That's it in a nutshell.
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And, as we could have expected, we have creationists spewing typical lying creationist nonsense.
@Privratnik: "Remember that it was scientists, not the church, that first believed the world was flat. The church may have feared the unknown and made bad decisions, but it didn't invent flat earth theory."
The church didn't need to invent the flat earth theory. It is found in the Bible. And several early Christian writers believed the earth to be flat, including Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Lactantius, Tertullian, Theophilus, and Clement. In the sixth century, Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote a book called Christian Topology in which he used the Bible to prove that the earth is flat. This was at a time when most educated people believed the earth to be spherical.
And I challenge @Privratnik to show when *scientists* believed the earth to be flat. If he cannot do that, then he is a bald-faced liar.
The fact is that the ancient Greek scientists knew that the earth is a sphere at the same time the writers of the Bible believed it to be a flat, immovable disk, supported by pillars, and covered by the solid firmament of heaven.
In the fourth century B.C. Aristotle presented several scientific arguments for a spherical earth. Heraclides provided rational arguments to show that the earth is spinning on its axis. And in the third century B.C. Aristarchus even proposed a view of the solar system essentially the same as our modern view. He also measured the distance to the moon and its size with remarkable accuracy. Also in the third century B.C. Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy.
On the other hand, according to Ecclesiastes 1:5 the sun actually goes around the earth--as, of course, it must, since, according to Ps 93:1, Ps 96:10, and 1 Chr 16:30, the earth does not move. And the earth cannot move because, according to 1 Samuel 2:8 and Ps 75:3, it is placed on pillars. And because it is placed on pillars, it has an underside and an upper side, as confirmed by Isaiah 40:22 which indicates that the earth is a flat disk.
(If earth were a sphere it would not have an under side and an upper side. The Hebrew word translated as "circle" in Isaiah 40:22 is chuwg, which means "circle" not "sphere." Strong's Concordance: "circle"..."describe a circle." Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament: "Circle...the earth conceived as a disc, Is 40:22." Hebrew-Aramaic and English Lexicon of the Old Testament: "draw round, make a circle." If a sphere were meant, the Hebrew word duwr would have been used.)
Since the biblical earth is flat, it has an underside and under the earth is the abyss, which is referred to several times in the Bible. That is also what is being referred to in Job 26:7 when it says that the earth hangs over nothing. Job 26:7 implies that the earth has an upper side and an underside, which the actual earth does not have. (The original Hebrew word translated as "upon" in that passage in the KJV also means "over.") The actual sphere of the earth in space is not "suspended' or "hanging" "over" or "upon" nothing. It is orbiting the sun at 66,700 miles per hour.
There are several other verses in the Bible indicating the earth is flat. Nebuchadnezzar's vision in Dan 4:10-11 clearly indicates the earth is flat (if it were not flat the tree could not be seen from all the earth), and Dan 2:28 states that the visions of Nebuchadnezzar are from God. If the biblical god says the biblical earth is flat, it must be flat.
The original Hebrew word translated as firmament is raqiya. That is a noun derived from the Hebrew word raqa, which is a verb meaning "to beat out." That term is used in the bible in reference to beating out metal into plates or expanses of the metal (as in Exodus 39:3). So raqiya, as a noun, would literally mean "that which is beaten out."
The idea is that the firmament, or sky, is a solid, beaten out expanse or vault set on the rim of the flat disk of the earth. The firmament holds back the waters that are above the firmament, as stated in Genesis. If the firmament were not solid, it could not hold back the waters.
This understanding is confirmed in Job 37:18, which states:
"Can you beat out the vault of the skies as he does,
hard as a mirror of cast metal?" (New English Bible. .)
There, the Hebrew word translated as "beat out" (or "spread out" in other versions) is, as noted above, raqa.
Also, the stars in the biblical cosmos are just lights set in the firmament. As mere lights in the sky, they will fall to the earth in the Last Days (Matt 24:29), something that is ridiculous considering the actual stars are other suns and many times larger than the earth.
Some might say that the language of such things is just poetic allusion. If that is so, how does one determine what is allusion and what is not? Even if it is poetry, that does not mean that it cannot reflect what the writers of the Bible actually believed. And if the Bible is the word of god and god does not lie, would he make statements that are not factual even if they are in the form of poetry? Moreover, the above descriptions provide a coherent, structurally consistent view of the biblical cosmos and that view is consistent throughout the whole Bible.
As for "bad decisions" made by the church, among those you can point to is its burning Giordano Bruno at the stake for saying, in contradiction to the Bible, that the earth moves, and its persecution of Galileo for saying the same thing.
The Bible-based belief of the church was wrong then, and the Bible-based belief of the present-day creationists is just as wrong.
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@Privratnik: "Creationists are open to being disproved, but it hasn't happened yet."
They are not, and it has happened numerous times.