I feel duped! I feel tricked, hood-winked, bamboozled! My “wonderful” public school education taught me that “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and he proved to all of Europe that the earth was round. Before that point, everyone thought the earth was flat. Most of you were all taught this too, right? It probably looked something like this:
“Columbus felt he would eventually reach the Indies in the East. Many Europeans still believed that the world was flat. Columbus, they thought, would fall off the earth.” America Past and Present (Scott Foresman, 1983)
Well, our public schools got half of it right. Columbus did set sail for what would end up being the Americas in 1492, but no educated person in 1492 believed the earth was flat. In fact, almost no western educated person believed the earth to be flat past the 3rd Century BC, when Eratosthenes (an Egyptian) calculated the diameter of the earth with only 2% error.
OK, maybe ancient Egyptians and Greeks figured it out. But, when Christianity conquered the Roman Empire, all of Europe slipped into the Dark Ages and all this knowledge was lost. The Church basically suppressed all scientific thought to control the masses and is responsible for keeping Europe in the Dark Ages until the Renaissance. Right? That’s what I thought. But, it’s not really true. Let me explain.
Recently, I’ve been on a kick of reading the great minds of the past and while reading Summa Theolgica, Thomas Aquinas argues against the assertion that no other type of knowledge is needed except for theology by saying:
“… For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion — that THE EARTH, for instance, IS ROUND: the astronomer by means of mathematics, but the physicist by means of matter itself. …” Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas, Question 1, Article 1, Reply 2)
Imagine my surprise at reading that Thomas Aquinas says in passing that the earth is round (like, duh, everyone knows that), but Aquinas died in 1274, over 200 years before the famous voyage. WAIT A SECOND! I thought everyone believed the earth was flat in the middle ages?!?! By the way, Aquinas says in this argument that truth is found through BOTH science AND theology. (And this concept didn’t start with Aquinas, it was prominent from the conception of the Church.)
So, I did a quick google search on “Columbus Flat Earth” and almost every link that came up was dedicated to the Flat Earth Myth. Evidently, I was a sucker for the myth and only recently found out I had been duped. In fact, the Historical Society of Britain listed the Flat Earth Myth as #1 of ten top historical myths in 1945.
Why did we all learn this is school? Here’s how the myth got started. In 1828, Washington Irving wrote a “biography” on Christopher Columbus, but it was actually historical fiction. Most of us know Irving by his two most famous books: Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. In the “biography” of Columbus, Irving describes a scene where Columbus stood in front of the council of Salamanca and tried to convince inquisitors that the earth was actually round.
The Flat Earth Myth was only found in Irving’s book until Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859. Then two prominent Americans published pseudo-historical books promoting the idea that most people in the middle ages thought the earth was flat. And, more importantly, they promoted the false idea that there has been an ongoing conflict between Christianity and science. The first to publish, John Draper, was the founder of NYU’s school of medicine and the second was Andrew Dickson White, the co-founder of Cornell University. The names of their books were History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), respectively.
These books have been widely discredited by 20th century historians. So why, then, does this myth still propagate? John Burton Russell, a history professor at UCSB, explains:
“The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society, is to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple and powerful, if not elegant: Look how stupid these Christians are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress. These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years denied that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?” (http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/russell/FlatEarth.html)
Is Flat Earth Myth being taught to your kids in school still today? I don’t know what children’s school history books look like, but I did go to Barnes and Noble and found two children’s biographies of Christopher Columbus that did get it right. Both books describe a conflict between Columbus and the council of Salamanca. But this conflict, was about the size of the earth, not whether it was flat. Columbus did his own calculations and figured that the earth was much smaller than originally calculated. He thought he’d be able to sail all the way to India with plenty of supplies. Nobody wanted to fund an expedition where they thought he’d run out of supplies on his way to India. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ended up funding his travels, and luckily for him, he ran into the Americas or else he would never have had the supplies to reach India.
This post isn’t meant to devolve into an argument for or against evolution. But, I wonder how many more things in “history” are a lie, meant to promote a certain world view. Do any of you have any other examples?
