Columbus and the Flat Earth: An Example of the Fallacy of Warfare Between Science and Religion
EVERY SCHOOLCHILD KNOWS—OR AT least knew before contemporary “political correctness” deep-sixed the good admiral full fathom five—the story of brave Christopher Columbus, who discovered America against a nearly universal conviction that he would sail right off the edge of a flat earth instead. This silliest and most flagrantly false of all tales within the venerable genre of “moral lessons for kiddies” provides the best example I know for exposing the harm done by the false model of warfare between science and religion—for we can trace the origin of the myth directly to the formulation of this model by Draper and White. Perhaps the generalities of the preceding section provide enough fuel to carry this particular argument for NOMA, based on proving the falsity of the opposite “warfare” model. But, as an essayist at heart, I believe that the best illustration of a generality lies in a well-chosen and adequately documented “little” example—not in a frontal assault on the abstraction itself (a strategy that can rarely proceed beyond tendentious waffling without the support of interesting details).1
We all know that classical scholars established the earth’s sphericity. Aristotle’s cosmology assumed a spherical planet, and Eratosthenes actually measured the earth’s circumference in the third century B.C. The flat-earth myth argues that this knowledge was then lost when ecclesiastical darkness settled over Europe. For a thousand years, almost all scholars held that the earth must be flat—like the floor of a tent, held up by the canopy of the sky, to cite a biblical metaphor read literally. The Renaissance then rediscovered classical notions of sphericity, but proof required the bravery of Columbus and other great explorers who should have sailed off the edge, but (beginning with Magellan’s expedition) returned home from the opposite direction after going all the way round.
The inspirational, schoolchild version of the myth centers upon Columbus, who supposedly overcame the calumny of assembled clerics in an epic battle at Salamanca between freedom of thought and religious dogmatism. Consider this version of the legend from a book for primary-school children written in 1887, soon after the myth’s invention (but little different from accounts that I read as a child in the 1950s):
“But if the world is round,” said Columbus, “it is not hell that lies beyond that stormy sea. Over there must lie the eastern strand of Asia, the Cathay of Marco Polo” … In the hall of the convent there was assembled the imposing company—shaved monks in gowns … cardinals in scarlet robes … “You think the earth is round … Are you not aware that the holy fathers of the church have condemned this belief … This theory of yours looks heretical.” Columbus might well quake in his boots at the mention of heresy; for there was that new Inquisition just in fine running order, with its elaborate bone-breaking, flesh-pinching, thumb-screwing, hanging, burning, mangling system for heretics.
(Some of the quotations, and much of the documentation, in this section come from an excellent book by the historian J. B. Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, Praeger, 1991.)
Dramatic to be sure, but entirely fictitious. No period of “flat earth darkness” ever occurred among scholars (no matter how many uneducated people may have conceptualized our planet in this way, both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval religious scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology. Ferdinand and Isabella did refer Columbus’s plans to a royal commission headed by Hernando de Talavera, Isabella’s confessor and, following the defeat of the Moors, Archbishop of Granada. This commission, composed of both clerical and lay advisers, did meet at Salamanca among other places. They did pose some sharp intellectual objections to Columbus, but no one questioned the earth’s roundness. As a major critique, they argued that Columbus could not reach the Indies in his own allotted time, because the earth’s circumference was too great. Moreover, his critics were entirely right. Columbus had “cooked” his figures to favor a much smaller earth, and an attainable Indies. Needless to say, he did not and could not reach Asia, and Native Americans are still called Indians as a legacy of his error.
Virtually all major Christian scholars affirmed our planet’s roundness. The Venerable Bede referred to the earth as orbis in medio totius mundi positus (an orb placed in the center of the universe) in the eighth century A.D. The twelfth-century translations into Latin of many Greek and Arabic works greatly expanded general appreciation of the natural sciences, particularly astronomy, among scholars—and convictions about the earth’s sphericity both spread and strengthened. Roger Bacon (1220–1292) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) affirmed roundness via Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, as did the greatest scientists of later medieval times, including Nicholas Oresme (1320–1382). All these men held ecclesiastical orders.
So who, then, was arguing for a flat earth, if all leading scholars believed in roundness? Villains must be found for any malfeasance, and Russell shows that the great English philosopher of science William Whewell first identified major culprits in his History of the Inductive Sciences, published in 1837—two far less significant characters, including the reasonably well known church father Lactantius (245–325) and the truly obscure Cosmas Indicopleustes, who wrote his Christian Topography in 547–549. Russell comments: “Whewell pointed to the culprits … as evidence of a medieval belief in a flat earth, and virtually every subsequent historian imitated him—they could find few other examples.”
I own a copy of Lactantius’s Divinae institutiones (Divine precepts), published in Lyons in 1541. This work does indeed include a chapter titled De antipodibus (On the antipodes), ridiculing the notion of a round earth with all the arguments about upside-down Australians, etc., that passed for humor in my fifth-grade class. Lactantius writes: “Can there be anyone so inept to believe that men exist whose extremities lie above their heads [quorum vestigia sint superiora quam capita] … that trees can grow downwards, and that rain, and snow, and hail go upwards instead of falling to earth [pluvias, et nives, et grandinem sursum versus cadere in terram]?” And Cosmas did champion a literal view of a biblical metaphor—the earth as a flat floor for the rectangular, vaulted arch of the heavens above.
Purveyors of the flat-earth myth could never deny the plain testimony of Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and others—so they argued that these men acted as rare beacons of brave light in pervasive darkness. But consider the absurdity of such a position. Who formed the orthodoxy representing this consensus of ignorance? Two minor figures named Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes? Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and their ilk were not brave iconoclasts. They constituted the establishment, and their convictions about the earth’s roundness stood as canonical, while Lactantius and colleagues remained marginal.
Where, then, and why, did the myth of medieval belief in a flat earth arise? Russell’s historiographic work gives us a good fix on both times and people. None of the great eighteenth-century anticlerical rationalists—not Condillac, Condorcet, Diderot, Gibbon, Hume, or our own Benjamin Franklin—accused early Christian scholars of believing in a flat earth, though these men scarcely veiled their contempt for medieval versions of Christianity. Washington Irving gave the flat-earth story a good boost in his largely fictional history of Columbus, published in 1828—but his version did not take hold. The legend grew during the nineteenth century, but did not enter the crucial domains of schoolboy pap or tour-guide lingo. Russell did an interesting survey of nineteenth-century history texts for secondary schools, and found that very few mentioned the flat-earth myth before 1870, but that almost all texts after 1880 featured the legend. We can therefore pinpoint the invasion of general culture by the flat-earth myth.
Those years also marked the construction of the model of warfare between science and religion as a guiding theme of Western history. Such theories of dichotomous struggle always need whipping boys and legends to advance their claims. Russell argues that the flat-earth myth achieved its canonical status as a primary homily for
the triumph of science under this false dichotomization of Western history. How could a better story for the army of science ever be concocted? Religious darkness destroys Greek knowledge and weaves us into a web of fears, based on dogma and opposed to both rationality and experience. Our ancestors therefore lived in anxiety, restricted by clerical irrationality, afraid that any challenge could only provoke a fall off the edge of the earth into eternal damnation. A fit tale for an intended purpose, but entirely false because few medieval Christian scholars ever doubted the earth’s sphericity.
In the preceding section, I traced the genesis of the warfare model of science and religion to the influential books of Draper and White. Both authors used the flat-earth myth as a primary example. Draper began by stating his thesis:
The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compressing arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other … Faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place.
From the measured tones of this statement, Draper descended into virulent anti-Catholicism and a near proclamation of war:
Will modern civilization consent to abandon the career of advancement which has given it so much power and happiness … Will it submit to the dictation of a power … which kept Europe in a stagnant condition for many centuries, ferociously suppressing by the stake and the sword every attempt at progress; a power that is founded in a cloud of mysteries; that sets itself above reason and common sense; that loudly proclaims the hatred it entertains against liberty of thought and freedom in civil institutions …
Then has it in truth come to this, that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both.
Equally uncompromising statements of war issued from the other side, as in this proclamation from the First Vatican Council:
Let him be anathema …
Who shall say that no miracles can be wrought, or that they can never be known with certainty, and that the divine origin of Christianity cannot be proved by them …
Who shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions, even when opposed to revealed doctrine.
Who shall say that it may at times come to pass, in the progress of science, that the doctrines set forth by the Church must be taken in another sense than that in which the Church has ever received and yet receives them.
Them’s fighting words indeed. But remember that these fulminations from both sides reflect the political realities of a particular time (as discussed on this page–this page), not the logical necessities of coherent and unchangeable arguments. Pio Nono’s stark proclamation rightly angered scientists, but it also brought great sorrow to liberals and supporters of science within the Church. Moreover, as documented in chapter 2 (this page–this page) for recent papal attitudes toward human evolution, the Catholic Church has since abandoned this confrontational position, born of a specific set of historical circumstances, and has warmly embraced NOMA.
Draper extolled the flat-earth myth as a primary example of religion’s constraint and science’s progressive power:
The circular visible horizon and its dip at sea, the gradual appearance and disappearance of ships in the offing, cannot fail to incline intelligent sailors to a belief in the globular figure of the earth. The writings of the Mohammedan astronomers and philosophers had given currency to that doctrine throughout Western Europe, but, as might be expected, it was received with disfavor by theologians … Traditions and policy forbade [the papal government] to admit any other than the flat figure of the earth, as revealed in the Scriptures.
Russell comments on the success of Draper’s work:
The History of the Conflict is of immense importance, because it was the first instance that an influential figure had explicitly declared that science and religion were at war, and it succeeded as few books ever do. It fixed in the educated mind the idea that “science” stood for freedom and progress against the superstition and repression of “religion.” Its viewpoint became conventional wisdom.
White’s later book also presents Columbus as an apostle of rationalism against theological dogma. Of Cosmas Indicopleustes’ flat-earth theory, for example, he wrote: “Some of the foremost men in the Church devoted themselves to buttressing it with new texts and throwing about it new outworks of theological reasoning; the great body of the faithful considered it a direct gift from the Almighty.”
Both Draper and White developed their basic model of science versus theology in the context of a seminal and contemporary struggle all too easily viewed in this light—the battle for evolution, specifically for Darwin’s secular version based on natural selection. No issue, certainly since Galileo, had so challenged traditional views about the deepest meaning of human life, and therefore so contacted a domain of religious inquiry as well. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Darwinian revolution directly triggered this influential nineteenth-century conceptualization of Western history as a war between science and religion. White made an explicit connection (quoted on this page) in his statement about Agassiz (the founder of the museum where I now work, and a visiting lecturer at Cornell). Moreover, the first chapter of his book treats the battle over evolution, while the second begins with the flat-earth myth.
Draper wraps himself even more fully in a Darwinian mantle. The end of his preface designates five great episodes in the history of science’s battle with religion: the debasement of classical knowledge and the descent of the Dark Ages; the flowering of science under early Islam; the battle of Galileo with the Catholic Church; the Reformation (a plus for an anti-Catholic like Draper); and the struggle for Darwinism. Moreover, no one could claim a more compelling personal license for such a view, for Draper had been an unwilling witness—one might even say an instigator—of the single most celebrated incident in the overt struggle between Darwin and divinity. We all have heard the famous story of Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley duking it out at the British Association meeting in 1860. But how many people know that their verbal pyrotechnics did not form the stated agenda of this meeting, and only arose during free discussion following the formal paper officially set for this session—an address by the same Dr. Draper on the “intellectual development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin.”
This link between struggles over Darwinism and the construction, by Draper and White, of the mythical model of warfare between science and religion—a model that must be debunked for the NOMA principle to prevail—permits a smooth transition to my inevitable discussion of the most potent and current American battle between scientific evidence and claims advanced in the name of religion—the attempt by biblical fundamentalists, now extending over more than seventy contentious years, to ban the teaching of evolution in American public schools, or at least to demand equal time for creationism on a literal biblical time scale (with an earth no more than ten thousand years old) in any classroom that also provides instruction about evolution. If this battle has played a major role in the twentieth-century cultural history of America, and has consumed the unwelcome time of many scientists (including yours truly) in successful political campaigns to preserve the First Amendment and reject the legislatively mandated teaching of palpable nonsense, then how can NOMA be defended as more than a pipe dream in a utopian world?
1 Much of the rest of this section comes from a previous essay, “The Late Birth of a Flat Earth,” published in Dinosaur in a Haystack (Harmony Books, 1995).
Defending NOMA from Both Sides Now: The Struggle Against Modern Creationism
CREATIONISM: A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN VIOLATION
OF NOMA
The myth of Columbus and the flat earth supports NOMA by the negative strategy of showing how the opposite model of warfare between science and religion often invents battles that never occurred, but arise only as forced inferences from the fictional model. Christian scholars never proclaimed a flat earth against the findings of science and the knowledge of antiquity, and Columbus fought no battles with ecclesiastical authorities over this nonissue. Modern creationism, alas, has provoked a real battle, thus supporting NOMA with a positive example of the principle that all apparent struggles between science and religion really arise from violations of NOMA, when a small group allied to one magisterium tries to impose its irrelevant and illegitimate will upon the other’s domain. Such genuine historical battles, therefore, do not pit science against religion, and can only represent a power play by zealots formally allied to one side, and trying to impose their idiosyncratic and decidedly minority views upon the magisterium of the other side.
The saga of attempts by creationists to ban the teaching of evolution, or to force their own fundamentalist version of life’s history into science curricula of public schools, represents one of the most interesting, distinctive, and persistent episodes in the cultural history of twentieth-century America. The story features a tempestuous beginning, starring two of the great characters of the 1920s, and also a gratifying end in the favorable Supreme Court decision of 1987. The larger struggle, however, has not terminated, but only shifted ground—as creationist zealots find other ways to impose their will and nonsense, now that the Court’s defense of the First Amendment precludes their old strategy of enforcing creationism by state legislation!
Rocks of Ages Page 8