Antipope Innocent II

I'm beginning to think this guy is a fundie plant designed to make we atheists look dumb. He accepts the "Jesus Myth" crap, he cites Freke and Gandy and he believes Christians burned down the Great Library? What next? Soon he'll be telling us the medieval Church taught the world was flat.

Antipope Innocent II

It's off topic for this thread, but can you quickly post anything at all to support the idea that the medieval Church taught the Earth was flat? I've got a whole shelf here of books on medieval science, cosmology and geography, and the learned gentlemen who wrote them seem to be unanimous that this idea is a Nineteenth Century myth. They are simply wrong?

angelo

You ever heard of the ''Flat Earth Society''? It exists today. The learned gentlemen you speak of were more than likely scientists. The clergy may have had different ideas. Remember, it was only recently that the Pope declared evolution as fact, with a proviso. It was God who caused the B/B and interfered at appropriate times in the evolution on the cosmos. Cheers.

cognac

The "flat earth" myth was a 19th century construction. This is shown in the book by J.B. Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, which Stephen Jay Gould covered in his Rock of Ages book on NOMA (non-overlapping magesteria), the principle of separation of science and religion.

Here's Gould on the subject (p 117):

The statement regarding evolution issued by the papacy was Humani Generis, which was dated 1950. Pope John Paul issued a statement in 1996 reaffirming this earlier acceptance of evolution, but going further. The difference between the statements was that Humani Generis accepted evolution as tentative, but John Paul's statement explicitly says that evolution can be accepted beyond reasonable doubt. (Ref: same Gould book, pp 70-82.)

Antipope Innocent II

Yes, and it was founded in the Twentieth Century. Which makes it about 500 years too late to be relevant to my question.


The learned gentlemen I speak of are historians of science in the ancient and medieval world. People like David c. Lindberg, author of The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (or via: amazon.co.uk), A. C. Crombie, author of The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo (or via: amazon.co.uk), Edward Grant, author of The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages:Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (or via: amazon.co.uk) and particularly Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (or via: amazon.co.uk). These leading historians of science, cosmology and geography in the Middle Ages don't only agree that the idea that the medieval Church taught the Earth was flat is a modern myth, but detail how this myth arose and give copious evidence that the idea the Earth was round was not questioned in the Middle Ages - by the Church or by anyone at all.

Then these historians have no inkling that they did and can finid no evidence that this was so. Neither can I, despite examining this point in detail for many years. You, on the other hand, made a bold assertion that "the medieval church taught just that. [Ha ha ha]". Your last response was where you were meant to have backed that assertion up with evidence, though you've failed to. Perhaps you'd like to do so now.

Over to you.

Alternatively, you could admit that you didn't actually know what you were talking about.

One or the other will do.

aa5874

I found a 'square-flat earth' theory from the 6th century by Cosmas in the 4th book of his writing "Christian Topography'.

There are sketches of the square-flat earth included with the writings.
And Cosmas wrote, ......"[b]ye suppose that there are men walking the earth over with their feet opposite the feet of other men."

See http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/awiesner/cosmas.html

Toto

If there is any more discussion of the Flat Earth, I will have to split this thread.

aa: the 6th century is not the middle ages.

angelo atheist: please just concede defeat. I think that someone once found one odd medieval churchman who thought that the earth must be flat based on Biblical verses, but the consensus was that the earth was round. Columbus did not have to persuade his financiers that he would not fall off the edge of the earth. He had to persuade them that the earth was not so big that he could get to China in a reasonable trip. (Actually his calculations of the size of the earth were wrong, but he happened to stumble on America.)

aa5874

The Middle Ages is from 500-1500 CE, see Wikipedia.

Toto

Cosmas Indicopleustes was an Alexandrian, and his thinking fits into the classical world.

Wikipedia identifies the middle ages as a division of European history, dating to the fall of the Western Roman Empire (not including Alexandria)

Antipope Innocent II

This digression has definitely gone on long enough, but as a final nail in the coffin of this "medieval flat earth" stuff: Cosmas Indicopleustes' weird cosmology had virtually zero impact on thinking in the East and absolutely zero in western Europe in the Middle Ages.

There are only three manuscripts of his work in Greek from the Byzantine Empire and he's only commented on by two other Greek writers - his contemporary John Philoponus and the Ninth Century Patriarch Photius of Constantinople. Both condemned his ideas as absurd and contrary to known science, to observation and to reason.

In medieval western Europe he wasn't condemned because he was totally unknown: there are no medieval manuscripts of Cosmas at all and no other sign that he was even known in the West. The first Latin translation of his work doesn't appear until 1706.

If anyone wants to continue to discuss this myth of the medieval Church and the "flat earth" I agree that a new thread would be appropriate. Otherwise I think it's now well and truly dead and buried.