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https://creation.com/flat-earth-myth.
Figure 1: Richard II of England, coronation portrait, Westminster Abbey.
Credit: Wikipedia.org
.As early as the 5th century, medieval European kings carried a symbol called the globus cruciger, Latin for ‘cross-bearing orb’, as a Christian symbol of royal power. The orb, usually a golden sphere, represented the earth—hang on, a sphere representing a flat earth—something’s wrong here … oh that’s right, it was a spherical earth. It was topped by a cross to symbolise Christ’s lordship over the earth, and held by the ruler to symbolise that he had been entrusted to rule his lands. In medieval portraits, the scale didn’t indicate physical size but importance, hence the large size of the cross.Indeed, there are many pictures portraying Christ Himself holding the orb, the classic Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) theme..Why did people oppose Columbus?
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The above demonstrate that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) was never opposed by flat-earthers, simply because there were none to oppose him, among either church or political leaders. So what was the real issue?.
Columbus was trying to reach India by sea, the ‘long way’ around the earth. But to do that, his ships had to carry enough provisions for the length of the journey. He had learned that the 9th-century Persian astronomer Alfraganus had estimated each degree of latitude spanned “56⅔ miles”. But Columbus thought Alfraganus meant the Roman mile (1,480 m, 4,856 ft), whereas he was using the Arabic mile (1,830 m, 6,004 ft). Thus Columbus thought that the earth’s circuмference was only about ¾ of its actual length of about 40,000 km (25,000 miles). Columbus also greatly underestimated the distance between Japan and the Canary Islands as 3,000 Italian miles (3,700 km or 2,300 miles), whereas the distance by sea is more like 19,600 km (12,200 miles)..It was thus the size of the earth, not the shape, that was under dispute. His critics argued that ships of his day (1492) could not carry enough fresh water and food for such a huge journey. And they were right! Columbus was just lucky that an enormous continent was in the way. He knew nothing of previous Viking discoveries centuries earlier. And he still thought he had landed in the East Indies, the then-current name for the Indian subcontinent. The results of his mistake persist today, in the common name for the Native Americans—‘Indians’, a translation of Columbus’ Spanish term ‘indios’.Sailors
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An example of the misinformation in the ‘education’ system comes from the 20th-century high-school history textbook The American Pageant by Thomas Bailey. Many of its editions claimed, “The superstitious sailors [of Columbus’ crew] … grew increasingly mutinous … because they were fearful of sailing over the edge of the world.”
However, sailors were well aware of the shape of the earth. One myth states that people realized that the earth was round because they saw ships slowly sinking below the horizon. But before telescopes, it was more likely the other way round: sailors returning to land saw high mountains before lowlands.Also, sailors from the northern hemisphere crossed the equator well before Christ, and reported that in the South, the sun shone from the north. They also knew how to measure their latitude from the angle of the sun at noon, which works only with a spherical earth..The rise of the Flat Earth lie
The above are the facts about Columbus. The much-parroted flat-earth myth about him comes not from history but from the tales of Washington Irving (1783–1859), The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828 ). Irving was probably America’s first genuine best-selling writer, but he admitted that he was “apt to indulge in the imagination.” Flat-earth belief was certainly a figment of his imagination.
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It was bad enough that this myth entered the public perception thanks to Irving’s wide readership. But it became worse when it acquired the veneer of scholarship, so it could be used as a club with which to bash Christianity. The main propagandists for this cause were the notorious 19th century anti-Christian bigots John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918 ). Draper, a fine chemist and photographer—first president of the American Chemical Society—but a lousy historian, wrote History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) as a poorly informed polemic against the Church. White was a disgruntled ex-Episcopalian and the founder of Cornell University as the first explicitly secular university in the United States. He also published the two-volume work History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)..Both authors relied heavily on the work of Cosmas, portraying his flat-earth teaching as typical rather than the almost forgotten, extreme minority view that it was. And they are the ones most responsible for the discredited ‘conflict thesis’ between Christianity and science, instead of the real history that the Christian world-view was responsible for science in the first place, while it was still-born in other places like ancient Greece and China.10.Colin Archibald Russell (1928–2013), Emeritus Professor of History of Science and Technology at the Open University, writes:.“Draper takes such liberty with history, perpetuating legends as fact that he is rightly avoided today in serious historical study. The same is nearly as true of White, though his prominent apparatus of prolific footnotes may create a misleading impression of meticulous scholarship.”11
Both J.B. Russell and Gould argue that Draper and White had an agenda to discredit Christians who opposed the then-new theories of Darwin as ‘flat earthers’. Nothing much has changed!.Flat earth leader is an evolutionist
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Although hardly anyone in the Church has ever believed the flat earth myth, “Incredibly, some people still do,” wrote Natalie Wolchover in Live Science last year (23 June, 2011) :
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“The Flat Earth Society is an active organization currently led by a Virginian man named Daniel Shenton. Though Shenton believes in evolution and global warming, he and his hundreds, if not thousands, of followers worldwide also believe that the Earth is a disc that you can fall off of.”12
So next time an evolutionist calls you a ‘flat-earther’, point out that the leading flat-earther is one of his fellow evolutionists!.
Lunar eclipse
.Ancient proof of round [spheroid] earth
Figure 4: Time-lapse photos of the moon during a lunar partial eclipse,
clearly showing the circular shadow produced by the ball-shaped earth.
“Either then the earth is spherical or it is at least naturally spherical. And it is right to call anything that which nature intends it to be, and which belongs to it, rather than which it is by constraint and contrary to nature. The evidence of the senses further corroborates this. How else would eclipses of the moon show segments shaped as we see them? As it is, the shapes which the moon itself each month shows are of every kind—straight, gibbous, and concave—but in eclipses the outline is always curved: and, since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth’s surface, which is therefore spherical.”13
This lines up with the Bible: Isaiah 40:22 tells us that God “sits above the circle of the earth”. Indeed, the Hebrew word (khûg) implies ball-shaped, just as Ven. Bede taught about 1,400 years after Isaiah.14 .Summary
- Almost all the early and medieval church scholars who commented on the earth’s shape explicitly said it was round [spheroid].
- Medieval European rulers used a golden sphere or orb called the globus cruciger to represent the earth under Christ’s rule.
- Columbus’s opponents never disputed the shape of the earth, but only its size—and they were right!
- The flat earth myth began with a fictional account of Columbus in the 19th century by Washington Irving. Then it was aggressively pushed in influential anti-Christian polemics by Draper and White.
- A final irony: the leading flat-earther today is an evolutionist.
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