# Ancient cultures and a heliocentric universe? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 26, 2004, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-cultures-and-a-heliocentric-universe/266129 "2004-09-26T04:31:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![rfgdxm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c0e974/32.png) [@rfgdxm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rfgdxm)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2004, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-cultures-and-a-heliocentric-universe/266129/21 "2004-09-27T16:33:42Z")
> [@W. Fikere Tomba](#): > > I think we all agree that Columbus underestimated the Earth’s size, and that he assumed it was a ball. The question is, was Columbus was a revolutionary for thinking of a spherical Earth, or was he merely subscribing to the accepted view of the time? Note that the “accepted view” that counts here is that of the highly educated elite. It could well be the vast majority of the peons thought the world was flat. However, what counted to Columbus was what the wealthy aristocracy thought. Columbus had financial backers. They believed the world was a ball. If they thought the world was flat, they sure as heck wouldn’t have paid real money to provide Columbus with 3 good ships, provisions, and pay for the crew. And, quite obviously Columbus was able to assemble a crew of sailors who thought the world was a ball. Any sailor who thought the world was flat would have just laughed at Columbus for asking him to sail off the edge of the world with him in a silly attempt to reach Asia in an impossible way. And, Columbus was hardly revolutionary. As I posted earlier, the ancient Greeks actually _proved_ the world was a ball a couple of millennia before. Which part of during a lunar eclipse the shadow of the Earth is always circular no matter where the moon is in the sky, and the only object that always casts a circular shadow is a sphere is hard to grok? If _I_ can figure this out, that Columbus can be considered a revolutionary thinker because he was at least as intelligent as me seems silly. Really, I am not that smart. 😉 > [@](#): > > I’m afraid I can’t give a citation, but it has been my understanding that the Church fathers ca. 1500 were authoritarians, but not fundamentalists or Biblical literalists. This may explain why they had such a large, bureaucratic hierarchy: they needed such a structure to enforce a dogma _not_ based solely on the Bible. Modern Protestant fundamentalists do not seem to need such a hierarchy, since they get their dogma straight from the Book. The Roman Catholics have never been Biblical literalists. If the Pope says something is so, the doctrine of papal infalliblity can wash away any scriptural error. This is true to this day. The Roman Catholic church position now on evolution is that Darwin probably got it right, and this is not inconsistent with church belief. Basically, they just accepted Darwin got it right, and tossed in that they believe that humanity was imbued with a Divine spark and was special. Science can’t disprove that humanity was blessed thus. Thus any Roman Catholic can believe in evolution, without contradicting the church. I say this was a brilliant dodge. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![bonzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2004, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-cultures-and-a-heliocentric-universe/266129/22 "2004-09-27T22:19:02Z")
> [@Complex Conjugate](#): > > I kinmd find a cite for this, but I’ve heard that the idea that medieval people believed the Earth was flat and Columbus proved them wrong orginated in the first half of the nineteenth century. That’s the conclusion of Jeffrey Burton Russell in his _Inventing the Flat Earth_ (1991) - see [this summary](http://www.id.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/RUSSELL/FlatEarth.html) by him. I’m personally not overly convinced by his (rather apologistic) explanation of why the myth spread so readily in the late 19th century, but his isolation of its invention to the early part of the century has convinced other historians and nobody’s subsequently been able to push its origin any further back. ---
**Author:** ![rfgdxm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c0e974/32.png) [@rfgdxm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rfgdxm)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2004, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-cultures-and-a-heliocentric-universe/266129/23 "2004-09-27T22:37:46Z")
> [@bonzer](#): > > That’s the conclusion of Jeffrey Burton Russell in his _Inventing the Flat Earth_ (1991) - see [this summary](http://www.id.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/RUSSELL/FlatEarth.html) by him. I’m personally not overly convinced by his (rather apologistic) explanation of why the myth spread so readily in the late 19th century, but his isolation of its invention to the early part of the century has convinced other historians and nobody’s subsequently been able to push its origin any further back. Perhaps the uneducated masses in the 1400s did think the Earth was flat? Of course, Colimbus dealt with the educated and wealthy, and not the peons of his day. ---
**Author:** ![bonzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2004, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-cultures-and-a-heliocentric-universe/266129/24 "2004-09-27T23:16:39Z")
> [@rfgdxm](#): > > Perhaps the uneducated masses in the 1400s did think the Earth was flat? Of course, Colimbus dealt with the educated and wealthy, and not the peons of his day. Absolutely. Which makes those uneducated masses irrelevant to the myth or its origins and hence the specific issue I was addressing. As I’ve previously pointed out on the SDMB, about the earliest data point for the beliefs about any general population that I can think of is that enough Londoners evidently understood the truth by 1599 for it to make sense to call a new theatre The Globe. Before that, it’s guesswork. But what Russell convincingly shows is that it’s extremely unlikely that either the Church or any other educated group was _teaching_ anybody that the earth was flat. It’s quite possible many people remained ignorant through, well, sheer ignorance. And one can turn the issue around. If the uneducated masses did believe it was flat, how do we know that Columbus’ voyages convinced them of anything? There are no records of any of them writing “dang, that Italian fellow’s obviously proved me wrong.” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-cultures-and-a-heliocentric-universe/266129.md?page=1)