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Flat Wrong

It’s Right in Front of Our Faces • Proceeding by Inquiry • Honest Seekers of Truth • This War of Twelve Centuries • This Preposterous Scheme • Man the Discoverer • A Quintessential Example • At Least Two and At Most Five • Always, Everywhere, and by All • Utter Ignorance of Scripture • Absolutely No Influence • Assailed with Citations from the Bible • I Don’t Know How to Get Rid of This Myth

It’s Right in Front of Our Faces

The Cleveland Cavaliers had the first pick in the 2011 National Basketball Association draft—and they used it to add highly rated youngster Kyrie Irving to their ranks. It turned out to be a smart move. Irving won Rookie of the Year in his first season, was an All-Star in his second, and was voted the best player in the All-Star game in his third. By season five, he had guided Cleveland to a championship—the city’s first in any major sport for more than half a century.

Basketball, though, is not the only thing that Irving has made the headlines for.

Recording an episode of the popular podcast Road Trippin’ with teammates Channing Frye and Richard Jefferson in early 2017, the celebrated athlete suddenly asked them “Do you believe the world is round?”¹

Frye and Jefferson chuckled, and confirmed that they did. Irving, however, pressed them further:

I think you need to do research on it. It’s right in front of our faces. I’m telling you it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us. . . . what I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round, but if you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move . . . can you really think of us rotating around the sun?²

Unsurprisingly, their conversation went viral—and the online reactions ranged from despair to puzzlement to delight. Kyrie Irving, sporting superstar, was genuinely arguing that the Earth is flat.

He is not the first to have done so.

Proceeding by Inquiry

Back in the 1830s, when Draper was starting his career and White was starting his life, Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816–1884) was busy doing some experiments. By carefully watching flags on barges as they traveled down the Old Bedford Canal in Cambridgeshire, England, he was going to prove that the Earth was a flat disc. Satisfied with his results, he published them (under the pseudonym “Parallax”) in Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe.

John Hampden, for one, was convinced—in fact, he was so sure of Parallax’s thesis that he put the equivalent of $75,000 of his family’s fortune on the line as a wager. Anyone who thought they could prove the Earth was curved, he said, was welcome to demonstrate it—with proper science, of course—to him and his associates. Such a person, he warned, had better have the money ready in advance—for they would fail.

His challenge was accepted by none other than Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913)—an impressively qualified fellow of the Royal Society, who is most famous nowadays for coming up with a well-developed evolution-by-natural-selection model several years before Darwin did.

Hampden and Wallace agreed to carry out the Bedford experiments again, in front of a neutral committee. This time, though, Wallace allowed for atmospheric refraction—a factor which Rowbotham hadn’t considered. The new, corrected result was both emphatic and decisive: the Earth was round after all. Rowbotham, presumably, would have been pleased with this new finding—for the word “zetetic” actually means “proceeding by inquiry.”

Hampden—the big loser in all this—was furious. Firstly, he complained about the outcome, suggesting that the observers were not neutral at all. When that didn’t work, he falsely claimed that he had gone bankrupt, and could not pay off the bet. That failed too. Descending deeper and deeper into the darkness, Hampden wrote a rather bone-chilling letter to Wallace’s poor wife:

Madam, if your infernal thief of a husband is brought home some day on a hurdle, with every bone in his head smashed to pulp, you will know the reason. Do you tell him from me he is a lying infernal thief, and as sure as his name is Wallace he never dies in his bed. You must be a miserable wretch to be obliged to live with a convicted felon. Do not think or let him think I have done with him.³

There is no happy ending to this story. Hampden was imprisoned; Wallace got no money.

And yet, despite Rowbotham/Parallax being so soundly proved wrong, his theories were never quite killed off. The Universal Zetetic Society was set up by his supporters in 1901 after his death, and eventually morphed into the International Flat Earth Research Society in 1956. This, in turn, was rebranded The Flat Earth Society, which went online in 2004, and is positively thriving—more than 150 years after Wallace seemed to have got rid of the only reason for its existence.

Today, according to pollsters YouGov, only two in three Americans aged between 18 and 24 are convinced the Earth is round.⁴ Celebrities such as rapper B.o.B. and controversial TV star Tina Tequila have added their skeptical voices to that of Irving’s. The Flat Earth Society’s website receives one hundred thousand visits a month. The whole thing is really taking off.

But why? And how? Are we missing something here?

Honest Seekers of Truth

The Flat Earth Society offers its own set of answers to the most commonly asked questions about their ideas. Here are some highlights from their web page:

What is gravity? Gravity as a theory is false. Objects simply fall.

What about pictures from space? There are a plethora of resources available that show us we can’t trust the photographic evidence from organizations such as NASA.

What does the map of the Earth look like then? As evidenced by the logo of the United Nations the Earth is a round disk of indefinite dimensions.⁵

This is not only an online movement, however—flat-earthers have begun getting together in real life as well. Meetings have been surprisingly well attended, as reporter Mack Lamoureux discovered:

“I guarantee that you know flat earthers right now, but they’re never going to tell you because they’re afraid of being ostracized,” Sargent [a prominent figure in the movement] says to me later that evening . . . it’s hard not to believe him. If a flat Earth conference in Edmonton, Alberta, [Canada] of all places, can pull in over 200 people at 200 bucks a pop well. . . . I think we may be underestimating the size of the movement.⁶

It just seems bizarre: how has a fringe organization debunked in the nineteenth century suddenly re-emerged to gain such a following? Well, one possible reason is hinted at by YouGov themselves: when they published their survey as an article, they gave it the title “Most Flat Earthers Consider Themselves Very Religious.”

Hmm.

In fact, their data was damning on that particular front, for more than half of those who believed in the flat Earth called themselves “very religious.” Those who considered the Earth to be a globe were far less likely—at only 20%—to fall into that category.⁷

Meanwhile, if we hop back to that official Flat Earth FAQ:

Is the Flat Earth connected to any religion? . . . we have no official connection with any established religions. However, it would be impossible to deny the strong historical ties with Christianity by past Presidents of the Society.⁸

This is starting to look rather embarrassing for those of a Christian persuasion. Christine Garwood, who has written extensively on the history of this topic, does not offer much respite—she says that both John Hampden and Samuel Rowbotham saw their geographical views as deeply rooted in their faith: “Like Parallax, [Hampden] was competing for cultural authority . . . his alternative Bible science was the ‘true’ science, zetetics were the honest seekers of truth.”⁹

It seems, therefore, that there is an undeniable relationship between Christianity and the refusal to accept that we live on a globe. Is this not a perfect example, then, of how religion is a natural enemy of science? Is this not precisely the point that Spencer, and Tyndall, and Comte were making in our previous chapter—that dogma closes our minds, and ignores all the evidence?

Well, if flat-earthery is indeed a perfect example of the conflict thesis, then we should expect to find it mentioned by Draper and White, should we not? So, did our two men and their two books engage in any of these God-versus-science arguments about the shape of the planet we live on?

Let’s have a look and see.

This War of Twelve Centuries

It is time, now, to begin our first real deep dive into the twin texts that fooled the world. As we descend further and further, we will hopefully develop a real sense of the mood and style of each volume, as well as that of each writer. We shall set off, in this first instance, with Andrew Dickson White’s gigantic work, Warfare.

White tended to stick to a specific pattern as he addressed one lengthy topic after another. Each discussion begins with a story of what humanity used to believe in its hopelessly naïve starting state, before showing how science brings us closer to the truth. Along the way, dogmatic religion (usually in the form of one traditional church or another) hovers about as a constant menace: it niggles at, or stalls, or even manages to seriously wound the scientific forces of progress. In the end, however, White makes it clear which side is destined to win out—and it isn’t conservative Christianity.

Here we go, then, starting out on Warfare’s epic of the flat Earth:

Among various rude tribes we find survivals of a primitive idea that the earth is a flat table or disk, ceiled, domed, or canopied by the sky, and that the sky rests upon the mountains as pillars. Such a belief is entirely natural; it conforms to the appearance of things.¹⁰

Having ticked that first box, White moves on toward scientific hope:

But, as civilization was developed, there were evolved, especially among the Greeks, ideas of the earth’s sphericity. The Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle especially cherished them.¹¹

and then he introduces the bad guys:

A few of the larger-minded fathers of the Church, influenced possibly by Pythagorean traditions, but certainly by Aristotle and Plato, were willing to accept this view, but the majority of them took fright at once. To them it seemed fraught with dangers to Scripture.¹²

White goes on to name a host of prominent Christian thinkers who stood firm against the onslaught of science, holding faithfully on to their flat Earth—including this interesting character:

Lactantius referred to the ideas of those studying astronomy as “bad and senseless,” and opposed the doctrine of the earth’s sphericity both from Scripture and reason.¹³

and this one:

According to Cosmas, the earth is a parallelogram, flat, and surrounded by four seas. It is four hundred days’ journey long and two hundred broad. At the outer edges of these four seas arise massive walls closing in the whole structure. . . . The whole of this theologico-scientific structure was built most carefully and, as was then thought, most scripturally.¹⁴

Lanctantius and Cosmas, White explains, had combined to give the Church’s final word on the matter—and they had done so before the end of the sixth century. Drawing on all the relevant Bible passages, they had comprehensively described God’s world, and told pious Christians what they were to believe. These Christians, White says, were both impressed and grateful:

Some of the foremost men in the Church devoted themselves to buttressing [the model] with new texts and throwing about it new outworks of theological reasoning; the great body of the faithful considered it a direct gift from the Almighty.

[Cosmas’s plan] was accepted by the universal Church as a vast contribution to thought; for several centuries it was the orthodox doctrine, and various leaders in theology devoted themselves to developing and supplementing it.¹⁵

Then, having established the foolishness of “orthodox doctrine,” White encourages his readers not to worry—for science surely forces its way to the surface, even when theology has tried its best to hold it down:

But the ancient germ of scientific truth in geography—the idea of the earth’s sphericity—still lived. Although the great majority of the early fathers of the Church, and especially Lactantius, had sought to crush it beneath the utterances attributed to Isaiah, David, and St. Paul, the better opinion of Eudoxus and Aristotle could not be forgotten . . . the sacred theory struggled long and vigorously but in vain. Eminent authorities in later ages, like Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Vincent of Beauvais, felt obliged to accept the doctrine of the earth’s sphericity, and as we approach the modern period we find its truth acknowledged by the vast majority of thinking men.¹⁶

Christianity, Warfare trumpets, was dragged kicking and screaming into modernity by the sheer power of “scientific truth”—entirely against its sacred will. Reluctantly, its biggest names bowed the knee under the combined weight of evidence and reason—for their Bibles were simply not strong enough to support them anymore.

The final death knell of the old Scriptural view was sounded when Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) defied the warnings of the Church to sail over to the West Indies—and, when Ferdinand Magellan’s (1480–1521) later expedition went right around the globe, even the most pious flat-earthers had to finally give up:

The warfare of Columbus the world knows well . . . how sundry wise men of Spain confronted him with the usual quotations from the Psalms, from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine; how, even after he was triumphant, and after his voyage had greatly strengthened the theory of the earth’s sphericity . . . the Church by its highest authority solemnly stumbled and persisted in going astray. . . . But in 1519 science gains a crushing victory. Magellan makes his famous voyage. He proves the earth to be round.¹⁷

Surely now the battle is over—is it not? No, White says, not quite: “Yet even this does not end the war. Many conscientious men oppose the doctrine for two hundred years longer.”¹⁸ But it is too late for these faithful few—science will overpower them:

Then the French astronomers make their measurements of degrees in equatorial and polar regions, and add to their proofs that of the lengthened pendulum. When this was done, when the deductions of science were seen to be established by the simple test of measurement, beautifully and perfectly, and when a long line of trustworthy explorers, including devoted missionaries, had sent home accounts of the antipodes, then, and then only, this war of twelve centuries ended.¹⁹

His tale told, White sums up his analysis:

Such was the main result of this long war; but there were other results not so fortunate. The efforts of Eusebius, Basil, and Lactantius to deaden scientific thought; the efforts of Augustine to combat it; the efforts of Cosmas to crush it by dogmatism; the efforts of Boniface and Zachary to crush it by force, conscientious as they all were, had resulted simply in impressing upon many leading minds the conviction that science and religion are enemies.²⁰

The point is abundantly clear: dogmatic Christianity, with its naïve reliance on the Bible and stubborn opposition to science, had totally messed up. Science, with its clarity of thought and willingness to follow the actual evidence, had triumphed. White was teaching the world a valuable lesson.

Such were the flat-earth thoughts of Warfare—did Conflict concur?

This Preposterous Scheme

Draper’s text may well have been much shorter and snappier than White’s, but he still found plenty of room to talk about the shape of the Earth. In fact, his story arc is remarkably similar to his conflict thesis colleague’s—and so he, too, begins with early man:

An uncritical observation of the aspect of Nature persuades us that the earth is an extended level surface which sustains the dome of the sky . . . he seems justified in concluding that every thing has been created for his use—the sun for the purpose of giving him light by day, the moon and stars by night.²¹

The Greeks, though, were smarter than this, and came up with pretty clever scientific arguments for a round earth, says Draper—and then he moves on to a certain Christian thinker:

Lactantius, referring to the heretical doctrine of the globular form of the earth, remarks: “Is it possible that men can be so absurd as to believe that the crops and the trees on the other side of the earth hang downward, and that men have their feet higher than their heads? If you ask them how they defend these monstrosities, how things do not fall away from the earth on that side, they reply that the nature of things is such that heavy bodies tend toward the centre. . . . I am really at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their folly, and defend one absurd opinion by another.”²²

And, having referenced Lactantius, Draper heads dutifully on to Cosmas:

Perhaps, however, I may quote from Cosmas Indicopleustes the views that were entertained in the sixth century. He wrote a work entitled “Christian Topography”, the chief intent of which was to confute the heretical opinion of the globular form of the earth. . . . He affirms that, according to the true orthodox system of geography, the earth is a quadrangular plane . . . that it is inclosed by mountains, on which the sky rests; that one on the north side, huger than the others, by intercepting the rays of the sun, produces night.²³

The whole thing is both ridiculous and mildly depressing to our chemist: “Was it for this preposterous scheme–this product of ignorance and audacity–that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up?”²⁴ Still charting the same course as White, Draper duly arrives at Columbus:

Among his friends he numbered Toscanelli, a Florentine, who had turned his attention to astronomy, and had become a strong advocate of the globular form. In Genoa itself Columbus met with but little encouragement. He then spent many years in trying to interest different princes in his proposed attempt. Its irreligious tendency was pointed out by the Spanish ecclesiastics, and condemned by the Council of Salamanca; its orthodoxy was confuted from the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophecies, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the writings of the Fathers—St. Chrystostom, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, St. Basil, St. Ambrose.

and then at Magellan, whose ship:

had accomplished the greatest achievement in the history of the human race. She had circumnavigated the earth. The San Vittoria, sailing westward, had come back to her starting-point. Henceforth the theological doctrine of the flatness of the earth was irretrievably overthrown.²⁵

And there we have it—the same tale, told by two eminent authorities, in two bestselling books. Bible-thumping theologians, said White, had “arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years.” Draper’s synopsis put it even more succinctly:

Scriptural view of the world: the earth a flat surface . . .

Scientific view: the earth a globe.

Point made.

Man the Discoverer

Such was the force of Draper’s and White’s flat-earth account that it soon became the standard storyline, the definitive discussion, the normal narrative. When the next generation or two of historians or commentators wrote on the topic, they simply repeated or embellished the Conflict–Warfare account as they saw fit. This often applied even to the most highly respected and best qualified of writers—including Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004).

Boorstin enjoyed twelve fine years as the librarian of the US Congress. He was a prolific author, penning more than twenty historical works, including The Americans: The Democratic Experience—for which he won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. A big-hitter on the intellectual stage, he was awarded honorary degrees by universities from all over the world. In short, he was considered to be a man who knew what he was talking about.

One of his most popular titles, The Discoverers, was published in 1984. We get our first clue that the issue of a flat Earth might feature as early as the introduction: “My hero is Man the Discoverer. The world we now view from the literate West . . . had to be opened to us by countless Columbuses.”²⁶ And, when the seemingly inevitable comes, there is a familiar name attached to it. Chapter Fourteen—"A Flat Earth Returns”—begins like this: “ ‘Can anyone be so foolish,’ asked the revered Lactantius, ‘the Christian Cicero,’ whom Constantine chose to tutor his son, ‘as to believe that there are men whose feet are higher than their heads . . . ?”²⁷

From here, Boorstin goes on, carefully tracing the footsteps of the two men who wrote a century before him:

To avoid heretical possibilities, faithful Christians preferred to believe that there could be no Antipodes, or even, if necessary, that the earth was no sphere. Saint Augustine, too, was explicit and dogmatic, and his immense authority, compounded with that of Isidore, the Venerable Bede, Saint Boniface, and others, warned away rash spirits. The ancient Greek and Roman geographers had not been troubled by such matters.²⁸

“Antipodes,” by the way, were hypothesized people who lived below the equator. Their existence was hotly debated among thinkers of all persuasions, Christian or not—indeed, it resembled the modern debate about extraterrestrials. While this argument was a separate one from the shape of the planet itself, the two were clearly related, and were often talked about alongside one another. Still, getting back to Boorstin’s book, we soon happen across another recognizable character:

It was a fanatical recent convert, Cosmas of Alexandria, who provided a full-fledged Topographia Christiana, which lasted these many centuries to the dismay and embarrassment of modern Christians. . . . In his very first book he destroyed the abominable heresy of the sphericity of the earth. Then he expounded his own system, supported, of course, from Scripture.²⁹

Eventually, Columbus came along and sorted the whole mess out. The Greeks, it was discovered, had been right all along—and, crucially, they had been right without the aid of the Bible.

A Quintessential Example

Boorstin is not the only more modern thinker to follow Draper and White. Their story shows up all over the place as a useful teaching tool—one which calls us to trust science, and not religion, when it comes to uncovering the truth about our world. Here, for instance, is Astronomy by John Fix—a much-used college textbook, which is now in its sixth edition:

Part of the reason for the loss of Greek astronomical knowledge can be attributed to the antagonism of the early Christian church to many of the features of Greek astronomy. Many church leaders thought that ideas such as the sphericity of the Earth contradicted descriptions of the universe found in the Scriptures. Rather than accept the spherical shape of the Earth and the celestial sphere, some Christian scholars such as Lactantius and Kosmas argued that the Sun, after sunset, travelled around the horizon toward the north and then east to rise again in the morning.³⁰

Any number of alternative volumes could have been chosen to make this same point; the Conflict and Warfare version of events is pretty much everywhere. Historian Edward Grant, a distinguished medievalist, confirms as much:

The flat-earth theory that was attributed to the Middles Ages gradually became embedded in both popular literature and intellectual thought. Since approximately 1870, the flat-earth theory has become very nearly a quintessential example of the backwardness of the Middle Ages . . . one author placed Columbus before a commission at Salamanca that is made to terrorize Columbus with the following chilling lines: “You think the earth is round, and inhabited on the other side? Are you not aware that the holy fathers of the church have condemned this belief?”³¹

In fact, we can go further—for not only does it inhabit “popular literature and intellectual thought,” but the legacy of Draper and White can even be found on Twitter. In 2016, Neil deGrasse Tyson—physicist, science communicator, and internet favorite—rightly decided that it was time to take on the new wave of flat-earthers, and clear up their misinformation for the benefit of a whole generation. He tweeted a gently corrective nudge aimed at the aforementioned rap artist B.o.B: “Duude—to be clear: Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn’t mean we all can’t still like your music.”³² When a reader queried his history, and mentioned folk knowing about the curvature of the Earth far earlier than “five centuries” ago, Tyson clarified his original statement: “Yes. Ancient Greece—inferred from Earth’s shadow during Lunar Eclipses. But it was lost to the Dark Ages.”³³

Floating around cyberspace, then, is Grant’s “quintessential example” of dogmatism stifling science, and of Christendom bringing about Tyson’s “Dark Ages.” Christians, rejecting the wisdom of the Greeks, had effectively stuck their fingers in their ears. Then, not content with that, they did their best to stop everyone else from listening, too. As Draper himself put it: “Catholicism had irrevocably committed itself to the dogma of a flat earth.”³⁴

Well, it is a good cautionary tale. Blind faith in Bronze Age holy writings won’t get anyone all that far—but, if they start doing science instead, they might yet become one of Boorstin’s discoverers. Before we move on with our lesson duly learned, however, there is probably something worth double-checking about all this.

Namely, this: is it actually true?

At Least Two and at Most Five

It is entirely conceivable, of course, that our earliest ancestors really did think that they were living on a flat disc, or in a box, or under a solid sky, or all three—because it does, at first simplistic glance, very much look like we are. So far, so good, then, for Draper and White. Similarly, our duo are right about the Greeks and Romans—for they did indeed use observations and mathematics to deduce the shape of the planet we all call home.

Thanks to clever scientific reasoning about the Earth’s shadow on the moon, the disappearance of ships over the horizon, the changing lengths and angles of shadows in different cities, and the varied positioning of stars as one moved over its surface, the best thinkers from around 500 BC onward had conclusively nailed down the sphericity of our world. The likes of Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Euclid had got it all mostly figured out a few centuries before Jesus turned up—and there was, even during their time, a broad consensus about the matter.

It is at this point, though, that things start to go horribly awry for Conflict and Warfare. To see why, it is perhaps best to introduce a new voice into the proceedings: that of Jeffrey Burton Russell, professor emeritus of history at the University of California and author of the ominously titled Inventing the Flat Earth. Russell gets straight into the fray with his preface:

The almost universal supposition that educated medieval people believed the earth to be flat puzzled me and struck me as dissonant when I was in elementary school, but I assumed that teacher knew best and shelved my doubts.³⁵

He then continues with the following bombshell: “By the time my children were in elementary school, they were learning the same mistake, and by that time I knew it was a falsehood.”³⁶

Wait a second: a “falsehood”? Can Russell support such a radical counterclaim—one that undermines not only Draper and White, but other established intellectuals like Boorstin, and Fix, and Tyson—with any actual evidence? Well, he seems to think so:

A few—at least two and at most five—early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2–3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.³⁷

Oh. “At least two and at most five” is markedly different to White’s “great majority of the early fathers of the Church.” Did Russell somehow miss the memo that the others all got? Who is right here? Who is wrong?

Russell, somewhat promisingly for his cause, can boast an ally in Allan Chapman, historian of science at the University of Oxford:

Let us be clear about one thing: no medieval scholar of any worth thought that the Earth was flat . . . . One needs only to read the astronomical literature of the Middle Ages to realise that the spherical nature of the earth, about 6000 or 8000 miles across, was standard knowledge, and taught to university students from Salamanca to Prague . . . . Inherited in unbroken succession from the Greeks, in fact, taught by the Venerable Bede to the young monks of Jarrow Abbey in AD 710, and encapsulated in John of the Holy Wood (Johannes de Sacrobosco’s) Latin textbook De Sphaera Mundi (“On the Sphere of the Earth”) of c. 1240.³⁸

Lesley B. Cormack—yet another historian of science, this time in Alberta, Canada—is also on Team Russell:

If we examine the work of even early-medieval writers, we find that with few exceptions they held a spherical-earth theory. Among the early Church Fathers, Augustine (354–430), Jerome (d. 420), and Ambrose (d. 420) all agreed that the earth was a sphere.³⁹

Later in the same essay, Cormack says that between AD 600 and 1300: “every important medieval thinker concerned about the natural world stated more or less explicitly that the world was a round globe, many of them incorporating Ptolemy’s astronomy and Aristotle’s physics into their work.”⁴⁰

She goes on to name Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), Roger Bacon (d. 1294), John Sacrobosco (1195–1256), and the archbishop of Cambrai, Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1410) as famous and influential Christians who wrote, freely and openly, about the globular form of the world.

It doesn’t end there: medieval bestsellers such as Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1320), John Mandeville’s Travels (c. 1360), and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1400) all treat the Earth, quite matter-of-factly, as a ball. This is important because, as Cormack herself explains, it tells us that even the non-scientific audiences of the time were fully aware of the truth.

If it is really the case, however, that the doctrine of a spherical Earth was an unquestioned constant from the time of the Greeks onward, and that the Church actively believed and taught it throughout that Middle Ages and beyond, then why did Conflict and Warfare both insist, so confidently, that the exact opposite was true?

Moreover, why did the very-well-read Boorstin agree with them? Why do so many textbooks, even today, side with Draper and White rather than Russell? Why does Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Twitter feed say that Greek conclusions were “lost to the Dark Ages”—until, presumably, the persecuted-but-unbroken Columbus came along? Why does the Church keep getting the blame for a crime that it didn’t commit—indeed, a crime that no one committed?

The answer, it would seem, lies with Russell’s “at least two.”

Always, Everywhere, and by All

Lactantius and Cosmas have a lot to answer for: it is, essentially, on them that Draper and White and Boorstin and Fix all hang their story. Sure, other saintly names are mentioned, but no one else is ever actually quoted—only these two. Upon investigation, it turns out that there is a rather good reason for this: there is, to put it simply, nobody else to quote. Cosmas and Lactantius, and they alone, are the sources for the world-famous Christian flat Earth.

Still, if Lactantius and Cosmas were revered as messengers from God—if they were the authorities looked to by theologians, priests, and lay believers everywhere for hundreds of years afterward—then they would be enough to build a case upon. Their teachings could genuinely be viewed as representative of Christianity as a whole, and the Draper and White thesis would hold firm. White suggests as much in Warfare:

In summing up the action of the Church upon geography, we must say, then, that the dogmas developed in strict adherence to Scripture and the conceptions held in the Church during many centuries “always, everywhere, and by all,” were, on the whole, steadily hostile to truth.⁴¹

Let us give White the benefit of the doubt for a moment: if the doctrines developed by Lactantius and Cosmas “in strict adherence to Scripture” really were believed to be true “always, everywhere, and by all,” then his overall argument—and Draper’s, and Tyson’s, and so on—clearly stands.

But were they believed “always, everywhere, and by all”? Were these two geographical commentators universally influential? Did they set the holy course for everyone else to follow? Had Catholicism at large accepted their teachings and “irrevocably committed itself to the dogma of a flat earth,” as per Draper?

It’s time to find out.

Utter Ignorance of Scripture

Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius was born in Africa sometime around AD 245 to pagans. He ascended to the lofty role of head of rhetoric under the Emperor Diocletian (245–313), before converting to Christianity nearer to AD 300. Diocletian was about to begin a period of brutal persecution across the empire—one which would see churches destroyed, Scriptures burned, and many Christians mercilessly executed. Lactantius saw it all coming—so he resigned his post and fled to Gaul.

Outlasting the vicious attacks on his spiritual brothers and sisters, he found himself back in favor once Constantine (272–337) took over as emperor in AD 306. The atmosphere had changed, and Christianity was no longer under threat—and, as Boorstin rightly observed, Lactantius was duly appointed as tutor to Constantine’s son.

A gifted thinker, Lactantius soon became renowned, even during his own lifetime, for his aesthetically pleasing prose and persuasive argument. Here is a taste of his work—a passage made all the more poignant when one remembers that he had seen much Christian suffering in his life:

Religion is to be defended, not by putting to death, but by dying; not by cruelty, but by patient endurance; not by guilt but by good faith . . . if you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, and by tortures, and by guilt, it will no longer be defended, but will be polluted and profaned.⁴²

He was also convinced—just as Draper and White wrote all those years ago—that the Earth really was flat.

One might think, then, that this famous theologian’s insistence upon terrestrial flatness would have carried far and wide. One might think that the ever-sheeplike laity would hang on his every word, and write off any spherical ideas they might have heard elsewhere as blasphemous lies. In reality, however, that is not how matters played out.

Lactantius was well-known, and skilled in rhetoric, yes—but he was hardly a respected doctrinal authority. So confused and muddled was some of his theology, in fact, that he mistakenly taught that Jesus and the devil were twins, that Jesus was an angel created by God, and that God had been forced to create evil in the world because His hands were tied by the laws of logic. Unsurprisingly, such beliefs saw him written off as a heretic after his death. The Catholic Encyclopedia, which we might expect to be his strongest supporter, says this:

The strengths and the weakness of Lactantius are nowhere better shown than in his work. The beauty of the style, the choice and aptness of the terminology, cannot hide the author’s lack of grasp of Christian principles and his almost utter ignorance of Scripture.⁴³

This is no after-the-events apology written by an embarrassed modern contributor, either—for St. Jerome (c. 347–420) had made a similar point more than 1500 years ago: “Lactantius has a flow of eloquence worthy of Tully: would that he had been as ready to teach our doctrines as he was to pull down those of others!”⁴⁴

It is not just that people listened to Lactantius about the flat Earth and then, after much discussion, had decided that he was wrong—it is more that his geographical views never appeared on their radar in the first place. Geoscientist Malcolm Reeves spells out the rather uncontentious reality of the situation:

Starting with Bede (seventh–eighth centuries), a consistent exposition and defense of the sphericity of the earth was clear in Western Europe and made its way into university teaching. Nobody in the Middle Ages took notice of Lactantius’s rejection of the sphericity of the earth.⁴⁵

Lactantius, having effectively disappeared after his death, was later resurrected during the explosion of interest in classical authors which occurred in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By then, however, any chance of him having any impact whatsoever on either doctrine or dogma was long gone. He was a novel curiosity, celebrated by a handful of Renaissance scholars for the quality of his writing—but nothing more. In making him a spokesperson for the whole of Christendom about the shape of the Earth, then, Draper and White—and Boorstin, for that matter—have got things horribly wrong.

Surely they couldn’t make the same mistake twice, though—could they?

Absolutely No Influence

Cosmas Indicopleustes (d. 550) was ethnically Greek, born in Egypt, and earned his surname—literally “sailed to India”—for his traveling exploits. Like Lactantius, he was an adult convert to Christianity and, also like Lactantius, he (mis)used his Bible to make a grand old mess of geography.

Against essentially every other thinker before or since, Cosmas decided that a couple of passages in the book of Hebrews about the heavenly tabernacle—a temple-like structure in which God dwelled and was worshiped—were not about spirituality, but were instead a physical description of the cosmos. This entirely bonkers analysis led him to sketch out the box-shaped world that Draper, White, Boorstin, and the textbooks seem to think was adopted “always, everywhere, and by all.”

But it wasn’t.

Here is Russell again:

The influence of Cosmas’s blundered effort on the Middle Ages was virtually nil. . . . Cosmas was roundly attacked in his own time by John Philoponus (490–570) . . . after Philoponus, Cosmas was ignored until the ninth century, when the Patriarch Photius of Constantinople again dismissed his views. In Latin, no medieval text of Cosmas exists at all. The first translation of Cosmas into Latin, his very first introduction into western Europe, was not until 1706. He had absolutely no influence on medieval western thought.⁴⁶

To press Russell’s point home, it is worth looking at exactly what one prominent Christian teacher he mentioned—John Philoponus—actually had to say about Cosmas:

If certain people, owing to the uneducated state of their soul, cannot attain to what has been said and are troubled about the way the facts are put together, silence will help them to cover up their own ignorance. And let them not tell lies about God’s creation out of their own lack of experience and the slowness of their mind. . . . Some people’s saying that it [the sun] is carried by the north winds to return to the east, being hidden by very high mountains, was an ancient and foolish notion held by some which deserves the laughter befitting it.⁴⁷

Ouch.

Perhaps we can leave it to historian of science Pablo de Felipe to hammer the final nail into Draper’s and White’s everyone-listened-to-Cosmas coffin:

Interestingly, and contrary to the impression commonly left after the rediscovery of Cosmas in the early 18th century, his work was not the beginning or even the pinnacle of flat-earth cosmological influence among Christians. It was rather the opposite; this most elaborate defense of the flat earth seems to have brought the discussion to its end. As far as we can track in the extant Christian texts of late Antiquity and the early Medieval period, there seem to be no followers of Cosmas.⁴⁸

So, in actual fact, the Church never believed in a flat Earth, never taught it, was never in the need of correction on the matter—and the two poster boys of the Conflict and Warfare grand narrative, Lactantius and Cosmas, were written off by Christendom as weirdos who were barking up entirely the wrong tree. Draper and White, then, weren’t just slightly off course—they were on a different planet altogether.

One loose end remains, however. For, if no one at Columbus’s time thought the Earth was flat, then why does the Spanish sailor show up in the story at all? Why did White write the “warfare of Columbus the world knows well”? Why does Draper have the Spaniard warned by the ever-dogmatic Church of his proposed journey’s “irreligious tendency”?

The answer is almost unbelievable: the idea first seems to have turned up in the American mainstream in a novel.

Assailed with Citations from the Bible

Washington Irving (1783–1859) is most famous for his short fairy tales “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” He also loved to write historical pieces—or, more accurately, pseudo-historical pieces. His A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) had originally been planned as straight history—but the novelist had found his desired sources to be either wholly non-existent or rather less dramatic than he had anticipated. Historian of science Darin Hayton explains what then ensued: “Irving embellished. He wrote what should have happened, what surely did happen even if the evidence had since disappeared. He did what historians have been doing since Herodotus: he made it up.”⁴⁹

In his quest to write a good story, Irving played around with the true events—that Columbus had indeed been challenged, but only because his distance calculations were, quite correctly, considered suspect—and decided to turn what he knew was merely a mathematical debate into an entirely fictitious science-versus-religion showdown:

Columbus was assailed with citations from the Bible and the Testament, the book of Genesis, the psalms of David, the Prophets, the epistles, and the gospels. To these were added expositions of various Saints and reverend commentators, St. Gregory, St. Basil and St. Ambrose . . .

wait for it . . .

. . . and Lactantius.⁵⁰

None of this stand-off took place, except in Irving’s imagination—but his readers took it to heart nonetheless. It is particularly instructive to compare this paragraph from Columbus to one written by Draper, in Conflict, 50 years later:

[Columbus’s journey’s] irreligious tendency was pointed out by the Spanish ecclesiastics, and condemned by the Council of Salamanca; its orthodoxy was confuted from the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophecies, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the writings of the Fathers—St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, St. Basil, St. Ambrose.⁵¹

Draper, incidentally, gives no footnote for this bold assertion—but it would hardly take a Hercule Poirot or a Miss Marple to deduce its origins.

And, just to sum up the outcome of all this, here is Hayton once more:

By the time Andrew White wrote [Warfare] Columbus’s struggles to overcome a medieval Church that believed in a flat earth had become historical fact. Historical truth had surrendered to truthiness. . . . Despite decades of historical work and dozens of articles and textbooks and, more recently, blogposts, the Columbus myth is alive and well.⁵²

The flat Earth account, then, is a God-versus-science myth, alive and well today, set on its way by Draper and White.

And it is far from being the only one.

I Don’t Know How to Get Rid of This Myth

Our first deep Draper-and-White dive has been an enlightening one. We have seen the words of Conflict and Warfare for ourselves. We have seen how both men told a simple story that was easy to follow, and also how the overwhelming majority of the world’s commentators have since been persuaded by it.

Our pair spelled out, in quite some style, a moral tale about science and religion: the Greeks had deduced the shape of our planet using science; Christianity had universally rejected sphericity on the basis of Scripture; Lactantius and Cosmas had led the holy charge against reason, with the Church blindly following along; Columbus, in the face of persecution, had finally rescued us from dogma.

For the last 150 years, coursebook writers, librarians of Congress, and tweeting astrophysicists have continued to remind us all of this important story, and of its even more important core lesson: that dogmatic religion leads us to nonsense, and that rational science leads us to truth. We have to pick a side; and that side, without doubt, should be science.

But Draper’s and White’s moral tale is not true. It is a mixture of exaggerations, dishonest emphases, misunderstandings, and outright lies—it has been consigned to the rubbish heap by scores of careful historians of science.

Yet still, it thrives—in our schools and universities, as well as on our streets, and in our heads. Russell, in his book Inventing the Flat Earth, can be found lamenting the current situation: “Many authors great and small have followed the Draper-White line down to the present. The educated public, seeing so many eminent scientists, philosophers, and scholars in agreement, concluded that they must be right.”⁵³ And this, sadly, is not an isolated case. Here is the impressively titled Katherine Park—the Samuel Zemurray, Jr., and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Research Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus—giving an interview to the Harvard Gazette in 2011:

“It was a 19th century myth,” said Park, “like that before Christopher Columbus everyone thought the world was flat. People are absolutely wedded to a view that says ‘We are modern, and they were stupid’ . . . it just kills me. I don’t know how to get rid of this myth.”⁵⁴

Had Draper and White only struck once—by indoctrinating folk with the flat Earth fallacy—then perhaps the conflict thesis would not have caught on in the way that it has. But they did not strike just once—for the pervasive myth that Park is upset about, and that she doesn’t know how to get rid of, also came from the pages of Conflict and Warfare. So what was it?

Well, that will be the topic of our next chapter.