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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (23537)	7/10/2006 12:59:51 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541387

However my argument was sadly Euro-centric, in terms of the belief of the Christian body of Europe: and there, I understand the "educated" view was that the Earth was a circular disk probably with the Garden of Eden (or possibly Jerusalem) at the centre... or at least, that was what people were supposed to believe. Before the Crusades the evidence is somewhat mixed, although scholars probably knew the earth was round. By the time of Columbus its clear that educated people in Europe knew the earth was not flat. --- "The common misconception that people before the age of exploration believed that Earth was flat entered the popular imagination after Washington Irving's publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828. In the United States, this belief persists in the popular imagination, and is even repeated in some widely read textbooks. Thomas Bailey's The American Pageant states that "The superstitious sailors ... grew increasingly mutinous...because they were fearful of sailing over the edge of the world"; however, no such historical account is known.[1] Actually, sailors were probably among the first to know of the curvature of Earth from daily observations — seeing how shore landscape features (or masts of other ships) gradually descend/ascend near the horizon. A few early Christian writers questioned or even opposed the sphericity of the Earth on theological grounds, but these writers are not thought to have been influential in the Middle Ages due to a scarcity of references to their work in medieval writings. The dominant textbooks of the Early Middle Ages supported the sphericity of the Earth. Even before the translation of the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy in the 1100s, the geocentric model had supplanted any doubts about the Earth's sphericity in the minds of the learned people of Europe. This did not settle, however, the question of whether the antipodes were habitable, or even reachable... ...The Early Church There is evidence that the spherical Earth was accepted by many Christians. For example, Emperor Theodosius II of the Byzantine Empire placed the globus cruciger (which depicts Earth as round) on his coins. However, the antipodes (thought to be separated from the Mediterranean world by the uncrossable torrid clime) were difficult to reconcile with the Christian view of a unified human race descended from one couple and redeemed by a single Christ. Consequently, some of the Church Fathers questioned their existence and even the roundness of Earth... ...Different historians have maintained that these advocates of the flat Earth were either influential (a view typified by Andrew Dickson White) or relatively unimportant (typified by Jeffrey Russell) in the later Middle Ages. The scarcity of references to their beliefs in later medieval writings convinces most of today's historians that their influence was slight... ...A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth."[13] Of course it was probably not the few noted intellectuals who defined public opinion. It is difficult to tell what the wider population may have thought of the shape of the Earth – if they considered the question at all. It may have been as irrelevant to them as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is to most of our contemporaries... ...Later Middle Ages By the 11th century, Europe had learned of Islamic astronomy, and abundant records suggest that any doubts that Europeans had had in earlier times were generally eliminated. Lectures in the medieval universities commonly advanced evidence in favor of the idea that the Earth was a sphere.[14] A few examples: the most important and widely taught theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), believed in a spherical Earth. Hermannus Contractus (1013–1054) is among the earliest Christian scholars to estimate the circumference of Earth with Eratosthenes' method. In addition, Dante's Divine Comedy portrays Earth as a sphere. The Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis (c. 1120), an important manual for the instruction of lesser clergy which was translated into Middle English, Old French, Middle High German, Old Russian, Middle Dutch, Old Norse, Icelandic, Spanish, and several Italian dialects, explicitly refers to a spherical Earth. This supports the contention that the spherical shape of the Earth was common knowledge outside scholarly circles. Likewise, the fact that Bertold von Regensburg (mid-13th century) used the spherical Earth as a sermon illustration shows that he could assume this knowledge among his congregation. The sermon was held in the vernacular (i.e. German as opposed to Latin), and thus was not intended for a learned audience. However, as late as 1400s, the Spanish theologian Tostatus disputed the existence of any inhabitants at the antipodes[15]." en.wikipedia.org --- Again, my comment on flat earthers was an analogy to do with their previous position as holding the common opinion and its gradual replacement by greater and ever-more-incontrovertible fact, and the stubbornness with which people denied evidenced science because it went against what they wanted to believe. If that's the idea that you meant to convey then comparing the skeptics with believers that the earth was flat was a poor choice as it implies more than that. Also I wouldn't even say that all global warming skeptics fit in with your idea of stubbornly clinging to something against near incontrovertible evidence because its what they want to believe. Message 22609916