation, then you should accept the Ptolemaic system, i.e. geocentric, stationary globe earth.  There are other people on this forum who think this and, while I do not personally do so, I consider it a reasonable position.
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