Somehow people just read an interesting book and decided that their great-grandparents all believed on that stupid thing.
They were right, too, as the size of the planet was pretty accurately known. He just lucked out that someone had left a continent for him to run into.
See also the religion-science conflict thesis, which was popularized by Draper and White:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis
> My guests today are David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu, co-authors of Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World. David is a physicist, science teacher and writer and James is a historian of science and religion. In this interview we discuss their book and the origin and impact of the Conflict Thesis - the pervasive but erroneous idea that religion and science have always been in conflict down the ages.
https://hti.osu.edu/sites/default/files/documents_in_the_cas...
"heresy" ... "that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world" ... "contrary to Holy Scripture"
More detailed:
"We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo . . . have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture".
Additionally, Galileo's and Copernicus' books were finally removed from the index of the banned books only in 1835, they were on the banned list for more than 200 years, since the 1616 Inquisition's judgment.
Context: Galileo was the first person to see with his own eyes with his first of the kind self-made telescope the moons that are today known as Galilean moons and recognized them as the satellites of Jupiter in March 1610. Which convinced him that the understanding of the church was wrong. The church sentenced him in 1633 to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642.
Which was not evidence for heliocentrism.
In the early 1600s there were seven models floating around: Heraclidean (geo-heliocentric), Ptolemaic, Copernican (heliocentric, pure circles with lots of epicycles), Gilbertian, Tychonic, Ursine, Keplerian.
Newton, in his Principia (1687), did not use calculus to present his Universal Graviation: rather it was carefully structured in Aristotelian form, with axioms and deductive logic. Kepler's laws can be deduced from principles. Still no coriollis or parallax.
The first inkling of the Earth's motion comes in 1728 when James Bradley detects stellar aberration in γ-Draconis. In 1791 Giovanni Guglielmini finds a 4 mm Coriolis deflection over a 29 m drop, thus providing empirical evidence of rotation. In 1806 Giuseppi Calandrelli publishes "Ozzervatione e riflessione sulla paralasse annua dall’alfa della Lira," reporting parallax in α-Lyrae. So parallax, the chief evidence for the Earth's motion came 250+ years after Galileo.
Stellar parallax was considered since at least Aristotle, as he mentions in his On the Heavens (II.14), and since it is not observed then it is reasonable to conclude that there is no motion (it took several thousand years to develop instruments to actually measure it).
Galileo's chief problems were (a) he was an egotistical jackass, and (b) he had no evidence for what he was claiming to be true. He was allowed to put forward the Copernican model "suppositionally", i.e., as an hypothesis, and "not absolutely". The latter of which, (b), Galileo admitted in his first deposition (12 April 1633): it was concluded that his book put forward the idea 'absolutely', which is where his conviction comes from.
By the late 1600s most folks had switched over to the Keplerian model: not necessarily because they thought it was what was actually happening in reality, but probably because it made the math easier.
For a good timeline of events, see (recently late) Michael F. Flynn's "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown":
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
Daniel Whitten's "Matters of Faith and Morals Ex Suppositione" is also an interesting read.
Many useless claims which don't disprove that his sentence was literally because of:
"heresy" ... "that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world" ... "contrary to Holy Scripture"
And the church forbade his book as "heresy" for 200 years.
He was right. The church was wrong, directly referring to the effing "Holy Scripture" to support its claim and played fighting "heresy", keeping being wrong for 200 years afterwards. It's so clear.
Monkeys throwing darts can also (just happen to) be "right" when picking stocks that do well in the market. Galileo had as much evidence in believing Copernicus was right as the monkeys.
If he had simply stuck to simply arguing both sides of an hypothesis in his Dialogue, which he was asked to do by the pope in the first place, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Heck, Kepler's stuff was already around for decades, and Galileo completely ignored it (along with Tycho):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Ch...
If you want to argue 'for science' then Galileo is not a good example: the only thing he just happen to be right about was that the sun was the centre of things, whereas everything else in the Copernican system (including epicycles) was just as messy as in Ptolemy. There was no practical reason to switch systems, and no evidence to think it was correct.
At the end of the day the person who actually got things right was Kepler, and he kept plugging away at the problem because of this belief that the physical world reflected the spiritual realm (KGW XIII, letter 23, 35; 1595)
> In this way, then, the Sun, itself at rest in the middle and yet the fount of motion, carries the image of God the Father and creator. For what creation is to God, motion is to the Sun. Moreover, it moves [the planets] in a fixed place, as the Father creates in the Son. Unless the fixed stars offered a place, thanks to their motionlessness, no movement could exist. I defended this axiom while still in Tübingen. The Sun distributes motive virtue through the medium space, in which the planets are found: just as the Father creates by spirit or by the virtue of His spirit. And from the necessity of these presuppositions, it follows that motion is in proportion with distance.
See Kozhamthadam's "The Religious Foundations of Kepler's Science" and "Theological Foundations of Kepler's Astronomy" by Barker and Goldstein.
Going further, one needs to believe in certain metaphysical assumptions before you can even start doing what we know call science:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Provid...
There were plenty ideas floating around at the time, but ideas are cheap. Galileo certainly made important improvements to telescope technology, but his efforts in moving forward new models (specifically Copernican) were a dead end, and he made no practical difference to things: Kepler was already defending Copernicus in his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1e 1596), and put forward his laws in Astronomia nova (1609), a copy of which he sent to Galileo, which Galileo promptly ignored even two decades later when he published his Dialogue (1632).
The Earth was never the center around which the Sun rotated. Not in 1AD, not in 1600AD, not now.
If the church claimed that the "Holy Scripture" says that the Earth is in the center, the church was still wrong, and moreover, the "Holy Scripture" was wrong.
The church can't be right to claim "heresy" to somebody who was right then and is still right now.
It wan't even the case that the Pope (in person) was mad with Galileo for being used as a Simplicio caricature and figure of fun in his work.
All the data used came from church funded observatories and church backed astronomers, all the main ideas from both sides of the debate came from church funded theorists.
The crux of the dispute and the trial was pretty much that Galileo was a dedicated edgelord who had decades of pissing people off and making enemies on his ledger.
Think less about religion Vs science and more about maverick asshole vs. faction within giant bureaucracy.
Once Galileo had "insulted the Pope" the knives came out and his enemies struck, it was a pure show trial fueled by personal vindictiveness that came from being the target of savage biting insults.
- the church officially wrote that the Earth is the center
- that the Holy Scripture says so and
- whoever says differently is heretic
and the Earth was never the center.
The Catholic Church has changed its stance on many things through time, see [history].
In this instance the Church itself had officially requested a presentation be made to demonstrate various arguments for and against different viewpoints .. one of which was that the heavens didn't rotate about the earth.
It wasn't a surprise that such a well known hypothetical should appear in a book commissioned to outline such hypotheticals.
It was the pope that asked Galileo to write a book in the first place. The Church was so against the idea that… its leader asked a prominent natural philosopher to write about. The book had two imprimatur approvals.
> The Earth was never the center around which the Sun rotated. Not in 1AD, not in 1600AD, not now.
And there was no evidence to support this assertion until 1728 and Bradley with γ-Draconis, and with the first parallax report in 1806 and Calandrelli (a priest) with α-Lyrae/Vega (the actual value he calculated was wrong). It was not a new idea when Copernicus published his book in 1543, nor when Kepler defended it in 1596, nor when Galileo published his Dialgoue in 1623: Aristotle most famously considered it in ~300 BC and rejected it for lack of evidence. Anaxagoras (400s BC) and Aristarchus of Samos put forward heliocentrism.
Politics is a complex thing where people don't mean what they say, and their meaning change depending on who are listening, how, why and when.
Heliocentrism was discovered by a joint-enterprise of two enemy churches, and only became heresy post-facto when some very good evidence arrived. But by then it seemed to really become heresy, and was punished by itself. Almost certainly the Galileo's posture was important for that, but the society's context was way more important.
Anyway, you won't get any good conclusion if you insist on analyzing the politicians arguments on logic or expect coherence.
Those who judged Galileo were part of the Roman Inquisition.
Pope Urban's hands were tied when Galileo was seen to mock the pope and church through the figure and dialogue of Simplicio.
This is of course does not make the adjudication OK but you're going too far in the opposite direction.
The arguments made "by an idiot" were clear swipes at both Lodovico delle Colombe and Cesare Cremonini.
And other passages in other works of Galileo, but that alone is sufficiento sink "Evidence-free claim".
This has been batted back and forth since (at least) The Sleepwalkers (1959) by Arthur Koestler so you can argue against the assertaion but it's foolish to pretend there isn't reams of references on this going back decades.
All those references are in the class of this salt stuff in the OP. They're whole fiction.
The Our Fake History podcast had a two-part series on this:
* https://www.podcastone.com/episode/Episode-163--What-Was-The...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-163-what-was-t...
* https://www.podcastone.com/episode/Episode-164--What-Was-The...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-164-what-was-t...
And in fact, such stories are not that uncommon at the 18. Century. Thinkers and scientists were fighting against the church, and they made up many fake stories to show how stupid and dangerous the church is. And AFAIK the church believing in a flat earth was one of them.
But it wouldn’t be fair to say that’s what our “culture” believes to be true.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/aug/energy-demands-limit-our...
Not saying that only X% of our brain is being used, but what it essentially says is that our brain is power-limited, and therefore, it has to be selective in which parts to "turn on". It makes a lot of sense, there are few things in life more important than energy and power management, and human brains already need lots of both.
We call that an epileptic seizure. :)
I can't recommend literature, a probably source is in medical textbook.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seizure/sympt...
There are plenty of cultures from 2000+ years ago that never bothered thinking about the shape of Earth. I don't know of any that did bother and decided it was flat (and would really like a pointer), even though I do know of some ambiguous texts that people keep interpreting as that, but are much better explained as they not caring about the shape.
It's quite hard to do astronomy on a larger area than a single city and not discover the planet isn't flat. And it looks like people have been exchanging astronomic findings over some longish distances for longer than they have been writing texts that we can read today.
For those, we don't have any kind of indicator what they believed about earths shape, so why do they matter?
The way you phrased your comment indicated that you kinda believe that now one at any point in early history really believed in a flat earth, and it's all just a story made up later.
Semitic cultures very much believed the Earth was more or less a disc-like shape that consisted of the known world (mostly in their sphere of influence, if you pardon the expression). But they also had some other ideas, like that of chaotic universal waters above and below the Earth, separated by the firmament, and supported by pillars (though you can see this idea changing somewhat by the time the book of Job was written). This is a theme that is repeated in Genesis, Isaiah, Job, and one or more of the Psalms.
Not coincidentally, it's fairly well established in the scholarly literature that this was the view of ancient Near Eastern writers, and it wasn't until Young Earth Creationists decided to apply a degree of scientific concordism to the text where we get a more distorted view of Hebrew words like hûg inferring something other than a disc or circular inscription. It's true that they probably didn't care so much about the shape (unlike us), but their cosmology is definitely inferred rather strongly in the biblical texts (and in some cases from their neighbors). John Walton's "Lost World" series on Genesis are a good pointer in this direction, but I'd also suggest the IVP Bible Background Commentary (Walton is a contributor) which certainly touches on this motif and draws upon other creation accounts such as those in the Ugaritic tablets, Baal Cycle, etc. The late Dr. Michael Heiser has a great lecture series you can find on YT talking about biblical cosmology that might help if you're into that format.
The link with Columbus was indeed perpetrating a myth. You get this as recently as Ray Comfort's "Evidence Bible" which is filled with complete buffoonery in that it attempts to explain Columbus' motives based on his mention of Isaiah; YECs like Comfort link this to Isaiah 40:22 (again, with an incorrect reading of hûg). Columbus was motivated by his eschatology and the only reason he ever cited Isaiah was because of its dual function as prophetic-apocalyptic literature.
They were right on the way when the idea of popular astronomy (instead of only god-appointed people doing it) reached Europe, and yet they seem oblivious from it.
It's a really good reminder that even on the era of large empires, culture was still very fractally distributed.
This is a really good point. The ANE had its own idea of cosmology, Europe its, Asia its, etc. Even then, much of the biblical text contains polemics against Babylonian ideas (recall that cosmology, deity, and "function" are all tied together in their worldview).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_astronomy#:~:text....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_Map_of_the_World
This idea probably wasn't unique to the Babylonians, but this approximation of a disc-shaped Earth was fairly commonplace up to and including the Exhilic Period (biblical texts likely being influenced, at least in part, by the Babylonian views though much of the text is certainly constructed of polemic narratives).
> Isaiah 11:12: He will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.
Which clearly indicates some kind of quadrilateral, or perhaps a tetrahedron.
Regardless of shape, I think the most fundamental shift occurred with the idea that the Earth is not a center of the universe.
天圓地方 (literally: sky round, land square) was a serious core idea in ancient Chinese cosmology that was most popular 2000 years ago around the Han Dynasty period.
As for some serious pointers as you requested, here: https://ctext.org/lunheng/shuo-ri/zh
There's a couple paragraphs arguing that the sky isn't round (dome-like) but "flat" and parallel to the land because people have travelled and have never seen the sky merge with the land. (see the paras starting "實者、天不在地中，日亦不隨天隱，天平正，與地無異。")
You might say the ancient Chinese didn't care enough so they ended up with wrong conclusions (or parroted whatever was told to them by even more ancient sources that just made up its cosmology), but at any rate the Chinese definitely did believe in flat earth 2000 years ago, and we have very reliable records for that one.
It would be like saying, "It's a myth that in the 21st century, they were bunch of rubes who were unaware that every single object is exerting a gravitational force on them." Well, um, it's a myth that physics-educated people were unaware of this, sure. But most people have no reason to learn about this or be aware of it; it's not relevant to everyday life.
Just go on social media today to see the same thing in action.