Despite the clarity of 20th century scholarship on this matter, we should not minimize the potential of such rhetoric for providing ‘historical’ justification for a conflict view of science and faith relations, and for providing support to an agenda of removing religion from contemporary society.
These historians have also refuted the claim that belief in a flat earth reigned supreme until Columbus (or Magellan or Copernicus or some other 16th century figure) restored the truth of a round earth.Īrmed with an erroneous vision of the past, however, internet warriors with sharp rhetoric make bold claims about the ‘ hole left by Christian dark ages’ and the grand and steady progress made by science once unshackled from religion.
Since the early 20th century a chorus of historians has denounced this supposed 1,000 years of ignorance (5th to 15th centuries), when scientific knowledge is said to have fallen to such a low ebb as to have nearly erased the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and to have flattened the globe. But is there any truth in this accusation? Christianity has been accused of the suppression of knowledge in this ‘dark age’. For more than a century, however, this very insult has been hurled at a millennium of Western European history, regarded as the bastion of Christian flat-earthism. To be called a flat-earther is the ultimate of ‘scientific’ insults. Today, most people regard flat-earthism as the ultimate in nonsense and as scientific ‘heresy’.
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