Flat Earth (Refuted): Questions & Answers

Explore 6 questions and answers about Flat Earth (Refuted), answered by Dr. Robert Sungenis.

I am the last man a flat-earther expects to hear this from. I hold that the Earth does not move. I hold that the Church was right in 1616 and again in 1633, and that no experiment in the history of physics has ever caught the Earth travelling through space. And the Earth is a globe. Those two convictions sit together perfectly well, and the habit of treating them as one package has done more damage to the geocentric case than any critic ever managed.

The flat Earth is not an old Christian belief being recovered. It is Victorian. It starts with Samuel Rowbotham in the 1840s, who named his method zetetic, from the Greek for to seek, and laid down the rule that only what a man can verify with his own eyes counts as evidence. That sounds like humility. Work out what it excludes and it stops sounding like humility. It excludes refraction, which bends light downward and lets you see what is sitting below the horizon. It excludes the arithmetic that shows why the horizon does not hold at eye level as you climb. Rule out the two things that explain what you are looking at, and what you are looking at will agree with you every time.

Then there are the observations, and most of them cost nothing and need no space agency. Star trails wheel around two opposite poles. A disc cannot do that. The shadow the Earth throws on the Moon in eclipse is round from every direction it is ever seen. Antarctica gets a summer sun that never sets, which no small local sun under a dome can produce. And the three cases flat-earthers put forward as their strongest, the Bedford Level, the Lake Pontchartrain causeway, and Joshua Nowicki's photographs of the Chicago skyline, all measure curvature once refraction is put back into the calculation. I work each one through in the book rather than waving at it.

The Scripture argument is the one I care most about, and it fails on the Hebrew. The firmament of Genesis 1:6 is raqiya, and the solid-dome reading that the whole flat-earth case leans on is not what the Fathers of the Church taught. I go through their testimony at length for that reason. You cannot defend the literal sense of Scripture by tying it to a reading the Fathers did not hold. That is not literalism. It is a nineteenth-century idea wearing a patristic coat.

The answers below take the objections one at a time, and I take them seriously rather than laughing at them, because the men asking are usually asking in good faith and because I want the geocentric argument judged on its own evidence instead of being buried alongside a claim the evidence does not support.