Myths of Science and Christianity (We All Believe) - Myth 1: Flat Earth

With the decline of Rome and the advent of the Dark Ages, geography as a science went into hibernation, from which the early Church did little to rouse it...Strict biblical interpretations plus unbending Patristic bigotry resulted in the theory of a flat earth with Jerusalem in its center, and the Garden of Eden somewhere up country, from which flowed the four rivers of Paradise.

                   --Boise Penrose, Travel and Discovery        
                    in the Renaissance
                   (quoted in Galileo Goes to Jail, 28)


I remember quite vividly the first representation of Columbus that I was taught; like the glimmering icons of the Orthodox church, his portrait was given to us less a man, and more a thin veil through which the portentous light of Enlightenment found quite early access to key into the world.  Against the stubbornness of a backwards society, Columbus was a man, so it was said, singularly convinced of the world's rotundity, and to settle this geometric bet he set sail.

Behind his lambent form was the pitch abyss of a thousand years of Medievalism, ignorant--or deceived by Priests' wooden reading of "the four corners of the world" in scripture.  It was from this morass that Columbus strode forward resolute, now tinged with the sort of heroic loneliness American mythology devours.  It was a breathtaking tale; both because of his resolution, and because my young mind fascinated upon the uncanny image of a horizon line of waters churning over that last vital edge.  Impatient with the details of the lesson, I daydreamed, and wondered how the waters refilled themselves if they kept foaming over the abyss.  I pictured far below us another flat earth, only upside down, whose waters likewise keeled over the edge, but from our vantage plunged up to us as our waters plunged downwards to them, in a sort of eternal emptying and refilling.  Quietly, my fifth grade self cursed Columbus for wrecking this wonderful fairytale I just invented.

It turns out one fairytale simply replaced another, however.  And this new fairytale, of a proto-scientific quest for truth funding the discovery of America and all its soon-to-be ingenuity, quite happily dovetailed as well into the fact that Columbus represented the mercantile class of entrepreneurs, so that not only was it this rebellious scientific gut-feeling that liberated us from the priests, but proto free-market economy as well.

Of course this isn't a post about Columbus so much as the flat earth.  Whatever mythology attaches to the man will have to wait another day.  The point of the flat earth, however, is that it is a common trope: Medieval Christians (and Christians both before and after) taught the earth was flat.  Though I have not looked into it myself, supposedly there are even some groups of "Flat-earthers" which still exist (I would google it, but not sure I quite have the stomach for it).

"Why did battle rage over this issue?" asks historian Lesley B. Cormack.  "Because a belief in flat earth was equated with willful ignorance, while an understanding of the spherical earth was seen as a measure of modernity."  As it was utilized by those like William Draper, then, a flat-earth belief became synecdoche for the entire apparatus of ignorance and scientific backwardness that was the Catholic church.  Indeed, much like the epithet "Medieval" (about which there will be an upcoming post), "Flat-earther" is received happily as a sobriquet by no one; except maybe actual Flat-earthers.

The trouble is that Columbus could not have "discovered" the earth was round, because this was already known.  For quite some time.  By quite a lot of folks.  Cormack notes, for example "that every major Greek geographical thinker, including Aristotle, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy, based his geographical and astronomical work on the theory that the earth was a sphere."

They were not alone.

Augustine (354-430), Jerome (d. 420), Ambrose (d. 420), all believed in a spherical earth.  Aquinas (d. 1274) followed Aristotle's proof on sphericity by observing that the changing astronomical position of the constellations as one moved about the earth's surface demanded the earth be spherical.  Cormack lists a cadre of others: Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Michael Scot (note: I spent ten minutes thinking of an Office joke to insert here; I gave up) Jean de Sacrobosco, Pierre d'Ailly, Dante, Chaucer, and on and on.

Amusing indeed is Cormack's noting that it was Columbus' opponents belief in a spherical earth which they used against the viability of his journey, not the presupposition of the earth's flatness.  It was their firm belief in a spherical earth that led them to believe the planet was far, far larger than Columbus was anticipating, and that circumnavigation would simply take too long.

Now, that being said, what of scripture?  Scripture, as we mentioned, often talks about thinks like "The four corners of the earth" (e.g. Is. 11:12; Rev. 7:1) or "the ends of the earth" (Job 38:13; Jeremiah 16:19; Daniel 4:11).  Or in the New Testament, in a particularly famous scene, Christ goes hiking with the Devil "upon an extremely high mountain," where Satan shows Christ all of the kingdoms of the earth--it being possible to do this, of course, only on a flat earth (but still, hopefully one of them brought binoculars).  Here the issue comes down to the fact that perhaps the authors and editors of scripture did in fact think of the earth as flat.  If this is indeed so I have to say: so what? I am of the opinion, following Wheaton Old Testament scholar John Walton (which I will devote at least one or two upcoming posts about) that the Biblical authors share the common "scientific" presuppositions of their day, or, putting it another way: there are no "new" scientific revelations in scripture that could would not have had at least some precedent in the Ancient Near-Eastern context at large.

Though we will go into more detail about Walton's views later, for now it suffices to say that these Ancient Near East "scientific" (or we would say, mytho-cosmological) beliefs merely served as vehicles for the message of YHWH election of Israel and His covenant faithfulness.  On occasion the message itself would reorient and reorganize some of the "science" (for example: specifically relegating the creation of the stars to the fourth day instead of the first, and taking great pains to note that far from gods themselves with power and influence over human affairs, they are just the true God's lightbulbs).  Yet in taking the spiritual, metaphysical, socio-political messages seriously, we are hardly required to just take the prima-facie "science" at face value.  Just as, for example, many might have actually held an anthropology where the heart was indeed the seat of the emotions, today when we say "Love the Lord your God with all your heart," we are not thereby required to commit our anatomy textbooks to the flame.

And in fact, who among us doesn't use the heart as the go-to image for the seat of the emotions?  Much like the Greek word for compassion splanka (which literally means something like "liver" or "innards") the visceral nature conjured by speaking of the heart evokes a poetic and aesthetic response that scientific literalism would not.  It, in George Steiner's description, "presses words into the service of touch."  And here, precisely, I think we reach an important point: What type of text are we reading when we read scripture?  Take careful notice of this.  This type of phenomenological and poetic language is a frequent device in scripture, which leads one immediately to note, without much fear of being wrong, that when we read these terms within the parameters of what we today consider scientific description, we are wrenching the text to become something it was never meant to be.  It is difficult to deny the power contained in the image "the ends of the earth," or "the four corners of the earth."  These terms are still used today.  Much as when I was enamored with waters roaring over some far edge, these images evoke awe.  And if one bothers to look at the contexts, this is exactly what they were meant to do.

To utilize these texts as proof of a flat earth is to contort the text beyond recogition; a very real example of a prior cause looking for specific complaint.

However, in a sense this is asking the wrong question, or approaching the text in the wrong way.