Materialist myths: David Warren on anti-Christian rubbish taught in science classes

What I find really helpful about the Ottawa Citizen's David Warren is the historical context he kindly provides. We are so often a-swamp in materialist nonsense. For example, the idea that the culture of Christian Europe promoted the idea that the Earth is flat. I've blogged on this before, here, here, and here, (and this last is David again).

Still, David says it so much better:

One of the constants in the long clash between Scientism & Christianity has been the repetition & elaboration by the Scienticists of quite incredible myths & lies, that are still used in our public schools, media, &c, to mock & slander Christians & Christianity. I know about the potency of these myths & lies, for I myself was taught many of them, in school, saw them endlessly repeated in the press, heard them repeated by all liberal adults, & actually believed several of them until I came to riper years, & began to realize that public atheism requires the defence of a "bodyguard of lies." (And you will find them all repeated uncritically in Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, & all the current bestselling atheist tracts.)

Many of the specific lies descend from old Protestant broadsides against Catholics -- for instance, the lie that the mediaeval scholastics debated how many angels on the head of a pin, lurid & untruthful accounts of proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition, various folk myths about what Catholics do in Mass, the misrepresentation of the trial of Galileo, &c. All except this last were products of virulent anti-Catholic pamphleteering, in the 17th century. (The Galileo myth was invented later, for in the 17th-C the Protestants themselves were opposing the heliocentric theory, & often trying to suppress it as a popish "heresy" -- on grounds that the people propagating it were all Catholics & often monks & were well-received in the Vatican.)

But while Scientism has taken aboard all the old Protestant smears, & turned them into smears against Christians in general, it has also been industriously manufacturing its own myths, lies, & vitriolic sneers, from the philosophes of the Enlightenment, forward. (The Darwinists of the 19th century were even more inventive, in their determination to associate Christian belief with idiocy.)

Among the most universally taught & least subtle, lies taught to this day, is that Christians throughout the Middle Ages believed the world was flat; & that the Church taught this, & defended it as religious doctrine against Copernicus, Kepler, & Galileo. Yet the Church never taught the earth was flat, nor did any educated person, Christian or otherwise, ever believe it.

Indeed, the old Ptolemaic system -- universally accepted by intelligent Christians, Heretics, Atheists, Jews, Muslims, & even Hindus until the age of Copernicus -- was very clear on the fact that the earth was a sphere.

The American scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote an excellent history of the foundation & propagation of the "flat earth myth" in the 19th century, of which I've just become aware. (His earlier series of books on the historical development of doctrine & beliefs about the monotheist personification of the Devil may be familiar to some of you.) Russell is pedestrian in the best sense: a very thorough scholar who walks patiently through a broad range of evidence, insists on consulting original sources, & writes very clearly.

Here, anyway, is his own summary of his findings in his book, Inventing the Flat Earth (1991).

Materialist myths: The flat earth myth ... another go-round

In his review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion last January, Nobelist Steven Weinberg opines,

In the early days of Christianity, the Church Fathers Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria rejected the knowledge, common since the time of Plato, that the Earth is a sphere. They insisted on the literal truth of the Bible, and from Genesis to Revelation verses could be interpreted to mean that the Earth is flat. But the evidence for a spherical Earth was overwhelming to anyone who had seen a ship's hull disappear below the horizon while its masts were still visible, and in the end the flat Earth did not seem worth a fight. By the high Middle Ages, the spherical Earth was accepted by educated Christians.

Now THERE’s a wheeze that never finally croaks. A friend wrote to wonder why Weinberg had not received the Nobel Prize for Literature (fiction) rather than Physics, drawing my attention to a flyer distributed during Ohio school board hearings in 2002, which reads in part,

THE FLAT EARTH MYTH

... the story is false. It began as fiction, and it was elevated to a historical claim by late-19th century Darwinists who used it as a weapon to ridicule Christians.

The spherical shape of the earth was known to the ancient Greeks, who even made some decent estimates of its circumference. Christian theologians likewise knew that the earth was a sphere. The only two who are known to have advocated a flat earth were a 4th-century heretic, Lactantius, and an obscure 6th-century writer, Cosmas Indicopleustes.

A major promulgator of the flat earth myth was the 19th-century American writer Washington Irving. In his fictional History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), Irving wrote that flat-earth churchmen had opposed Columbus on the grounds that he would fall off the edge of the earth if he tried to sail across the Atlantic. In actuality, Columbus had been opposed by people who not only knew the earth was a sphere, but also had a pretty good idea of how big it was - but who knew nothing of the Americas and thus thought a voyage to the Far East would take too long and cost too much.

The flat earth remained clearly in the realm of fiction until after Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859. Two of Darwin's followers then elevated it to a historical claim in books defending Darwinism and attacking Christianity: John Draper's The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).

************
For an objective and very readable account of the flat earth myth, see Jeffrey Burton Russell (Professor of History, University of California at Santa Barbara), Inventing the Flat Earth (New York: Praeger, 1991).

Weinberg’s review is worth reading for a number of reasons, not least for Weinberg’s enthusiastic endorsement of evolutionary psychology as devastating to religious belief,

It became plausible that our love for our mates and children, and, according to the work of modern evolutionary biologists, even more abstract moral principles, such as loyalty, charity and honesty, have an origin in evolution, rather than in a divinely created soul.

Worth keeping in mind when someone reassures you that no reputable scientist really believes in concepts like the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution. The trouble is, some can’t help it. They don’t HAVE anything better to believe in.

Here and here cosmology is more on older cosmologies.

Who believed in the flat earth? - Nobody?

In response to my post about myths about science and religion, one kind reader asked about older worldviews. I can't post more than this now but, thanks to another kind reader, I have a link to the medieval cosmos, which looked like the illustration linked here.

It was not flat. It could not be flat. It only makes sense as a series of concentric spheres, between which 3-D travel was possible. Any time someone tells you that people back then thought the Earth was flat, you can politely but safely write that person off as an ignoramus.

Be warned: The modern ignoramus is more virulent and pernicious than the older kind, because he is apt to be a materialist or a Darwinist of some sort - so he must be right, and to heck with facts.