Flat Earth

The persistence of myth continues to amaze, as I was reading John Maxwell's helpful book The Difference Maker.  Once again, as so often, the illustration of Columbus was used to demonstrate how hard it is to accept change:  Columbus believes the earth is round, everyone else says it's flat;  he sails off, proves his thesis and yet it still takes a generation for this to permeate culture.

In fact Pythagorian thinking had influenced opinion since the 7thC BC, to such an extent that by the time of Columbus practically no one thought the earth was flat, and in fact most intellectuals had never believed this.  Columbus' argument was not about the shape of the world but how big it was and the location of Asia (neither of which he was correct about).

As these authors say:

Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference"

What's more interesting is the hint I came across today that the myth of the flat earth had an element of deliberateness to it, during the 19thC when fostering the impression of an eternal conflict between science and religion was seen as advantageous.

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution.

Washinton Irving's highly fictionalised account of Colombus' conflict with priests sank into the popular psyche.

In 1834, a few years after the publication of Irving's book, Jean Antoine Letronne, a French academic of strong antireligious ideas, misrepresented the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a  flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers.   Then, In 1837, the English philosopher of science William Whewell first identified, in his History of the Inductive Sciences, two minimally significant characters named Lactantius (245-325, also mocked by Copernicus' in De revolutionibus of 1543, as someone who speaks quite childishly about the Earth's shape, when he mocks those who declared that the Earth has the form of a globe) and Cosmas Indicopleustes, who wrote his "Christian Topography" in 547-549. Whewell pointed to them as evidence of a medieval belief in a Flat Earth, and other historians quickly followed him, even though it was hard to find other examples

Hmmm.....
(quotations from Wikipedia article 'Myth of the Flat Earth')