Boro Nut

True. It's even more interesting that one of the evidences he uses is that it is ludicrous to suppose that men (who all descended from Adam) could possibly travel all the way to the other side of the world. Nice to know he doesn't support the claim that animals could have pulled the trick off after leaving Noah's Ark even later. My kind of saint.

Boro Nut

aa5874

But strange, you missed the statement from the bishop of Gabala, "The earth is flat...

You completely ignore information that does not support your position.

lee_merrill

And I quote, "so some categorical repression of science by the church--this conclusion is incorrect." The goalposts have shifted.

GenesisNemesis

Yeah, I guess you could call them Christian Scientists! :Cheeky:

GenesisNemesis

We all know. Is this anything new?

SAWells

No-one with any degree of knowledge about the natural world has thought the earth was flat for about two millenia now. Consider that the standard Latin phrase for the whole world was orbis terrarum, the sphere of the lands. I strongly recommend reading Dante's Divine Comedy for an excellent presentation of Ptolemaic astronomy as per the Catholic church. In it, the poet descends into the depths of the earth- Satan occupies the exact centre of the planet, amusingly enough- and reemerges in the Antipodes at a point diametrically opposite to Jerusalem. He notes, by the way, that the direction of gravity changes during the process, being always directed towards the centre of the sphere.

Apparently a big motivator for the propagation of the myth of the medieval flat earth was the idea of a clash between Columbus, claiming that the earth is round and he can get to Cathay by sailing west, and the church arguing that the earth is flat. In this presentation Columbus is supposed to be a bold explorer challenging the orthodoxy etc. etc. This, however, is completely fictional. There was in fact a clash between Columbus, who used some rather dubious astronomical figures to argue that the sphere of the earth is small enough that he could sail to Cathay, and a lot of people arguing correctly that the distance was far too great. It's worth noting that of course Columbus didn't get to Cathay because he was wrong about the size of the earth, he just got lucky that there was a different continent in the way. Mind you, the Vikings had already found it quite some time previously, and Columbus was a genocidal maniac, but this is getting complicated enough already...

lee_merrill

Now cut that out! :Cheeky:

God Fearing Atheist

No one "missed" or "ignored" anything, big guy. Severian was a flat-earther. So were Lactantius and Cosmas, and probably Theodore of Mopsuestia and Diodore of Tarsus.

But that wasn't at issue in my post, was it? No, my post was about you oddly invoking a quote from Augustine that not only failed to support your contention, but flatly (excuse the pun) contradicted it.

aa5874

You missed the point completely. St. Augustine was a 'flat earther'.

God Fearing Atheist

But Augustine was not a flat earther, big guy. The quote you posted was explicitly about the existence of people on the other side of the (spherical) earth. But wait, I already pointed that out in post 39.

I'm beginning to understand why so many people have placed you on ignore.