And flat Earth cosmology and a modern 21st century. Since, where you have satellite imagery and airplanes and everyone knows that the Earth is today, there's a difference between flat Earth denialist today, and people who lived many thousands of years ago before such technology existed to know the shape of the Earth.
There's a big difference here.
And I think that people in the 21st century, we the concept of a flat Earth and we find it offensive because it's just so stupid, and so of course if someone said that the Bible presented a flat Earth, many in the church would find this offensive.
But from a an academic sense, it's a known fact of history that people many centuries ago just didn't know the shape of the Earth.
That's just a fact that we all have to accept, and when we look at scripture, scripture was actually written many centuries before the discovery of the shape of the Earth. We're talking literally Genesis or parts of Genesis dating back 6'7 or 800 years before Greeks even had clear arguments for the shape of the Earth.
I think people forget that the Bible really is an incredibly ancient argument, even though we have modern English translations today that make it look modern.
The Bible doesn't talk about modern things like the discovery of DNA or the internet or artificial intelligence or spacecrafts or subatomic photons or general relativity or the theory of evolution or heliocentrism or...
You could think of any number of recent discoveries in science, and you don't find these things in the Bible because the Bible was written before they were discovered.
And among those many many things, is the spherical shape of the earth. And so it's not intentional or intentionally offensive if I say that the Bible presents a flat Earth. Rather it's a reflection on the contextual background of scripture.
And people are going to have a hard time separating the two. Our culture has taught us clearly that flat Earth is so stupid or weird or conspiracy related that we want nothing to do with it. But we can't let the modern flat Earth movement negatively influence our understanding of ancient history.
Kind of like how the early Catholic Church didn't know that the Earth orbited the Sun, it's not that people were stupid, they just lived in a time before such concepts were known.
Just like how 30 years ago, nobody really knew much of anything about the internet, it's not that people were stupid, that kind of concept and Discovery just didn't exist yet.
And a thousand years into the future from now, people will still look back on us today and will say, wow those 21st century Americans, there was so much that they didn't know in terms of cosmology, even Stephen Hawking, as brilliant as he was, or Albert Einstein or any of the smartest scientific thinkers of human history, it doesn't matter who you pick, there are things that they didn't know or won't know 500 years in the future from now.
That doesn't make Stephen Hawking stupid, it just contextualizes the time and which Stephen Hawking lived.
And when we read the Bible, we kind of have to do the same thing, when did Moses live?
