lee_merrill

I love informative posts like this. Here's hoping A-I-II does more posting--if not ex cathedra...

aa5874

Antipope Innocent II, you have missed the point completely, the issue is the Medieval Church and its position with regards to the shape and movement of the earth. It has not been shown that any Pope, or Papal authorities during the Middle Ages articulated or wrote confirming the theories similar to those of Copernicus or Galileo and they never condemned the four-cornered-flat earth theory of Cosmas

In his book to Pope Paul III, Copernicus does not discuss any inhabitants of antipodes, there is nothing about migration, neither does Galileo mention any immigration or emmigration of people from the Garden of Eden.

Copernicus is clear to the Pope, the earth is not flat, it is not cylindrical, not bowl-shaped, not hollow, nor shaped like a cone. It must be likely that Copernicus knew that the Pope and Papal authorities thought the earth was flat or not entirely round.

It should be obvious to you that the Medieval Church could not comprehend an entirely round earth, this concept was just non-sense, anti-scriptural, and against nature. How will rain fall, which way will a fire burn, how will people walk on the opposite side? It just could not work.

Now if it was common knowledge that the earth was entirely round by the Papal authorities ,hundreds of years before, then Copernicus wasted his efforts, and there would have been no need to write to the Pope trying to convince him the earth was not flat.

lee_merrill

Yet the point was not missed completely, it was not missed at all (the issue being the shape, and not the movement) here is the Ethical Atheist that A-I-II mentioned:

So, you will perhaps need to discuss these points with the Ethical Atheist, and then get back to us?

Chili

The only reason why the earth is flat is because it is juxtaposed with the heavens in the singular, to say that it spans only one generation while the heavens are in the plural because they span many generations and up to One Thousand Years, actually, so we can be eternal in heaven as opposed to temporal on earth. The dome shape of the heavens is created by the diminishing recall we have over our very own multi-layered distant past.

One must keep in mind that the earth was (albeit a formless wasteland) when God juxtaposed heaven with earth to create the opposites needed to generate and regenerate.

Antipope Innocent II

Or he can discuss them with me, since I was one of the medievalists who pointed Ethical Atheist to most of the information he used on his site. And I'm an atheist, in case anyone thinks I have some agenda other than an accurate depiction of history as it was, not the cartoonish, prejudiced version.

Wrong. The issue is purely and wholly the shape of the Earth. Not it's movement. The point we are discussing here is (i) whether anyone in the Middle Ages argued for a flat earth and (ii) whether this argument was upheld as doctrine by the Catholic Church. The answer to both those questions is "NO". If you want to argue the answer is "Yes" then it's about time you produced some evidence. And no, that out of context quote from Copernicus which you've clearly misunderstood is not proof. Where are these medieval flat-earthers? Name them. Name one. Just one.

For about the third time: the shape of the Earth played no part in the dispute between those two scholars and the Church. Copernicus was NOT writing to convince the Pope that the Earth was round - both he and the Pope (and everyone else) knew that. He was writing to convince the Pope the Earth moved. That passage you quoted was a summary of how scholars knew the Earth was round before moving on to his argument about its movement.

Got it now?

Did you even read my last post? Cosmas' work was totally unknown in the West until the Eighteenth Century. Unknown. They didn't know it existed. Got it? So how could they condemn a work they didn't know existed and which, therefore, had no influence on anyone?

Because by the Sixteenth Century the debate about whether the Antipodes were inhabited was over and it was well-known that the Greeks had been wrong about the equator being impassable. That debate only makes sense if the Earth is understood to be round BTW.

Wrong. See above for the context of that passage. If you want to keep digging this hole for yourself go right ahead. But you might want to lean on your shovel and ask yourself why you're unable to actually show me any of these Sixteenth Century flat earth pronouncements. Scratch your head over that for a while and see what you come up with. Just about everyone else reading this thread worked out why quite some time ago.

So you say. Luckily, medieval scholars were actually a lot smarter and more sophisticated than your rather cartoonish grasp of medieval intellectual history gives them credit for. It will probably shock you to learn that they weren't Biblical literalists, for example, and were perfectly capable of reading flat-earth passages in the Bible as being figurative while happily accepting that the Earth was round.

lee_merrill

*Lee chuckles*

I would like to discuss with A-I-II, is there any issue you would like to disagree with me on? I am, for the record, an inerrantist theist ID-advocate evangelical, there ought to be a bone to pick in there somewhere!

Jehanne

If the shape of the earth was "not theology," why, then, was the position of the Earth "theology"? As was asked before, why was Galileo declared a heretic and not Cosmas?

Jehanne

Where's your evidence for this?

Antipope Innocent II

The Galileo case was as much about politics and science as as it was about theology. Yes, there were scientists opposed to him as well as theologians. And he had some clergy supporting him. But the theological implications of the Earth not actually being the centre of the Universe were significant.

Cosmas, on the other hand, was simply a incompetent amateur who made some assertions about the Earth that were wrong and which were recognised as being wrong. There were no theological implications to his error at all - he was just someone who shouldn't have tried his hand at cosmology.

He was declared to be wrong by the Orthodox Church. He wasn't declared anything by the Catholic Church because they didn't know the guy's writings on the subject even existed.

In Post #10 on the first page of this thread.

Jehanne

Because, assuming that if what you say is true (which, I really doubt) that Cosmas' work was only known in the East, in Byzantium, in Constantinople, such would have not protected him for a charge of heresy. If they had thought that he was wrong, the Byzantium church would have declared him to be a heretic or at least "in error," excommunicated him, and even put him to death. Papal power was something that evolved over time. Don't forget about the mutual excommunications in 1054, when the Bishop of Constantinople excommunicated the Bishop of Rome, and vice-a-versa, which led to the East-West Schism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East-West_Schism

You are implying that only the Western Church could condemn heresy, and this was most certainly not the case. Even if Cosmas was known only in the East, he was known to Emperor Justinian, who would have condemned him as a heretic, if he thought that he was teaching heresy or theological error.