Bede

Don,

You are fudging the point. Sagan was just wrong. Period. It wasn't a minority of theologians. There were none at all. Nor any popes.

Sven is right to say we can't know what uneducated people thought but whether they were Christians or not is irrelevant to that point. If they were Christians we can be sure that only the church provided much education and it was teaching the earth was a sphere.

B

Gooch's dad

I think Bede is mostly right, that it wasn't an "official doctrine of the church". It seems that more than one Christian theologian of the early middle ages held the flat-earth opinion, though:

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth

Clivedurdle

.Galileo's Heresy



Odd history

Anglican

Witht the exception of a handful of the early church fathers it was never a doctrine of the Christian church that the earth was flat.

The Christian church from quite an early period was the focus of learning in Europe and latervthe world, so it would of been known throughout the church that the world was round. It is certainly possible that some of the undeducated laeity held that the earth was flat however there is no evidence to suggest this view was widespread.

Anglican

btw the myth that people in the middle ages believed thta the earth was flat or that Columbus proved that it was round (which is a bit odd as h didn't even manage to get halfway around it) were purely 19th century conceits.

LeeBuhrul

I suspect some of the we would be the same now putting out "history books" showing humans coexisting with dinossaurs...

Jehanne

Geocentrism was an official dogma of the Church. And, to this day, so is the "dogma" of Adam & Eve (here it is from the "horse's mouth"):

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/P12HUMAN.HTM

In particular:

Of course, since Watson & Crick, the idea that the human race descended from two people has been shown to be clearly not true.

Regards,

Don

Jehanne

Catholic theology is contained in the "early church fathers" (at least from the perspective of the Medieval Church), which means that the "flat earth" was a valid, scriptural interpretation. The same would be true of Saint Augustine's opinion that condemned unbaptized infants to "hell fire" as opposed to the "natural happiness" embodied in Aquinas' teaching of Limbo. Both are valid theological opinions.

Regards,

Don

lpetrich

That "handful" are those whose writings have survived; it did not seem like they had been outnumbered by round-earthers back when they lived. Though their views were likely common, their views were never declared official church dogma, and round-earthers continued to advocate round-earthism without getting in trouble.

And by the later European Middle Ages, round-earthism was widely accepted by the educated, and Dante imagined that Hell was in the interior of a round Earth.

As to the Bible, it clearly teaches flat-earthism. Yes, where was that mountain where Jesus Christ could see "all the kingdoms of the world"?

Imagine trying to see at once:

Lisbon, Portugal (easternmost part of the Roman Empire)
Colombo, Sri Lanka (Buddhist monks had set up shop on that island)
Beijing, China (in the northeast)

One would have to be in outer space to do that.

Sven

Bede, do you have writings of every single theologian of this time, especially every single pope?
I have no problem to agree that a flat Earth was never a church doctrine and that most/almost all theologians knew that the Earth is a globe. But your claim above is simply ridiculous the way it's phrased. You have no way of knowing this to be true.

Is it? I think the question was if Christians ever believed that the Earth was flat? We can say with great confidence that the majority of them indeed did - because the majority was uneducated. Note that I don't blame the church on this.

You're right - but this is an irrelevant point.