Discussion about scientific issues as they relate to God and Christianity including archaeology, origins of life, the universe, intelligent design, evolution, etc.
First, let me be clear, my pastor does not believe the world is flat.
I am very much a sceptic. I cannot remember the last time I heard a sermon in which I had significant doubts about nothing in it.
I am such a sceptic that I have doubts about my doubts. So I keep going to church.
Also, I never recall hearing what I believed at the time to be a blantant factual error in a sermon. Until last Sunday night.
I repeat, my pastor did not say that the Earth is flat. However, he did say that people of power and influence believed it was at least close to Columbus's time He cited a Spanish statue he thought confirmed this.
According to this, http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/rus ... Earth.html
he fell into a big trap laid by those who disparage Christianity over 150 years ago.
He unwittigly spread their "gospel.''
I may have more to say on this if there is sufficient interest.
John 5:24 24 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.
“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
-Edward R Murrow
St. Richard the Sarcastic--The Patron Saint of Irony
How does investigating the myth of the flat earth help teachers of the history of science?
First, as a historian, I have to admit that it tells us something about the precariousness of history. History is precarious for three reasons: the good reason that it is extraordinarily difficult to determine "what really happened" in any series of events; the bad reason that historical scholarship is often sloppy; and the appalling reason that far too much historical scholarship consists of contorting the evidence to fit ideological models. The worst examples of such contortions are the Nazi and Communist histories of the early- and mid-twentieth century.
Contortions that are common today, if not widely recognized, are produced by the incessant attacks on Christianity and religion in general by secular writers during the past century and a half, attacks that are largely responsible for the academic and journalistic sneers at Christianity today.
A curious example of this mistreatment of the past for the purpose of slandering Christians is a widespread historical error, an error that the Historical Society of Britain some years back listed as number one in its short compendium of the ten most common historical illusions. It is the notion that people used to believe that the earth was flat--especially medieval Christians.
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.
A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.
Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few--at least two and at most five--early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.
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. How and why did this nonsense emerge?
In my research, I looked to see how old the idea was that medieval Christians believed the earth was flat. I obviously did not find it among medieval Christians. Nor among anti-Catholic Protestant reformers. Nor in Copernicus or Galileo or their followers, who had to demonstrate the superiority of a heliocentric system, but not of a spherical earth. I was sure I would find it among the eighteenth-century philosophes, among all their vitriolic sneers at Christianity, but not a word. I am still amazed at where it first appears.
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. Well, yes, there was a meeting at Salamanca in 1491, but Irving's version of it, to quote a distinguished modern historian of Columbus, was "pure moonshine. Washington Irving, scenting his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene," created a fictitious account of this "nonexistent university council" and "let his imagination go completely...the whole story is misleading and mischievous nonsense."
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?"
But that is not the truth.
Then I will see if I can post the link for it on another post.
This question may sound flippant but it isn't meant to be taken that way at all, its meant as a serious question- Is this a big deal? Yes, I would want my pastor to strive to be historically accurate and to avoid spreading false information. It would be good to feel confident that he did his research and wouldn't fall for a myth that's easily refutable.
But I'd also look at the context of the comment. The bigger a part it had in the sermon, the more problem I'd have with it. But in most contexts, its just used as a throw away example to illustrate a point (usually something about just because people believe something it doesn't mean its true). Its something that could be corrected, but its not like the fact that scholars in medieval times knew the earth was spherical is really disputed among those who know the history of it. That leads me to believe that maybe it was just a throw away comment on the pastor's part, correct me if I'm wrong.
Narnia, you are probably right, but it's a big deal to me nonetheless. I hear so much stuff in sermons, and places like this, I strongly doubt. Its my experience pastors frequently cannot admit that they were wrong, like us lesser mortals often are, and will plead lack of time or interest to even make a a case. And, unfortunately, Christians in general are too much like that not infrequently.
And when this one stepped in it with both feet up to his chest, could not admit his error,.........And spread an Ant-Christian lie, in the bargain, that really hit a raw nerve in this skeptic looking for reasons to believe. (This time I even spelled skeptic right, or did I?)
Also, it did not help that I have always had a huge interest in Columbus and Magellan, especialy what made them famous. Magellan, for instance, in his earlier days, sailed east to an island deep in the Pacific, from Portugal, where the Portugese had a business going. When he completed his work he headed back east to Portugal. Years later he went on his famous expedition from Spain heading west, he was killed on another Pacific island, likely west of his Portugese job. So he may have been the first person to go around the world after all.
You could do worse with your time than Googling Magellan.
So what was the context? Was it said in passing or was it a central point of the sermon? Did you or anyone else try to correct him (in an e-mail or private setting, hopefully)? Did this specific pastor refuse to admit that he was wrong if confronted?
Report this postReply with quote Re: Pastor falls for Anti-Christian myth, spreads it
by narnia4 » Sat Apr 28, 2012 8:54 pm
So what was the context? Was it said in passing or was it a central point of the sermon? Did you or anyone else try to correct him (in an e-mail or private setting, hopefully)? Did this specific pastor refuse to admit that he was wrong if confronted?
narnia4
Valued Member
You made me so angry I could not reply until now. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold. You just blew away what I, the OP, wanted to talk about, Narnia. Why should I answer your questions if you ignore mine?
Oh boy, my own call out thread! Well that makes me feel important...
But I'm going to ignore the call out thread, any discussion can be done here or via PM. I'm not sure what made you so angry, I didn't ignore any question. In fact, until your last post I didn't see you ask any question at all. If you didn't ask a question, how could I ignore it?
What I did is ask for clarification to try to determine whether you were making a mountain out of a molehill (getting angry over a passing reference that was inaccurate) or whether your pastor made this a central part of the sermon and refused to be corrected as to his mistake (which wouldn't make any sense, to be honest). Given that my post made you so angry that you were unable to reply for almost two weeks, I'm guessing that the former is what happened.
If you have a worthwhile question I'll try to answer it, if not... I'm not going to take part in any flame war. Sorry that you're so angry, although why you are is still a question. Not going to apologize for my post because there's nothing there that should offend. If there's a bigger issue with church or you have a more philosophical problem with the flat earth myth, there can be a thread on that instead.
ultimate777 wrote:Report this postReply with quote Re: Pastor falls for Anti-Christian myth, spreads it
by narnia4 » Sat Apr 28, 2012 8:54 pm
So what was the context? Was it said in passing or was it a central point of the sermon? Did you or anyone else try to correct him (in an e-mail or private setting, hopefully)? Did this specific pastor refuse to admit that he was wrong if confronted?
narnia4
Valued Member
You made me so angry I could not reply until now. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold. You just blew away what I, the OP, wanted to talk about, Narnia. Why should I answer your questions if you ignore mine?
Random is right. Man, take a chill pill.
I went back and read the OP, and you didn't ask Narnia a question, except regarding spelling. In fact, I didn't see any question posited to ANYONE.
-“The Bible treated allegorically becomes putty in the hands of the exegete.” John Walvoord
"I'm not saying scientists don't overstate their results. They do. And it's understandable, too...If you spend years working toward a certain goal and make no progress, of course you are going to spin your results in a positive light." Ivellious
He cited a Spanish statue he thought confirmed this.
