The earth could be both round and flat, if it were disk-shaped. Have we all been fed a whopping lie about the true shape of the earth?
Is the Earth Flat? | Answers in Genesis Internet Explorer is no longer supported. Try downloading another browser like Chrome or Firefox. redeem Make an Impact Help us share the truth of God’s Word and the gospel! $17M Match $17,037,492 raised of $20M goal Give Now CartSign In or Sign UpUnited States / EnglishIf you already have an account, Sign in.View Cart ×search United States / EnglishAnswersStoreEventsMediaKidsEducationDonate Answers in Genesis Answers Science Astronomy Earth Is the Earth Flat? Is the Earth Flat? by Dr. Danny R. Faulkner on May 24, 2016 Also available in Español Share: Email Using: Gmail Yahoo! Outlook Other Watch the video on YouTube. Why Write about a Flat Earth? Many people will probably wonder why it is necessary to write an article defending a round earth. Or, more specifically, an earth that is spherical. You see, the earth could be both round and flat, if it were disk shaped. Recently I had a conversation with some people about a Christian young man they know who frequently argues that the earth is flat. Mind you, this young man does not actually believe that the earth is flat. Rather, he finds the topic interesting and the discussion of it stimulating. Indeed, it can be. In my years at the university, I always asked the same sort of question in my introductory astronomy classes to motivate my students into thinking more deeply. By raising the question, I challenged our cultural mythology that, until the time of Christopher Columbus five centuries ago, nearly everyone thought the earth was flat. Supposedly, with our sophistication and intelligence today, we know better than the ignorant people of the past. Most of my students were surprised to learn that the facts of history are very different. The question of the earth’s true shape had been settled two millennia before Columbus. Rarely could any of my students give a good reason why the earth is spherical. So much for our modern smug superiority over the supposedly ignorant people of the past. Noah's Ark Guide - FREE Get equipped with biblical answers to questions about Noah's ark and the global flood. DOWNLOAD NOW Consequently, with no idea of the reasons we know that the earth is spherical, most people long ago entered a complacent state of more or less taking someone else’s word for the matter. Most people have not given this question any thought, because they have been taught their entire lives that the earth is spherical, so why worry about it? Consequently, with no idea of the reasons we know that the earth is spherical, most people long ago entered a complacent state of more or less taking someone else’s word for the matter. When someone comes along, such as this young man, who has given this some thought and begins to raise what appear to be simple objections to the earth’s spherical shape, it doesn’t take much to fluster most people. When cornered in this manner, people generally respond with the observation that we have photos from space that clearly show a spherical earth. However, the clever speaker will respond that such photos easily can be faked. Indeed, because we all know that it is very easy to fake such photos, perhaps those photos don’t prove much after all. Furthermore, those sorts of photos have been available only for a little more than a half-century. Belief in a spherical earth goes back much earlier than this, so obviously there must be better responses. Once the space photos of a spherical earth are shot down, the vast majority of people usually have one of two responses. The most common response is to dismiss the person asking the questions as a crank or fool, because “everyone knows that the earth is round.” The other response is to pay more attention to the “flat-earthers,” looking for errors in their facts or logic. However, rarely having the knowledge readily at hand to refute the case for a flat earth, most people who take this approach soon look for help. That search for help usually is on the Internet, whereupon they quickly find a slew of websites and videos promoting the flat earth, but precious little, if any, refuting it. Some people emerge a few hours later, their egos bruised and their intelligence a bit insulted, because they still think that the flat earth is nonsense but are frustrated that they can’t seem to answer many of the arguments they’ve just encountered. Still others never emerge from this rabbit hole and end up thinking that maybe the conspiracy theories that they have encountered along the way may be right—perhaps for a long time we’ve all been fed a whopping lie about the true shape of the earth. Reasons We Know That the Earth Is Spherical Earth’s Shadow So how did people in the ancient world know that the earth is spherical? The earliest recorded discussion of a spherical earth is from Pythagoras in the sixth century BC. Pythagoras correctly understood that the cause of lunar eclipses is the shadow of the earth falling on the moon. This can happen only when the moon is opposite the sun in our sky, which coincides with full moon. The earth’s shadow is larger than the moon, so we cannot see the entire shadow at once. However, during a lunar eclipse we see the earth’s shadow creep across the moon. Because the edge of the earth’s shadow always is a portion of a circle, the earth’s shadow must be a circle. If the earth were flat and round, similar to a disk, it could cast a circular shadow, but only for lunar eclipses that occur at midnight. For a lunar eclipse at sunrise or sunset, the earth’s shadow would be an ellipse, a line, or a rectangle, depending upon how thick the disk was compared to its diameter. However, the earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse is always a circle, regardless of the time of night when the eclipse occurs. The only shape that consistently has a circular shadow, regardless of its orientation, is a sphere. The only shape that consistently has a circular shadow, regardless of its orientation, is a sphere. Visibility of the Stars Another argument involves the stars that are visible in the northern and southern parts of the sky. The North Star lies within a degree of the north celestial pole, the direction in space that the earth’s rotation points at. As the earth rotates each day, the stars, the sun, and the moon appear to spin around the north celestial pole, so the north celestial pole remains fixed in the sky. In the ancient world, many people thought that the celestial sphere rotated each day around a non-spinning earth. For our purposes here, it doesn’t matter which is the case. The north celestial pole makes an angle with the northern horizon. We call this angle the altitude of the north celestial pole. Since the North Star is so close to the north celestial pole, we can approximate the altitude of the north celestial pole with the North Star’s altitude. Vela and surrounding constellations. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. The altitude of the North Star is noticeably higher in the sky at northern locations than it is at southern locations. For example, the North Star is much higher in the sky in the northern United States and Canada than it is in Florida, as anyone who pays attention on a trip, such as a vacation, can attest. This can happen only if north-south motion is along an arc. This is further underscored by other considerations. There is a region around the North Star in which the stars do not rise or set but instead are continually up and appear to go in circles around the north celestial pole. We call these circumpolar stars, meaning “around the pole.” The region of circumpolar stars is larger at northern locations than in southern locations. Likewise, there is a circumpolar region below the southern horizon whose stars are always below the horizon. The northern circumpolar region, where stars are always visible, is very large, and the southern circumpolar region, whose stars are never visible, is also large. Closer to the earth’s equator, the two circumpolar regions are smaller. For example, for many years I lived in South Carolina, about four degrees farther south latitude from where I now live in Northern Kentucky. I can see that the North Star is slightly higher in Northern Kentucky than it was in South Carolina. Furthermore, during winter in South Carolina, the bright star Canopus barely rose above the southern horizon each night; but in Kentucky I can never see Canopus. This is because in Northern Kentucky, Canopus is in the southern circumpolar region where stars are never visible, while in South Carolina it is not. This too shows that the earth is curved in the north-south direction. Curvature of the Earth Not only is the earth curved in the north-south direction, it also is curved in the east-west direction. There is a time difference of three hours between the east and west coasts of the United States. That is, the sun rises and sets approximately three hours earlier on the east coast than it does on the west coast. This is easily verified by anyone who has flown between the east and west coasts of the United States. Not only will your watch show that there is a time difference of three hours, but your body will notice the difference in time as well. If one drives from one coast to the other, the trip will take several days, so our bodies will not notice the time difference as much. However, our watches reveal that the time has changed. Such rapid transportation was not possible in ancient times, but the ancients could see this time difference a different way. A lunar eclipse obviously must happen simultaneously for everyone on earth, but it will be different times at different locations. For instance, a lunar eclipse may start shortly after sunset in the eastern Mediterranean, such as in Greece. However, in the western Mediterranean, such as in Spain, the moon would already be in eclipse when the moon rose that night. This means that the lunar eclipse began before sunset/moonrise in Spain, but after sunset/moonrise in Greece. Communication was such in the ancient world that people were aware of this effect. This shows that the earth is curved in the east-west direction. If the earth is curved in both the north-south and east-west direction, the most likely shape of the earth is a sphere. Ancient Sources Ancient sources, such as Aristotle, also mentioned that the hulls of ships disappeared before their masts did as ships sailed away. This would happen only if the earth is spherical. Without optical aid, this is difficult to see. However, one easily can see a related effect. If one is perched atop the mast of the ship, one can spot land or other ships before people on the deck can. This is why spotters often were placed in a crow’s nest high above a ship’s deck. If the earth were flat, there would be no advantage to being above the deck. A similar thing can be observed on land. The Door Peninsula in Wisconsin forms the eastern shore of Green Bay. The distance across Green Bay from the northern portion of the Door Peninsula to Northern Michigan is more than twenty miles. Looking across Green Bay from the beach on the west side of the Door Peninsula, one cannot see Northern Michigan. However, if one ascends the bluffs above the beach, one can see the shoreline of Northern Michigan. This is possible only if the earth is spherical. View of sunset from Potawatomi State Park, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. Eratosthenes. Image from Wikimedia Commons. Not only did ancient people know that the earth was spherical, one of them accurately measured the size of the earth around 200 BC. Eratosthenes worked at the Great Library in Alexandria, Egypt. Eratosthenes is the father of geography because he coined the term and commissioned the creation of many maps. One particular year on the summer solstice, Eratosthenes was in southern Egypt near modern-day Aswan. Being on the northern limit of the tropics, the sun was directly overhead at noon on the summer solstice. Eratosthenes realized this, because he could look down into a deep well and see the bottom. Normally, the bottom of a well is not visible because the sun’s light does not shine directly on the bottom, but it did at noon on the summer solstice because the sun was directly overhead. The sun never was directly overhead in Alexandria, because it is not in the tropics. Back in Alexandria the following year, Eratosthenes measured the altitude of the sun at noon on the summer solstice. He did this by constructing a vertical pole of known height and measuring the pole’s shadow at noon. Trigonometry allowed Eratosthenes to compute the sun’s altitude. The difference between ninety degrees and the altitude was how far the sun was from being vertical. Eratosthenes found that the angle was about one-fiftieth of a circle. This meant that Alexandria and Aswan were separated by one-fiftieth of the earth’s circumference. Eratosthenes knew the distance between those two locations, so multiplying that distance by fifty gave him the earth’s circumference. Why do so many people today assume that everyone thought that the earth was flat until the time of Columbus? The argument at the time of Columbus was not over the earth’s shape, but over the earth’s size. Muslims had closed to Europeans the overland trade routes to the Far East. Everyone realized that travel to Asia by sailing west from Europe was possible, but why would you want to? There was a vast ocean (they didn’t know about the two American continents in between) separating Europe and Asia. It was much shorter to sail eastward from Europe, perhaps around Africa, to reach Asia. In the small ships used at the time, it was not advisable to sail more than a few days out of sight of land. Columbus was proposing a voyage of a few months over open, uncharted waters. That was very dangerous. To make his proposed voyage more palatable, Columbus overestimated the eastward distance from Europe, and at the same time he decreased Eratosthenes’ measurement of the earth’s circumference. The difference in these two was Columbus’ expected distance to Asia by sailing westward from Europe. In Columbus’ estimation, it was shorter to reach Asia by sailing westward than eastward. A glance at a modern globe or map of the world reveals that this is false. In other words, Columbus was wrong, and his critics were right! Accusation of Christianity In the late nineteenth century, two atheistic skeptics, Andrew Dickson White and John Draper, created the conflict thesis that Christianity held back the progress of science. One of their major arguments was that throughout the Middle Ages the church had taught that the earth was flat. In creating this myth, Draper and White suggested that the church could redeem itself for this supposed error on the earth’s shape by getting in on the ground floor of Darwinism. This ploy was very successful in that much of the church capitulated on evolution. It also falsely altered history. It is this false version of history that most people have learned. Descent into the Rabbit Hole Within days of my conversation with the people about the young man who espoused a flat earth, I had two additional, yet independent, conversations with people having similar concerns about two other Christian young people. However, while the first young man merely talked about a flat earth as an intellectual exercise, these two young men apparently had become convinced that the earth may actually be flat. With three conversations over less than a week, I wondered, “Is there something going on out there?” There had been a few warning signs along the way. During the previous six months I had been asked about the flat earth several times. One was from the department that handles correspondences and questions directed to Answers in Genesis. It seems that people submit a question about this to Answers in Genesis often enough. Two of our speakers here at Answers in Genesis recently had received questions about the flat earth while traveling. Two other creation speakers not associated with Answers in Genesis had asked me about it. More recently I had someone raise this question after a talk that I gave at the Creation Museum. All of this suggested that there must be some sort of movement out there within Christianity promoting the flat earth. This immediately raised two questions: who are the people responsible for this recent interest in a flat earth, and what is their motivation? The search for those answers required that I disappear inside the flat-earth rabbit hole in the Internet for a while. Before I share what I found, I need to make one point very clear—as in the story of Alice in Wonderland, not everything is as it appears. Most people are aware that there is a Flat Earth Society, thinking that the Flat Earth Society is a serious group of people dedicated to promoting their own peculiar view of the world. The situation is far murkier than that. Actually, there have been several Flat Earth Societies. Some of them clearly have been tongue-in-cheek, while others appear to be far more serious. Some flat earth advocates obviously are having fun, and they don’t seem to mind if their audience is in on the gag. However, some people promoting a flat earth appear to enjoy watching people squirm uncomfortably when confronted with an argument that they disagree with but can’t quite manage to refute. Of course, these people are not about to let on that they are anything but serious about the flat earth. This is perverse. Examples of Flat-Earth Proponents An example of someone who may not be serious about the earth being flat is Matthew Boylan. According to some sources on the flat earth, Boylan is an artist who was an independent contractor with NASA. He supposedly left that job after NASA employees took him into their confidence and invited him to join the conspiracy promoting the lie that the earth is spherical. According to Boylan, NASA fakes nearly everything that it does. Boylan has several videos on the Internet, but some of them appear to be comedy routines. For instance, this video has an audience that reacts as if audience members understood that they were watching a comedy routine. Boylan’s delivery, including his frequent use of profanity, is similar to so many comedy routines today. In this routine, Boylan included a photo that he says shows the Apollo 11 Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) landing on the moon. According to him, because there had to be a camera crew already on the moon to take the photo, NASA faked the moon landing. However, the photograph clearly shows the curved edge of the moon, indicating that the LEM was far above the lunar surface. Actually, this photo was taken by Michael Collins, who remained aboard the Apollo 11 Command Module (CM), as the two other astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, landed on the moon. Collins took the photo shortly after separation of the LEM from the CM. Similarly, Boylan shows an image of the Galileo probe arriving at Jupiter. Boylan mockingly notes that the Galileo probe must have been followed very closely by another spacecraft carrying a camera. NASA frequently produces this sort of image of spacecraft superimposed with an image of some space object relevant to the spacecraft. In other words, this is an artist’s rendition. As an artist, Boylan must understand this. He must be very amused that so many people think that he is serious. “Support” for a Flat Earth Let us discuss some of the more frequent claims that supposedly prove that the earth is flat rather than spherical. Most of the supposed evidences are negative; that is, they are attempts to show that the earth is not spherical. However, at least one, the Bedford Level Experiment, is positive, an attempt directly to show that the earth is flat. In 1838, Samuel Birley Rowbotham claimed to have conducted an experiment on the Old Bedford River on the Bedford Level near Norfolk, England. The Bedford Level is a six-mile stretch of th… truncated (21,520 more characters in archive)