The thing to keep in mind, perhaps, is that most people who are convinced that the Earth is a sphere don’t actually know why, for sure.
Some flat earthers find the idea is appealing for religious reasons, others are of the crowd who think NASA is evil, space a fake, and the moon landing didn’t happen. But mostly it’s because they think they are merely being rational skeptics. They have not themselves been able to prove the earth is round, so they believe they are only reasonable when they request evidence. CNN for example reports from a flat earth conference: “Like most of the speakers at the event CNN spoke to, he was convinced after he decided he couldn’t prove the Earth’s roundness.”
Sabine Hossenfelder, “Flat Earth “Science”: Wrong, but not Stupid” at Back(Re)Action
I want to leave aside here that, of course, you cannot strictly speaking prove any empirical fact; you can only prove mathematical identities, so more precisely we should speak of seeking evidence that disfavors the hypothesis that the earth is flat. Of which there is plenty, starting with the historical evidence about how stellar constellations shift if you travel, how the length of shadows changes, to Newton’s 1/R2 force law that is the law for a sphere, not a disk, not to mention Einstein and gravitational redshift and the perihelion precession of mercury, and so on, and so forth.
The problem that flat earthers have is that they cannot do most of these observations themselves. So if you buy the idea that it’s only your personally collected evidence that you should accept, then it seems you cannot refute the idea that the earth is round, and so flat earthers philosophy forbids them to accept scientific fact.
Sabine Hossenfelder, “Flat Earth “Science”: Wrong, but not Stupid” at Back(Re)Action
Let’s keep this info handy if we encounter assertive flat-Earthers. Hossenfelder adds,
It is not possible for each and every one of us to redo all experiments in the history of science. It therefore becomes increasingly important that scientists provide evidence for how science works, so that people who cannot follow the research itself can instead rely on evidence that the system produces correct and useful descriptions of nature.
Sabine Hossenfelder, “Flat Earth “Science”: Wrong, but not Stupid” at Back(Re)Action
Well, she does a pretty good job herself.
What’s ironic is that Dr. Hossenfelder is on the “flat earth” side of the arguments over quantum mechanics and cosmology. She complains that there is currently too much theory and speculation (based on mathematics) and not enough experimental data. Her 2018 book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, is an excellent read for those interested in the subject!
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray-ebook/dp/B0763L6YR7
-Q
At a time when all of Science is actively participating in a holocaust, perhaps there are more important lies and false assumptions to worry about.
As to this comment from Hossenfelder,,,
Although she did not expand on that particular comment, that short statement from her reveals that she has bought into the myth that ‘religion’, i.e. Christianity, once taught that the earth was flat.
But, as historian Tim O’Neill, who happens to be an atheist himself, explains in his series ‘The Great Myths’, “But those of us who actually care to check facts,,, know that this (the belief that medieval Christians believed the earth was flat), is all complete crap.”
Here are several other widespread myths that Tim O’Neill, (again an atheist), has written on, which many ‘new’ atheists falsely believe about medieval Christianity,,,
All of these myths are part of the greater false ‘warfare’ myth, promoted by atheists, that Christianity is, and has been, constantly at war with science.
The story usually told by atheists is that Christianity suppressed the rise of modern science and that it was the ‘enlightenment’, and/or the “Renaissance”, where reason supposedly finally triumphed over the ‘superstition’ of Christianity, that modern science was finally able to be born.
But the fact of the matter is that it was Christianity, and Christianity alone, not enlightenment thinking, that gave rise to modern science,
Contrary to what atheists believe, It is simply impossible to ‘do science’ without Theistic and/or Christian presuppositions. As Paul Davies explained, “even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.”
In fact, although the atheist often insists he is being completely ‘rational’ in his promotion of reason over the supposed ‘superstition’ of Christianity, the fact of the matter is that, (in his adoption of naturalism/materialism, and in his rejection Christianity), the atheist ends up forsaking rationality itself. The reason for this is primarily because the atheist, in his adoption of naturalism, ends up being forced to deny the reality of his own free will, (which is a primary property of his own immaterial mind that enables him to reason rationally).
Sabine Hossenfelder herself rejected the reality of her own free will when she promoted ‘superdeterminism’ over and above the recent experimental closing of the ‘free-will loophole’ by Zeilinger and company
Again, in denying the reality of their own free will, the atheist ends up forsaking rationality itself,
As J.B.S. Haldane and C.S. Lewis explained,
Thus, far from his naturalistic worldview delivering the atheist from the supposed ‘dark world’ of Christian superstition, into a world of reason and rationality, the atheist instead ends up being delivered into a dark world of irrationality and anti-reason.
The naturalistic worldview is simply, for lack of a better term, completely insane,
Although the Darwinist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science, (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that Darwinists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to:
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, indeed more antagonistic to reason, rationality and even to reality itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
Bornagain77,
I’m glad you brought this up. As very few people nowadays know, about 200 years before Christ, Eratosthenes tried to measure the spherical circumference of the earth from Alexandria using shadows. He was off by only about 100 miles! How many scientists today could devise his method?
The sphericity of the earth was argued by the ancient Greeks on three counts:
a. Certain stars appeared and disappeared at the horizon in the southern horizon as one traveled north and in the northern horizon as one traveled south.
b. The earth’s shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always the arc of a circle.
c. Ships disappeared beyond the horizon regardless of their direction of travel. This effect manifests itself in a little as three miles, making the ship look as though it were sinking.
The reference by Dr. Hossenfelder to religious beliefs were those introduced by the medieval Catholic church. They were not the views of the ancient Greek mariners and likely not those of the skilled Phoenician mariners or of the common people of that day who talked to them.
-Q
Most people have seen footage taken from orbit of earth, an obviously spherical body. Aand some are old enough to have seen the Earth filmed from the vantage of the Moon. So I think most people DO know why the Earth is not flat and why it IS stupid to think so.