Yeah, the water canopy theory.  No, that's not what the Fathers believed, but that there's a permanent physical barrier between these waters above and the earth and atmosphere below, and that the waters remains and were STILL up there at the time of their writing (long after the Flood).  They describe how the heavier elements, earth and water settled lower and that above this layer of water, like a large Ocean, was the void, and that the earth is at the bottom center of creation.

Oh yes, I know. I thought I would share so there's understanding of just what Sugenis holds to. It's a pretty weak explanation, in my opinion. 

And it gets worse.  Sungenis cites multiple popes referring to the "globe".  But then he cites the Latin word they used, orbis.  Orbis does NOT mean globe, but rathe a circle.  Latin, depending on the era, could use either globus or sphaera for globe or sphere.  Our word "orbit" comes from the Latin.  So, do planets orbit in spherical patterns, or in circular patterns?

There's just no end to his dishonesty in sight.

Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary (one of the more authoritative ones short of the Oxford):
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=orbis&la=la&can=orbis0

a ring, circle, re-entering way, circular path, hoop, orbit

Chariots and other races around a track were said to be moving around the orbis.

So, the popes were using the term orbis as meaning "the world".  This in turn is short for the Roman orbis terrarum, the "circle of lands", a reference to the circle of lands around the Mediterranean sea that the Roman empire controlled.  For them it was synonymous with "the world" since it was the civilized world, outside of which were only barbarians, etc.  So this orbis terrarum expression came to mean the world, as in the inhabited world (vs. oceans, for instance).  Originally meaning "circle" or "track" or "circuit", it therefore became synonymous with "the world" ... which is how it was being used by the popes.  These Popes were NOT thereby claiming that the earth is a "globe" (as that's not the word for "globe").

Then he explains that FEs are constantly at war with each other and says this is because it's really a "religion" and is not based on the scientific method.

What absurd dishonesty.

So, modern science all agree with each other about everything and don't often have competing theories about various things that are not fully understood?

Doesn't 99.999% of modern science, who follow the "scientific method", denounce Sungenis himself as a raving lunatic and as unscientific?

These stupid ad hominems are what he opens the scientific chapters with?

Please allow me to categorically state that Bob is neither willfully ignorant nor intellectually dishonest.

He is on this issue, without question.  It's very clear that he's on a mission here to debunk FE and that he's applying "evidence" with confirmation bias.

I've cited numerous examples of this already.  Every time he sees a Church Father using the expression "circle of the earth," he uses that to assert that the Father in question believes in a globe.  He takes St. Augustine and butchers who he wrote, twisting it into saying the opposite of what he actually said.  He regularly straman's the FE position and FE arguments.

So, at the beginning of the science section, he admits that it's much more difficult to refute FE if you take NASA out of the picture.

This [rejecting NASA as legitimate evidence], unfortunately, is what makes proving the case against a flat Earth difficult at times.

[As a side note, he finds it "unfortunate" that the case against FE becomes more difficult.  Does this sound like someone who's interested in finding the truth, wherever the evidence may lead, or someone who's already decided ahead of time that FE must be refuted?]

He concedes that if we're limited to observations from the ground, that much of the data can be interpreted either way:

The reason is that both a flat Earth and a spherical Earth can, at times, be used to explain the same phenomenon if one is viewing the phenomenon from the surface of the Earth. Simple elements such as magnification, atmospheric distortion, perspective, lines of sight, temperature, pressure and sun light, can be used by both sides in varying ways to make it appear that one or the other view is correct or not correct, as the case may be.

He does concede one instance of fraud by NASA, and admits that it does shake NASA's credibility. 

It is quite an understatement to say that this particular photo of the Earth gives NASA a credibility problem, not only with flatearthers but with many others.

Of course, by focusing on this one photo (that's obviously a fake, and even he has to admit it), he's minimizing the extent of NASA fraud.  We could fill a book larger than his with all the evidence of NASA fraud.  It's dishonest of him to imply that there's only one (or a small handful) of examples that NASA has committed fraud.

Then he goes on to strawman FEs (as he does on a regular basis):

This caveat is not for the purpose of condoning what may have prompted NASA to make the fake photo, but only to say that NASA’s foibles do not prove the Earth is flat.

Nobody says that NASA "foibles" (again an understatement, since there's a vast amount of evidence of deliberate fraud on the part of NASA) "prove" that the Earth is flat.  What it does do is take anything produced by NASA "off the table" as reliable evidence.  In other words, you can't prove that the earth is a globe because of "muh NASA".

So after realizing that taking NASA "evidence" off the table makes it much more difficult to refute FE, he tries to salvage NASA.

He begins by denouncing FEs via strawman:

The flat-earthers begin by claiming that all the images NASA has produced of either the Earth or of man-made objects in space are computer graphic images (CGI for short) that are manufactured on Earth so as to appear as if they come from outer space.

For flat-earthers, this out-of-the gate premise denying satellite photos of Earth is simply a black and white issue, an all-or-nothing game, and there can be no compromise.

Nobody concludes from the evidence of fraud that "ALL the images NASA has produced" are fake.  That is not the argument.  Argument is that this evidence of fraud makes anything produced by NASA inadmissible as evidence.

There's a legal principle where it comes to evidence:  Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.  Literally, "false in one thing, false in all."  If a witness at a trial is caught lying about one thing, that basically renders anything else he says "inadmissible" as evidence.  While it's POSSIBLE that other stuff he says happens to be true, it cannot be proven due to the lack of credibility established even by a single lie.

He then goes on to cite an FE blogger here or there who claims that ALL NASA photos are fake.  That's dishonest as well.  You can find someone in any group who might say stupid things or exaggerate.  And the context of some of these posts he cites is people mixing it up with globers, and much of it is gamesmanship or even just trolling the Globers.  But to try to characterize the objective case for FE based on the comments of some individuals here or there is simply dishonest.  I'm sure you can find a geocentrist who says stupid things or exaggerates some things, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the case for or against geocentrism.

He then goes on to spend quite a few pages trying to save NASA.  For pictures where NASA was clearly cutting and pasting cloud formations across a globe, he tries to claim that in nature you can see "similar" cloud formations when the conditions are similar.  He shows a few pictures.  Problem is that in his pictures, the various clouds are SIMILAR, but they are clearly not IDENTICAL, and the formations that were pasted onto NASA photos of earth are in fact IDENTICAL down to the pixel.  He then goes on to use an earth curve simulator and then shows how a picture from NASA said to be taken from ISS shows the curvature exactly as predicted by the simulator.  So if some chump can write an accurate simulator, we're to think that NASA is incapable of using the same simulation math to come up with a convincing CGI (or otherwise doctored) image ... given their enormous budget?  None of his case  is the least bit convincing.  Even if NASA comes up with images that are accurate and convincing (they SHOULD given their budget), this does not prove that the photos are real or legitimate.  So he spends about 20 pages trying to demonstrate that some NASA images are accurate, based on simulators.  So?  That proves nothing.

So NASA is a mortal enemy of Sungenis' geocentrism and labels him a kook and a nutjob.  Now all of a sudden NASA has credibility.  He criticizes FE for trying to paint NASA as some kind of sinister organization, despite the fact that in his geocentrist battle, he pointed out well that modern science is driven by a dishonest atheistic agenda.  He passes over all of the occult and Masonic connections between NASA, where you even had Jack Parsons performing occult rituals as a devotee of Aleister Crowley.  There was an entire book written about the occultism at NASA.  In any case, now, suddenly Sungenis finds NASA redeemable.  It's like when "Pilate and Herod became friends that day".  He does realize the problem here, so that, at one point, and I can't find the exact quote at the moment, he has to reel back his defense of NASA, and so he says that both NASA and FEs have distorted evidence, with the arrogant assertion that only HE is honest and does not distort evidence.  So NASA is both reliable AND unreliable, reliable when they back him up and unreliable when they don't, leaving him as the ultimate decider and arbiter of when NASA is right and when NASA is wrong.  Are we starting to see the intellectual dishonesty yet?

So about 50 pages of Sungenis' argument falls on the basis of a very simple piece of logic.  Without having to say that ALL NASA images are fake, the principle of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus renders all evidence from NASA inadmissible.  He could have saved himself 50 pages of attempting to show that SOME NASA images are REALISTIC.  As mentioned earlier, showing that some NASA images MAY be real because they accurately follow various simulations, does not prove that they ARE real.  Given NASA's huge budget, it's more of a surprise to me when they get so sloppy as to get caught committing obvious fraud than when they happen to come up with something realistic and plausible.

So, the final conclusion on the NASA front, FE wins that battle.  There's sufficient evidence of NASA fraud to render all NASA evidence inadmissible.  That was a waste of about 50+ pages of his book.

That's like FE proponents pointing to the fact that virtually all open-world video games take place on a flat plane as proof for FE. It's silly.

I'm afraid that I simply don't understand the lack of logic, except that you tend to see that when someone is not being intellectually honest.

Argument is very simple, and it's not the strawman argument he presents (that FE hold ALL NASA images to be fraudulent), but if any are fraudulent, then none of them can be trusted ... even if they have happened to craft some that aren't obviously fake (i.e. that they're realistic).

Once the credibility of NASA is gone, he'd have to prove that any given image is real, and there simply is no way to do that.  Demonstrating that any particular image is believable, credible, realistic does not suffice, as NASA clearly has the funds and the technology to create such images.

And, yes, you occasionally see some absurd arguments from FE.  But this debate isn't about any given person's views, but about the objective question of whether the surface of the earth is flat.  And some of the more absurd arguments come from places like the Flat Earth Society, which certainly appears to have been turned into a disinfo operation.

So, for instance, you occasionally see people making absurd claims about 9/11, but this does not prove that 9/11 was pulled off by a bunch of Arabs with box-cutters.  So that would be like me arguing from a few absurd theories made either by nutjobs or else government disinfo agents deliberately attempting to discredit any doubts about the official story.

At one point, Sungenis spends 2-3 pages on the views of Mark Sergeant, that I'll get back to later

So the first substantial argument that's worth discussing is where Sungenis claims that the rotation of the stars that we observe would not be correct on a Flat Earth.

This one I'll have to study more closely.

He doesn't really prove anything, but makes certain statements, and shows pictures of constellations (that appear to be drawn in) as they are allegedly seen from different parts of the world.  I do not know how to confirm or deny what he's saying.  I've seen counter-arguments from the FEs, and don't know how to confirm or deny those either.

So, based on these assertions, Sungenis claims that FE is discredited.  He then goes on to mention that there's one FE who asserted that the prevalent FE model was wrong and had his own theory.  Sungenis concludes by spending 2-3 pages reproducing an e-mail exchange he had with Mark Sargeant, where Sargeant makes some strange claims.  Many FEs think that Sargeant is a disinfo agent, and in point of fact Sargeant believes the earth is actually some kind of artificial contraption.  Very few FEs accept his position.

But the key distinction that's important here is this.  It's certainly possible to find various shortcomings with different FE "models".  These models are in fact hypothetical, and there's room for improvement or possibly some alternative views.  Finding a flaw with a model does not address the larger question of whether the earth is Flat ... the central evidence for which has to do with seeing too far.  One does not have to believe in the model where the sun and moon rotate over the earth completely parallel to the surface.  Perhaps it goes up and down in an arc.  Perhaps it is more of an electromagnetic phenomenon rather than a physical body.  There are SOME flaws with the model that would discredit FE as a whole ... i.e. if someone could prove that the circuмference or perimeter of Antarctica is more like 12,000 miles than the nearly 70,000 it would be on a flat earth, but some smaller details could be addressed with an alternative model or adjustments to the existing one.  FE do not have the funds or the scientific apparatus to conduct the types of investigations that would be needed to either confirm or deny details about the various models.

In fact, when reading the Church Fathers, many of them did not hold that the sun moved across a plane.  They believed that it rose in the East, set in the West, and then did go beneath the earth during night-time.  They believed that the firmament was not in fact a hemisphere only but that it went around all the way to form a sphere.  But they denied that the bottom part of the earth was inhabitable.  There is one Father who posited that there's a large mountain range that obscures the sun as it moves farther away.  Then we read in the Book of Enoch the notion that the sun emerges from these "gates" and then disappears through gates on the other side of the firmament.

But the error that Sungenis REPEATEDLY makes is to mistake this spherical or hemispherical ENCLOSURE of the earth (their use of the term "world" rather than "earth" is key) for being a reference to a globe on whose surface people live.  It's clear that the Fathers did NOT believe in gravity, a concept that wasn't invented until much later.  So how would people live on the lower hemisphere.  That's where we have St. Hildegard later stating that the underside was uninhabitable due to the great deep and the entrance to Sheol.  These Fathers seemed to have the same view.  So it's rather ironic that Sungenis uses that picture of Our Lord holding a sphere as if it were proof for globe earth.  But if you look at the picture, it's a transparent globe that, when Our Lord's Hand is on the bottom, has the appearance of there being land at the bottom and blue sky at the top.

But the question of the constellations and movements of the stars is worth studying ... and here is finally some room (after hundreds of pages) for a substantial debate.