Why are people so defensive about the Flat Earth?

3rd July, 2023

There is often a sense of ridicule when people mention a belief in a flat Earth. But why is that? Where did it come from, why does it endure, and why is it so mocked? In this blog, James Hannam explores the Flat Earth phenomena.

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Writing to his Jesuit superiors in 1595, Matteo Ricci (1552 – 1610) laid out the consensus about the universe among educated Chinese people at the time. He noted that the Confucian literati could accurately explain the cause of solar eclipses. However, they also believed that there are five rather than four elements, and that the earth is flat and square. The historian of science Joseph Needham (1900 – 1995) was unhappy with this summary. He added a tetchy footnotes to Ricci’s list to castigate the Jesuit’s ignorance of Chinese cosmology, suggesting that belief in the flat earth was recherché by the sixteenth century when it was still very much the norm.

Nowadays, there is a broad scholarly consensus, in China as well as the West, that Chinese savants assumed the earth was flat until the seventeenth century or later. Every culture once assumed the same. This was simply common sense. The hypothesis of a spherical earth is alien to everyday experience, hard to demonstrate empirically and raises difficult questions (not least, why we don’t fall off). The wrong-headed speculations of today’s flat-earthers should not prevent us from recognising that people who lived a long time ago can’t be blamed for failing to grasp things they had no way of knowing.

Today, there is still a level of defensiveness about the flat earth, particularly in respect of the contents of books considered sacred. The foundational texts of the world’s great religions were written by cultures with traditional pictures of the universe. So it isn’t surprising that they simply assume the earth is a plane. This is the case for the Rig Veda, the Bible, the Koran and the Confucian classics. The Buddhist sutras contain detailed descriptions of a circular world with a great mountain at its centre – a vision with much earlier Indo-European roots. The Hebrew Bible was written before anyone knew the true shape of the world. Its authors could no more have taught that the earth is a globe than they could have explained a solar eclipse or, for that matter, quantum mechanics.

Of course, believers consider the scriptures to be divinely inspired. We might expect God to be aware the earth is round. However, the key messages that these texts seek to impart are religious; matters of faith, ritual and morals, not science. The relevance of the natural world is not how it is constructed, but who built it. According to the Koran, “The seven heavens and the earth, and all beings therein, declare His glory.” (17:44); while the Hebrew Psalmist sings, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1). This is something that sophisticated expositors have long realised: the scriptures are written in everyday language to help ordinary people to understand them. When Muslim intellectuals began to adopt the model of the earth as a ball, over a century after the Koran was written, they had no trouble accommodating their new-found knowledge to the text of their holy book. And when western cosmology reached Japan in the eighteenth century, Buddhist scholars noted that the Buddha himself had been concerned with salvation and not petty matters of physics.

If there is nothing to fear from acknowledging that people used to know less about science than we do now, why is there still such sensitivity about the flat earth? The answer can be traced back to attacks on the Catholic Church after the Reformation. Protestant writers criticised the allegedly superstitious theology of the Middle Ages. But, they went further than the facts allowed. For instance, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) complained that the missionary St Vergil of Salzburg (d. 784) had been persecuted for promoting the spherical earth, whereas as he did no more than suggest there might be inhabitants of the antipodes who needed to be evangelised – surely a legitimate concern for a missionary.

In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anti-Catholic polemic ramped up the myth that the Church had been an impediment to the development of science and, in particular, that it had taught the earth was a disc. Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826) breezily claimed that Galileo’s condemnation had been over exactly this question, rather than whether our planet goes around the sun. A biography of Christopher Columbus (1451 – 1506) by Washington Irving (1783 – 1859) notoriously portrayed the navigator’s scheme being ridiculed by a junta of Catholic clerics because the earth is flat. This is fictional but unfortunately the charge stuck.

By making the flat earth a touchstone for irrationality, nineteenth-century Europeans managed to accuse every pre-modern culture of foolishness. So, it is no surprise this has given rise to a measure of defensiveness. The spherical shape of the earth was discovered just once, in Athens in the fourth century BC. It took almost 2,500 years to be fully adopted all over the world. That fact alone should give us pause before we use ignorance of the earth’s form as evidence of inanity.

– James Hannam

James Hannam is the author of God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (2009). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and lives in Kent.

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