Bede

Ryan,

Flat Earth: the Magellan quote is pure fantasy. In fact, there is even a story of someone circumnavigating the earth from the 14th century by the Englishman John Mandeville so it was known to be possible. John's book assumes that the earth is round, over 20,000 miles in circumference and even explains time zones. It was a popular and not scholarly book read by the literate middle classes. He doesn't even mention that people might think the earth flat.

Arabs: They didn't either. All the Arab science and philosophy such as from Averroes, Avicenna, Razes and even al-Ghazadi (a religious conservative) all follow Aristotle's model of a geocentric cosmology with a round earth. There is no evidence that Islam ever tried to enforce another model although individual Moslems might have.

The flat earth is an example of just how successful a myth can be if it confirms our prejudices. The myth that Jesus never existed is similar.

Yours

Bede

<a href="http://www.bede.org.uk" target="_blank">Bede's Library - faith and reason</a>

Panta Pei

"The flat earth is an example of just how successful a myth can be if it confirms our prejudices. The myth that Jesus never existed is similar."

Yeah, I agree with Bede, and Zeus did so impregnate a human who bore his son Hercules.

Stop MOCKING us!

By Alcmene's true mortal love,

Panta Pei

RyanS2

Thanks for the information Bede. I was going to do a section on commonly taught historical myths, e.g. the Boston Tea party wasn't caused by British taxation of tea, the British dropped the tea tarrif, which caused the Dutch tea smuggling business to go out. They caused the Boston Tea party so they could keep making profits. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation didn't free any slaves, he did it to prevent interference from foreign countries which relied heavily upon southern trade. They hated slavery and if they thought the war centered solely on slavery, they wouldn't join. Hence the reason it took so long for blacks to gain equal rights even after the Civil War, Lincoln's original plan, which he proposed twice, was to ship the Africans back to Africa. The flat-Earth belief is another one of them I wanted to put up there, but was curious about those two parts.

Toto

One does not follow from another. You might as well say - the myth that Jesus did exist is similar. In fact, the ease with which myth appears should be an argument against the validity of most ancient tales.

Do you have a cite showing that the Magellan quote is fake? It looks unreliable, and it seems to come from Robert Ingersoll, who I would guess to be speaking metaphorically and not recording literal history (you can almost hear him pausing for the audience to laugh):

"The Discovery of America," from Orthodoxy (1884)

RyanS2

Ahh... the source comes through. Thanks Toto. That quote sounds very familiar to Aristotle, who assumed that the Earth was a sphere based upon the fact that the moon's shadow must be caused by Earth blocking the Sun, and thus, if the shadow is circular, the Earth must be circular. That sounds almost identical to what Ingersoll's quote is suggesting.

I also did a check and apparently an early Muslim did a very good estimate on the circumference of the Earth using the round-Earth model, so Bede is right in that respect as well. That doesn't have anything to do with the Christ-myth case though, and connecting the two is just a false analogy.

[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: RyanS2 ]</p>

Toto

I emailed Cliff Walker who runs the <a href="http://www.positiveatheism.org" target="_blank">Positive Atheism</a> site about the quotation. (I found the Ingersoll passage on his site, along with the quote ascribed to Magellan.)

He has evidently heard this charge before, and said that he had not seen any firm evidence that the quote ascribed to Magellan was made up by Ingersoll, and didn't agree that it was so obvious that Ingersoll was speaking rhetorically. He said he would correct his site if he saw firm evidence that it was made up - so is there any smoking gun? I'm 95% sure the quote is false, but this is not enough for Cliff.

edited for spelling

[ June 06, 2002: Message edited by: Toto ]</p>

Vorkosigan

Great bloodstained merciless gods! That site is wonderful. I hope Kirby gets some academic and popular recognition for what is clearly one of the best sites on the Internet.

Vorkosigan

One of the last sane

Steven Carr said

We also have a grave for Robin Hood, although it is further from the room where he allegedly died than a dying man could probably shoot an arrow, supposedly how his gravesite was chosen.

There is or was a grave for Little John too, and it was opened a while back and found to contain the bones of a very tall man.

Steven Carr

Will fawning admiration do?

Certainly Peter Kirby is an impressive young man.

Tharmas

Bede, I think you greatly overstate you case here. Not only does Mandeville NOT assume that his readers already accept that the world is round, but on the contrary he goes to great lengths to prove it to them.

He references those ancients who thought the world was round – he believes they underestimated its size and for his part rather over estimates it – but he is confirming the ancient opinion rather than assuming that everybody already knows this; else why spend nearly 2000 words explaining the concept?

For example he explains at great length that people on the other side of the world don’t fall off and in fact believe that they are the ones “on top.”

He is aware that naturally this means it is dark on one side while light on the other but as for an explanation of “time zones” I believe you are reading your modern understanding back into the text in a rather large way.

He believes it is possible to circumnavigate the globe but not practical because of problems with navigation.

His sense of geography is highly spiritual and based on assumed symmetries. That is he assumes an Antarctic star that exactly corresponds to Polaris (and assumes both must be “fixed”), and assures us that Jerusalem is the “highest” point on the globe, in the “center” or at the “top,” balanced by the two “lowest” points, England and India (insofar as “Prester John’s Kingdom of Ind” means India). It is possible that he is here somehow thinking of the equator and the poles but as I said his sense of geography is based on a spiritual understanding rather than on maps and it’s fair to say that at this point in his analysis he has become quite confused!

What we find here is really very fascinating from the point of view of the history of ideas. I believe you are correct in pointing out that the simplistic idea that “people used to think the world was flat” is exactly that, simplistic. But the reality is not the opposite, that everyone always understood the world was a globe.

In fact the reality has always been that people use the idea or frame of reference that they need to use in order to accomplish the task at hand.

(Incidentally ever since I read Kuhn’s book back when it first came out I believe that single statement sums it up, and it seems to be the idea that’s most overlooked by both sides in the debate – but I digress...)

I repeat: people use the idea or frame of reference that they need to use in order to accomplish the task at hand.

For one example today we STILL use the flat earth concept if that’s all we need. For example when we draw the floor plan for a building we don’t normally take the earth’s curvature into account in our projections. Why not? Because it would make far less that a millimeter’s difference at any point and we have more give than that in any connection. The same principle applies when we create a street map.

Another example would be how the popular imagination believes Einstein proved Newton “wrong.” Yet when they put a man on the moon they didn’t calculate the trajectory using anything else but Newtonian mechanics (actually I don’t know that for a fact, but if it’s not true it would surprise the heck out of me!!).

In Mandeville’s day the idea of a round earth was understood by educated people, but generally as one of those wild academic “theories” (I use the word in its street sense) that you could think about on a winter’s eve when you didn’t have anything else to do, but which otherwise meant little. But Mandeville represents the very first stirrings of the maritime age. For the first time here is somebody traveling great distances across the globe, often by sea. Furthermore he has a reason to travel – the Crusades of course, but also the Spice Islands. He has the latest (Arabic) invention, his Astrolabe, which he uses to great effect. And all the sudden the roundness of the earth makes a difference. It’s vital to understand the shape of the earth if you want to grasp navigation over large distances. And these are exactly the questions that Mandeville is trying to answer. All of the sudden this “academic theory” becomes the reality of calculating how far from port you are and how far you have yet to go. Mandeville is saying “Hey, this isn’t a theory. This is reality, and I can prove it!”

This idea that people’s assumptions about reality can linger in society as long as they’re useful or on the other hand at least don’t get in the way may have wider application in this discussion. For example, the belief in the historicity of Christ is of great moment to the conservative Christian. It is of little consequence to the “traditional” historian, on the other hand, who is perhaps more concerned with the effects of Christianity and its believers. Traditional historians, in other words, have no professional interest in the historicity of Christ.

I myself was raised in a branch of Christianity that was rather liberal; the historicity of Christ was not a matter of our faith, so I used to find the question of mostly academic interest. These days, on the other hand, with conservative Christians becoming a political force in North America, these discussions have lost a good deal of their “academic” patina for me.

Thanks for reading this. The history of ideas is an area I very much enjoy following, and I did not know Sir John until you pointed him out. He’s a great read. Thanks much! I forget the legends of Prester John, now, so I’ll have to chase down that one...