The flat-earth straw man

The mythological notion that medieval Christians believed that the earth is flat is one of the Darwinists' favorite straw men and they don't realize how ignorant and foolish they look when they repeat this myth. Trolls have repeated the myth many times on this blog. A historian at the Univ. of Calif. - Santa Barbara said,

It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat . . . (emphasis in original)

. . . . Historians of science have been proving this point for at least 70 years (most recently Edward Grant, David Lindberg, Daniel Woodward, and Robert S. Westman), without making notable headway against the error. Schoolchildren in the US, Europe, and Japan are for the most part being taught the same old nonsense . . .

. . . No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat.

The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an American, between whom I have not been able to establish a connection, though they were both in Paris at the same time. One was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an academic of strong antireligious prejudices who had studied both geography and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834). The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history. His misrepresentations of the history of early New York City and of the life of Washington were topped by his history of Christopher Columbus (1828). It was he who invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus, a "simple mariner," appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed, according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate.

This medieval belief that the earth is flat has as much factual basis as Washington Irving's headless horseman.

I remember being taught that Columbus's crews almost mutinied because they were afraid that they would sail off the end of the earth and that Columbus bravely told them, "sail on." I first realized that the flat-earth story was fishy when I learned that the ancient Greeks estimated the size of the earth by measuring the angles of shadows cast at noon-time at the same time of year by sticks at two different latitudes. I just mistakenly assumed that this knowledge was lost during the Middle Ages, but now I know the truth.

But now, why did the false accounts of Letronne and Irving become melded and then, as early as the 1860s, begin to be served up in schools and in schoolbooks as the solemn truth?

The answer is that the falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or library.

The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society, is to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple and powerful, if not elegant: "Look how stupid these Christians are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress. These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years denied that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?"

Even with the power of the Internet to spread refutations of this mythological flat-earth story, Darwinists continue to frequently repeat the story. They should stick to their straw man argument that Darwin doubters think that 2 + 2 = 5 -- at least that argument only makes the Darwinists look stupid and does not make them look ignorant too.

This blog has a previous article about the flat-earth straw man.
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