Flat Earthers: What They Believe and Why

[Job 33:6]

Thank God for Lutherans, in maintaining a Christological emphasis in understanding the word of God.

There is a book titled The Meaning of Creation (John Knox Press) by Lutheran pastor-scholar Conrad Hyers in which he makes the case that the Gen. 1 text is a refutation of the various gods comprising the regions of nature. The account of creation avoids using, for instance, the Hebrew words for sun and moon and uses descriptive language instead because the literal words in Hebrew are sun-god and moon-god. The creation account ends (Gen 2:4) with a touch of satire: These are the generations (genealogies of the gods), when they were created (instead).

Second, it is my hope that eventually the missionary accommodation of putting a plastic Jesus overlay over pagan holidays such as Christmas and Easter will be replaced with the holidays (holy-days) Yahweh gave us to celebrate instead. Recognizing the Passover as one of them instead of Easter (the pagan Norse eoster) is a good start. Some churches have church camps, which is an unwitting move toward bringing back the "Feast of Booths" or what I translate in the vernacular as the Camping Festival, which reminds us that we are sojourners seeking to travel in God's tent (Psalm 15). The two groups of Yahwist holidays are in the spring and the fall. It is not surprising that the feast of Trumpets - trumpets sounding the arrival of the king - should be around the time of the birth of Jesus.

The whole YEC idea is based on faulty biblical exegesis. Nobody tries to interpret the Sumerian or Egyptian writings as modern science. Why should the Bible be any different? The Genesis account answers that Yahweh gave adam "dominion" over the physical surroundings, where dominion implies the ability to know it. That effort in our time is called science, whether physical or social.

I think this is how many Christians view egyptian history:

 

[DennisF]

And yes, it is in a dream, but the earth in this dream is flat, nonetheless.

Job 28:24 NRSVUE
[24] For he looks to the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens.

Id say that the easiest explanation is to simply view the text as phenomenological, or describing the sky with figurative language.

Later rabbinic writings speak about breaking through the raqia with drills. Various nations around the world also have ancient stories about shooting the sky with arrows and climbing ladders up to it to ascend through its windows to heaven, as well.

On that note, there is a verse in Genesis about angels ascending a ladder to heaven as well.

Genesis 28:12-13 NIV
[12] He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. [13] There above it stood the Lord, and he said: “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying.

And a lot of creationists like to repeat "well like Daniel 4:20, this is a dream". But I think this response misses the point that these texts are affirmations of the same cosmology of Job, Exodus, Genesis, Ezekiel and everywhere else in the Bible. As if people would mysterious dream of a flat earth despite not thinking of such a thing when they were awake (Daniel 4:20).

It's more reasonable, much like most people do when they read Genesis 7:11 and 8:2 about windows opening and closing in the sky to release water, to simply conclude that Genesis and the old testament are figuratively expressing an ancient Israelite cosmology.

Genesis 8:2 ESV
[2] The fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained,

It need not be more complicated than this.

It's the same thing with Joshua 10 or old test references about kidneys, or Job or proverbs describing boundaries for the sea etc.

Job 7:12 NIV
[12] Am I the sea, or the monster of the deep, that you put me under guard?

Psalm 89:9-11 ESV
[9] You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them. [10] You crushed Rahab like a carcass; you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm. [11] The heavens are yours; the earth also is yours; the world and all that is in it, you have founded them.

Proverbs 8:28-29 ESV
[28] when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, [29] when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

Job 38:8-10 ESV
[8] “Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, [9] when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, [10] and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors,

And some of this relates to the crushing of leviathan, a representation of the sea. But much like the waters above, the waters below were also held back by a figuratively solid structure.

And then you get flat earthers that will say, "well maybe the earth actually is flat like in Daniel, and maybe the sky actually is or was solid". Um no, there never were nor will there ever be, windows in the sky opening and closing to release and restrain water. The Bible is not an astronomy textbook.

Then you get people making up ideas about vapor canopies during the flood or ice particles at the edge of the universe and all sorts of absurd ideas, because people don't want to just come to terms with the fact that the Bible uses figurative language.

Yes, the whole pattern of thinking about the physical world in scripture - that is, the Hebrew-Yahwist way of thinking - is phenomenological; that is, descriptions are given as observed. This might help to explain why in the Genesis 1 account, which orders the events of creation in how we would think about them, except the fourth day. For us, no star (sun), no light. One explanation for this is that on the earth, it is not until the fourth day that the heavy cloud layer expected by modern science over an early earth would have dissipated enough to allow sunlight to reach the ground. I don't know if this is the right way to regard the fourth day, but for anyone seeking a concordist understanding, it would possibly resolve the conflict between the Genesis ordering of events and a contemporary understanding from science (but not YEC science).

P.S. Flat-earth is science in that it is a hypothesis based on observations, but it has so much observable evidence against it that it fits into the rejected category of "good ideas" (except by flat-earthers) along with the phlogiston theory of heat. Which leads to a story ...

I was once a member the American Scientific Affiliation, and one of the persons who gave talks at the Annual Meeting was a Lutheran pastor and astrophysicist, George Murphy (whose father, a professor of classics at Ohio U. was my wife's early Latin mentor - a small-world story in itself). He once gave a talk about how a few centuries ago, it was believed (the phlogiston theory of heat) that heat was a substance, and that the Russian Orthodox believed it was important to be baptized in pure water. So, George recounted, baptism - being buried in death with Christ - in the cold Russian winter took on literal meaning!

Putting on a flat-earth hat for the moment, my best argument for a flat earth comes from Tom McNamara on Quora, a fellow electoniker with a PhD in optronics from MIT, who says: The earth looks flat where I am. How about where you are? He proposes an experiment whereby others from all over the world observe whether the earth is flat where they are and report in. If the consensus is that it is flat, then the matter is resolved, no?