Flattening the Earth - A Study

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FLATTENING THE EARTH 1 | Flattening the Earth: Columbus and the Falsification of History Jonatas Cavani University of Missouri

description

This study gives a brief overview of the Flat Error – the idea that Europeans believed the earth to be flat – tracing its origin in the writings of 19th century historians and comparing it with medieval interpretations of the shape of the earth. This study also analyzes secondary students’ ideas concerning the Flat Error and their views of the Middle Ages. Primary source documents before and after the time of Columbus are used to foster inquiry and historical thinking. Finally, possible explanations are given why this Error has persisted to this day and how it plays a larger role in the Conflict Thesis – the idea that science and religion are in constant warfare.

Transcript of Flattening the Earth - A Study

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Flattening the Earth:

Columbus and the Falsification of History

Jonatas Cavani

University of Missouri

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Abstract

This study gives a brief overview of the Flat Error – the idea that Europeans believed the earth to

be flat – tracing its origin in the writings of 19th century historians and comparing it with

medieval interpretations of the shape of the earth. This study also analyzes secondary students’

ideas concerning the Flat Error and their views of the Middle Ages. Primary source documents

before and after the time of Columbus are used to foster inquiry and historical thinking. Finally,

possible explanations are given why this Error has persisted to this day and how it plays a larger

role in the Conflict Thesis – the idea that science and religion are in constant warfare.

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Introduction – The Curious Case of Christopher Columbus

I believe it was in an elementary school in Brazil when I heard for the first time the story

of Christopher Columbus’ mighty travels and the discovery of the Americas. Of course, that such

discovery, as important as it was, simply paled in comparison to Pedro Alvares Cabral’s voyage

in 1500 where by “accident,” he found Brazil. At least, that was the impression that the teacher

had given us. In Middle School, the same old story was retold, and I remember marveling at the

stupidity of the sailors who thought they were going to fall off the edge of the world if they

embarked on Columbus’ expedition, as well as feeling somewhat suspicious at the reasons why

Portugal wanted to redraw the original Treaty of Tordesillas, extending it westward, to what is

now Brazil, but by then, an undiscovered country. But I kept my thoughts to myself. Columbus

must have been quite the bright man, I thought, and Cabral, quite the lucky one, to have ended up

discovering Brazil, by “chance”, a claim that was safeguarded by the new Treaty of Tordesillas

that divided the world between Spain and Portugal, regardless of what the British or the French

thought about it. When I emigrated to the U.S. and attended a public high school, once more I

was taught the same story and by then I knew it by heart, with the only difference that now,

Columbus’ travels were magnified while Cabral’s voyage was not even mentioned. In my heart, I

forgave my American teachers for their notorious omission of the discovery of Brazil, since after

all, I was not in Brazil anymore.

It was only in college that I had come across a ‘shocking’ and ‘scandalous’ piece of

evidence. Apparently, no educated European during the time of Columbus believed the world to

be flat (Russell, 1997). It took me some time to digest this new piece of evidence, since I had to

adjust my worldview concerning what medieval people really believed about geography and

cosmology. But if my history teachers were capable of committing such a blatant mistake, what

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else had I been taught wrongly? What else did I need to unlearn, in order to gain a more truthful

vision of the past? These questions have, of course, stayed with me until now, because they play

a fundamental role not only in assessing historical epistemology and teaching pedagogy, but also

in evaluating a larger battle in the intellectual community, concerning two contending and

mutually exclusive worldviews: philosophical naturalism and theism.

In order to address these larger questions, it is necessary first to understand students’

ideas about history, and by extension, the nature of historical thinking itself (Barton, 1997;

Wineburg, 2001). The curious case involving Columbus, and his contemporaries’ ideas about the

shape of the earth, has the potential of serving as a window into (1) how students’ knowledge of

the past is structured, (2) how students understand and use historical evidence, (3) and which

factors in the students’ social context may aid or hinder their attempt at forming true

understandings of history (Barton, 2008). The other benefit of conducting a study case of this

nature in the classroom is that it will allow students to think differently than what they are

accustomed to. They will be forced to engage in historical thinking, something that Wineburg

calls an “unnatural act” (2001). The Columbus narrative also provides an excellent way of

transforming the familiar curricular objectives (from state/national standards) into an inquisitive

historiographical problem that begs to be solved.

The Problem – Lack of Inquiry and Metaphysical Prejudice

The great American educator G. Stanley Hall once complained about the state of history

teaching in the United States. According to him, teachers were unprepared; their methods,

ineffective (1883). As a result, history was often made into the driest of subjects, creating in the

students a strong distaste for historical study. It is remarkable that his criticism still stands today,

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more than a hundred years later! In order to foster a desire for historical study, primary sources

must be used. It is not only a matter of introducing them in the curriculum, but also of analyzing

them in class. As Wineburg (1991) pointed out, this is often an arduous task, because access to

the sources may be difficult, the scope of the sources may be limited and their content

contradictory and enigmatic. To construct meaning from the past involves deductive reasoning

and great imagination. VanSledright (1997) also concurs, affirming the need to grow out of a

‘stabilized’ view of history, consequently, allowing students to lively engage with the sources.

The “Columbus Case Study” activity that I have designed addresses this crucial point, by giving

students a chance to engage with primary sources; sources that deal with the state of the

geographical and cosmological knowledge of the medieval society during the time period of

Columbus.

Though many fruitful researches have resulted from Wineburg’s monumental work on

historical thinking, especially concerning how students interpret the issue of slavery in Lincoln’s

speeches, the case concerning Columbus and the Flat Earth Error, has seldom been addressed

(Wooden, 2008). Why does this error persist even to this day? Why even noted historians pay

lip-service to this falsehood (Boorstin, 1990)? It seems that the response lies not only (1) in the

lack of inquiry in classrooms, but also in (2) a deeper prejudice in the academic world against

metaphysical categories. As far as the lack of inquiry is concerned, VanSledright (1997) has

noted that students are often inundated with facts and disconnected pieces of information,

knowing only that they have to memorize the “facts” for the sake of unit exams. However, such

view of history ignores the processes by which historical knowledge is derived in the first place.

Besides, it is not only students who lack understanding of how historical narratives are created,

teachers also have unwarranted epistemological assumptions, that often result in a flawed

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teaching pedagogy (Waring and Torrez, 2010). That is why, as research reveals, one effective

way of mentally engaging students is by presenting them with a multiplicity of sources on the

same topic, with often conflicting accounts (VanSledright, 2011; Wineburg, 2001). This is what I

have attempted to stimulate with the Columbus Case Study, deriving my main inspiration from

the Historical Scene Investigation Project (HSI). In the HSI Project, students are presented with

an array of conflicting historical sources. After the sources are read, students are left to decide

which sources are more trustworthy, and how all of the contradicting sources fit together into an

overarching historical narrative. Sometimes, it is this fragmentary, idiosyncratic, and often

“contradictory nature of primary documents… [that] help students understand the problematic

nature of historical evidence and the need for critical thinking about sources and bias” (Tally &

Goldenberg, 2005, p. 3). Conflicting narratives have the potential of causing cognitive

dissonance, especially when students’ prior knowledge is contradicted by new information

(Bohan & Davis Jr., 1998). It is precisely this ‘cognitive dissonance’ that the Columbus Case

Study activity attempts to create. In order to grasp a better understanding of the Middle Ages, old

myths must be debunked. It is here that the issue of “metaphysical prejudice” comes into play.

Students need to deconstruct not only the seemingly omniscient voice of “authorless” textbook

authors, but they also need to critically evaluate a much larger falsehood: the falsehood of the

eternal war between science and religion throughout Western history (Loewen, 2007; Russell,

1997; VanSledright & Limon, 2006). The Flat Earth Error plays a fundamental role in this

conflict as it will be briefly explained in the following section.

Literature Review

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Though the main work on the Flat Earth Error has been done recently by Russell (1997),

it is important to trace back in history how this myth first started. The Myth tells us that

Columbus was the first European, nay, the first man, who proved the earth was round. But did

he? What were the views of his contemporaries on this matter? What about the ancients? Did

they also believe the earth to be a flat disk? In order to understand this historiographical problem

more fully, we will concisely review (1) the cosmological beliefs of the ancients, (2) the Flat

Earth Error in modern historiography, and (3) the cosmological beliefs, the real ones, of the

medievalists.

The Glory That Was Greece

The Greeks, especially after the fifth century B.C. thought of the earth as anything but

round (Dicks, 1970, p. 72). With the exception of Democritus and Leucippus, who imagined the

earth to be a flat disk, the main philosophers, such as Pythagoras (ca. 570-490 B.C.), Plato (429-

347 B.C.), Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Euclid (ca. 300 B.C.), Aristarchus (ca. 310-230 B.C.), and

Archimedes (ca. 287-212 B.C.), believed the earth to be a globe (pp. 72-198). Aristotle’s view in

particular, would become the golden standard of the philosophers. The earth was conceived as an

immobile sphere at the center of the universe, with all the heavenly bodies moving around it, in

perfect concentric spheres. The sphericity of the earth was not accepted on the basis of empirical

proof, but on the basis of philosophical argumentation. For example, Aristotle argued that:

The earth must be a sphere because the sphere is the perfect shape; because all

earthly matter is pulled downward by natural motion toward a central point;

because only a sphere includes the maximum value of evenly distributed matter

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around the center; because mathematical symmetry requires that the earth be

spherical like the heavens (Russell, 1997, p. 24).

Aristotle also saw evidence for this in the limitation of our view of the sea by the curvature of the

earth, in the fact that we see the stars differently depending on our latitude, in that the hull of a

ship disappears from our eyes before the mast does, in that the higher one’s elevation the farther

one can see, and in that eclipses of the moon are caused by the shadow of the spherical earth.

Following Aristotle, the librarian of the famous library at Alexandria, Eratosthenes (285-194

B.C.), was able to measure the circumference of the earth using trigonometry and data obtained

from the sun’s declination at different latitudes (e.g. on the summer solstice, the sun cast

shadows at different angles in cities of different latitudes). Under the Romans, the Greeks - such

as Strabo (born c. 63 B.C.) and Crates of Mallus (c. 150 B.C.) - continued to do geographical

work. But it was Claudius Ptolemy (90-168 AD) who systematized the work of his predecessors.

He constructed an accurate map of the known world and his Almagest became the standard

astronomy book of the Middle Ages, making him the most reputable and respected astronomer of

antiquity. Ptolemy gave the Aristotelian system mathematical plausibility making it a powerful

scientific theory because of its ability to predict the heavenly motions (Kuhn, 1996). Medieval

philosophers would later modify the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system to accommodate for the

Christian theology. So if the Greek philosophers during the Hellenistic era and the Late

Antiquity pronounced unanimously that the earth was a sphere, where did the Flat Earth Error

come from?

The “Impeccability” of Modern Scholars

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According to Daniel Boorstin (1990), the Greek knowledge that earth was a sphere was

lost in the Middle Ages. The leaders of the Church “built a grand barrier against the progress of

knowledge about the earth” (p. 100). Boorstin calls this the “Great Interruption”, a “Europe-wide

phenomenon of scholarly amnesia”, where centuries of Christian dogma had “suppressed the

useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully, and so scrupulously drawn by

ancient geographers” (p. 102). Boorstin goes on to say that the medievalists in their efforts to

navigate accurately, “did not find much help in Cosmas Indicopleustes’ [a notorious flat-earther]

neat box of the universe… The outlines of the seacoast… could not be modified or ignored by

what was written in Isidore of Seville or even in Saint Augustine… [and] the schematic Christian

T-O map was little use to Europeans seeking an eastward sea passage to the Indies” (pp. 146-

149). But As Russell (1997) correctly refutes, Cosmas Indicopleustes was unknown in the 15th

century, Isidore and St. Augustine had nothing to say about the outlines of the coast; and the T-O

maps were never intended for navigation (p. 27). Boorstin, like many other modern historians,

never bothered to check their sources.

The Flat-Earth Error contains two main historical fallacies. The first fallacy is the

statement that nobody before Columbus knew the world was round. This dismisses the careful

calculations of the Greeks along with their medieval successors. As Russell wittily writes, “it

makes Aristotle, the most eloquent of round-earthers, and Ptolemy, the most accurate, into flat-

earthers” (1997, p. 27). The second fallacy is the embellished fable that the sailors feared they

would fall off the edge of the world if they voyaged too far into the ocean. This fallacy was

popularized by Andrew Dickson White, the founder of Cornell University, who wrote in 1896:

Many a bold navigator, who was quite ready to brave pirates and tempests,

trembled at the thought of tumbling with his ship into one of the openings into

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hell which a widespread belief placed in the Atlantic at some unknown distance

from Europe. This terror among sailors was one of the main obstacles in the great

voyage of Columbus. (p. 97)

But perhaps, the most dramatic perpetrator of the Flat Earth Error, was none other than

Washington Irving (1783-1859) who mingled history and fiction in his book A History of the Life

and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). Irving cited the famous but imaginary meeting of

Columbus with the professors of the University of Salamanca, where Columbus supposedly

confounded all by his belief in the sphericity of the earth. In this meeting, Columbus was

portrayed as a simple mariner, standing forth in the midst of an imposing array of professors,

friars, and dignitaries of the church. But according to Morison (1942), the meeting was nothing

but a fabrication:

Washington Irving, scenting his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene,

took a fictitious account of this nonexistent university council published 130 years

after the event, elaborated on it, and let his imagination go completely…the whole

story is misleading and mischievous nonsense…the sphericity of the globe was

not in question. The issue was the width of the ocean; and therein the opposition

was right. (pp. 88-89)

But Irving was not alone in the creation of this myth. The French Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-

1848) was the man responsible for establishing the Flat Earth Error as an academic

commonplace, especially with his article On the Cosmographical Opinions of the Church

Fathers (1834). Irving and Letronne were both the founding fathers of this most magnificent of

errors (Russell, 1997, p. 61). But this Error cannot be understood if taken in isolation of its socio-

historical context. Letronne and Irving simply cultivated a seed that had long been planted by

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none other than Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543). In his classical work, On the Revolutions of

Heavenly Spheres, Copernicus used Lactantius [an early Christian author] to illustrate how the

ignorance of opponents of the round earth was comparable to that of those insisting on

geocentricity in his own time (1995, p. 7). His mention of Lactantius on the preface of his book

would be the basis for later writers to use Lactantius as a villain, illustrating a supposed medieval

belief in the flat earth (Russell, 1997, p. 64).

The Flat Earth Error in a Larger Context

During the Enlightenment Era, the philosophes painted the Middle Ages in the darkest of

colors, where religion was seen as a superstition. Hume had already planted the seed that science

and Christianity were incompatible when he wrote about the improbability of the miracles

described in the Bible as well as the miracles believed to have had happened during the Middle

Ages. Only superstitious people would blindly believe in them. Hegel (1770-1831) would also

appear on the scene and write about the infinite falsehood constituting the life and spirit of the

Middle Ages. He would be followed by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the prophet of progress.

Comte laid the philosophical basis for positivism, arguing that humanity was struggling upward

toward the reign of science. Anything seem as impeding science was to be considered retrograde.

This tension between “enlightened reason” and “irrational superstition” would finally culminate

with John W. Draper (1811-1882) who published History of the Conflict between Religion and

Science in 1873. He combined in his book “the Enlightenment skepticism of Gibbon with the

positivism of Comte” (Russell, 1997, p. 37). The History of the Conflict is of immense

importance because it succeeded as few books ever do. It planted “in the educated mind the idea

that science stood for freedom and progress against the superstition of religion” (p. 38). Its

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viewpoint became conventional wisdom. Draper would eventually have a deep impact on

Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), who founded Cornell University (1868) the first

determinedly and explicitly secular university in the United States. White would carry into the

academic world what would later become known as the “Conflict Thesis” – the idea that science

and religion are mutually exclusive realms of knowledge in constant warfare. In 1896 he

published History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, the same book that

had supported the falling-off-the-edge-of-the-world fallacy, as mentioned earlier.

By the end of the 19th century, the Flat Earth Error had become a powerful weapon in the

hands of the emerging Darwinists who needed rhetorical ammunition to refute creationists. The

argument was simple and powerful: “these people who deny evolution today are of the same sort

as those who had believed in a flat-earth in the past.” Thus, the Flat Earth Error was incorporated

into a larger, alleged war between science and religion. White made sure that the false account

was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the

present day. So much for the founding father of secular higher education in America! The Flat

Earth Error must be true for many secularists, because it fits their preconceptions about the

Middle Ages. As Russell (1997) explained, the Error had become so firmly established that by

Boorstin’s time “it was easier to lie back and believe it: easier not to check the sources; easier to

fit the consensus; easier to fit the preconceived worldview; easier to avoid the discipline needed

in order to dislodge a firmly held error. Religion and science had not been at war until the

Draper-White thesis made them so” (p. 48).

Those Terrible Middle Ages

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The irony of the supposed “university council” at Salamanca was that Columbus had

“cooked” his numbers (e.g. he estimated the voyage at about 20 percent its actual length), in

order to convince the monarchs of Spain to sponsor his voyage. His opponents, citing the

traditional measurements of the globe according to Ptolemy, argued that the circumference of the

earth was too great and the distance too far to allow for a successful western passage to the

Indies. Columbus’ opponents had science and reason on their side. Columbus, however, had

stubborn determination, political ability and a shrewd tradesman’s skills. He managed to

convince Isabella and Ferdinand to sponsor a voyage that was destined to end in starvation, if

God had not put America in the way to catch Columbus. But how did these clerics come across

such an accurate knowledge of the globe?

We have already seen that Ptolemy’s Almagest was the standard astronomy textbook of

the Middle Ages, and one needs not go further than Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica where

the idea of a spherical globe is alluded to in the very first paragraph (book 1, question 1, article

1; question 68, article 2 as well). To Aquinas’ writings, we could add those of Roger Bacon

(Opus Maius 4.4.10), Robert Grosseteste (De Sphaera), and Johannes de Sacrobosco (Treatise of

the Sphere) among many others. Even the so-called John of Mandeville, who wrote Travels

(1370), laughs at simple people who think that antipodeans would fall off the other side of the

globe.

Most remarkable still is the fact that the two most influential writers on geography during

the Middle Ages - Macrobius (ca. 400) and Martianus Capella (ca. 420) - took the sphericity of

the globe for granted. It is interesting to know that Capella, who created the concept of seven

liberal arts (including astronomy and geometry), believed that the inhabited world was a small

island on a vast globe of sea (Russell, 1997, p. 19). And of course, the great historian Bede (673-

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735) also affirmed that the earth was at the center of a spherical cosmos. According to him, the

earth could be considered a perfect sphere because the surface irregularities of mountains and

valleys are very small in comparison to its vast size (De Temporum Ratione 32).

But real flat-earthers did exist such as Lactantius (240-320) and Cosmas Indicopleustes

(c. 540). Lactantius was a professional rhetorician, converted to Christianity. Revolting against

his pagan upbringing, he rejected the teachings of the Greek philosophers on every point he

could. The philosophers argue for sphericity, he wrote, but there is no biblical passage

supporting them, therefore their view is unimportant. Is there anyone so silly to believe that there

are humans on the other side of the earth, with their feet above their head, where crops and trees

grow upside down, and rain and snow fall upward and the sky is lower than the ground? Thus, he

denied roundness as part of denying the antipodes, but he was not widely heeded (Russell, 1997,

p. 32). Cosmas Indicopleustes was from the Greek East. He wrote a “Christian Topography” in

which he argued that the cosmos was a huge, rectangular, vaulted arch with the earth as a flat

floor. He took as science what the divinely inspired writers intended as poetry. Eratosthenes and

Strabo had drawn rectangular maps to represent the known world, which they knew occupied a

portion of the surface of the spherical earth: their maps were attempts at projection. Cosmas took

such views as implying a physically flat, oblong earth (p. 33). However, Cosmas was roundly

attacked in his own time by John Philoponus (490-570), who strove to reconcile philosophy and

theology, advising Christians not to make statements that were contradictory to reason and

observation (similarly to Augustine who had also warned Christians about the danger of

interpreting isolated Biblical texts out of context, making pagans contemptuous of Christians and

their Scriptures). Cosmas’ influence on the Middle Ages was virtually nil. Russell tells us that

only three Greek texts exist and no Latin manuscript at all (p. 35). Cosmas was translated into

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Latin for the very first time in 1706. However, when his work appears in English for the first

time in 1897, he is made into an escape-goat, as typical of medieval foolishness. He had by then

become an icon in the war against religion.

Taking this whole ideological and historiographical problem into account, the main

questions that I want to answer through this study are:

• What are students’ ideas about the Flat Earth Error?

• How does the case of Columbus influence the way students view the Middle Ages?

• Why has the Flat Error persisted to this day?

Methodology

Framework

This study was guided by an attempt to integrate two sets of perspectives: cognitive

reading strategies and historical thinking skills into the classroom (Schell & Fisher, 2007;

Wineburg, 2001). Both perspectives demand the implementation of inquiry techniques. My

guiding premise is that by allowing students to immerse themselves in primary source

documents, they will gain a more nuanced view of the past and as a result, more light will be

shed on how they construct their own interpretations of the past, based on the evidence that they

have available at the moment.

Methods & Data Collection

The study was situated in a small international school in Central China, with 130 K-12

students who must possess a passport other than the host nation’s in order to be enrolled. The

participants in this study included three secondary social studies classes: a U.S. History class

with 18 students drawn from 7th and 8th grades, a World Geography class with 16 students drawn

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from 9th and 10th grades and an AP Comparative Government class with 3 students drawn from

11th and 12th grades (the whole activity took place in three days). About thirty percent of the

students are Koreans, followed by Americans (20%) and other nationalities. My high school

classes did not contain any ESOL students, since all of the non-native English speakers had been

in an international school environment for more than five years. My middle school class

however, had only 2 American students and 2 other Western students (from Canada and France).

The rest of the class was composed of Asian students, primarily Koreans, but also ethnic Chinese

students with non-Chinese passports. A total of 10 students are considered language learners (i.e.

ESOL 2 and ESOL 3 students).

Basically, I followed the HSI Project activity format, selecting eight key documents for

students to read, followed by six questions about the texts that they had to answer individually.

The list of documents contained four texts/images that supported the interpretation that

Europeans in the Middle Ages believed the earth was flat (all of these written after Columbus)

while the remaining four documents/images contradicted this idea (all of these written before

Columbus’ time):

Document A: D.J. Boorstin's Account of Beliefs in the Middle Ages (1990)

Document B: Irving’s Account of Columbus before the Council at Salamanca (1828)

Document C: White’s Account of Geographical Knowledge During the Middle Ages (1896)

Document D: The Flammarion Engraving (1888)

Document E: Opus Maius of Roger Bacon (ca. 1268)

Document F: The Treatise on the Sphere by Johannes de Sacrobosco (ca. 1230)

Document G: The Reckoning of Time by the Venerable Bede (ca. 725)

Document H: Farnese Atlas (2nd Century AD)

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The first question asked students to state their prior beliefs regarding the Flat-Earth

Hypothesis, before reading the documents. Other questions asked students to compare their

original beliefs with the first four and the last four documents. The last questions tied the Flat-

Earth Hypothesis to larger issues in the controversy of science and religion. Students were then

asked to write a concluding paragraph summarizing their new views after they had investigated

these sources.

Analysis & Results

When I conducted this study I faced a couple of limitations and challenges. The first one

was that given the circumstances of where I work and the nature of the expat community in my

city (Wuhan) I had only a small sample of 37 students. The second limitation was that it became

impossible to avoid the so-called “researcher’s bias” since all the students were my students. A

third limitation was that in the beginning of the school year, I had told my middle school U.S.

History class that Europeans, at the time of Columbus, did not believe the earth was flat. Thus, it

is hard to distinguish if their prior beliefs had already been “compromised” when this study was

undertaken. Finally, a fourth challenge, also in my middle school class, was the percentage of

language learners. The majority of students in the class had difficulty to follow the texts I had

selected, not only because of the inherent grammatical difficulty of some of the readings, but

also because they had to constantly ask for the meaning of words they did not know. The

following table shows the number of students who held to the Flat-Earth Error before they had

read the documents:

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Table 1 Class # of Students # Students who held

to the Flat-Error Percentage

US History (7th-8th) 18 9 50% World Geography (9th-10th) 16 14 87.5% AP Comp Gov (11th-12th) 3 1 33% Total 37 24 65% As it can be seen, the percentage of middle school students who did not believed in the Flat-

Earth Hypothesis (i.e. 50%) is somewhat inflated, given that students were taught this in the

beginning of the year. High school classes’ results give us a less biased data. The second table

was constructed after analyzing what students wrote in their final paragraph, once they had read

all the texts and evaluated all the evidence:

Table 2 Class # of Students who

held to the Flat-Error before the activity

# Students who still held to the Flat-Error after the activity

Percentage of Change

US History (7th-8th) 9 5 56% World Geography (9th-10th) 14 7 50% AP Comp Gov (11th-12th) 1 0 0% Total 24 12 50% Even when one takes into account that students were exposed to contradicting sources and

counterarguments against the Flat-Error, still half of the students, who originally adhered to this

belief, persisted in their views. Some of the reasoning behind such behavior and some possible

explanations will be presented in the following paragraphs.

Discussion

The idea that Europeans believed in a flat earth seems to be deeply embedded not only in

the Western mind, but in the Eastern mind as well. Even when such belief is contested by the

evidence, students still have a hard time in adjusting this new information into their worldview.

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Half of the middle school class for example, despite having been taught in the beginning of the

year about the Flat Error, could not supplant this deep-rooted belief. When I had first conducted

a survey in the beginning of the school year, only one student in my U.S. History class did not

believe in the Flat Error. A couple of middle school students who still held to that belief, by the

end of the “Columbus Case Study” activity, either claimed that Galileo proved the world was

round or that the Europeans lacked technology to verify the sphericity of the world, among other

answers. They had read the Galileo affair into the Columbus narrative (a mistake that

Washington Irving also committed). And they have also used the technological advancement of

the present society as a yardstick to measure all others – a tendency that we call presentism. One

of the two Americans in the class, Nick, an 8th grader, and also the only one who did not believe

in the Flat Error during the survey I conducted in the beginning of the year, was able to connect

the Flat Error to the relationship of science and religion in a nuanced manner. He stated that the

“error persisted into the present day because we are always trying to believe that we are smarter

than people in the past” and that the humanists “were trying to portray religion as an obstruction

to science”, so it made sense for them “to spread this propaganda.”

However, it was not only middle school students who displayed a presentist tendency,

high school students also claimed “lack of technology”, “the Bible”, and “stupidity” to explain

why the Medieval people supposedly held to the Flat Error. The only two students that did not

hold to this belief before the activity both claimed “Darwinism” as a reason why the Error

persisted to this day. A couple of students also demonstrated confusion in their answers, stating

that it was hard to discern the truth and falsity between the conflicting evidence that was

presented to them. However, roughly half of the high school students were able to change their

original opinion, paying close attention to the dates the documents were first published. One

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particular 11th grader, before doing the activity, stated that Columbus was no genius and that he

had gotten his information from currently existing sources, and if the information was available

to Columbus, it shows us that the knowledge about the sphericity of the world was conventional

wisdom at the time, “scientific knowledge just does not disappear”.

Overall I was pleased with this activity because it allowed students the opportunity to

verify for themselves if the Flat Earth Hypothesis was true or not. One of the things learned from

this study is that the Flat Error takes time to be displaced and refuted, for students are taught this

misconception usually in elementary school. The image of Columbus as a ‘genius’ seems to have

a negative influence in the way the Middle Ages is often portrayed, because someone is

considered a ‘genius’ only in relation to a certain background socio-cultural information. If we

call someone a ‘genius’ just because he believes the earth is round, the resulting perception is

that Petrarch may be justified in his assertion that the Middle Ages are nothing but “Dark Ages”.

But that is another falsehood perpetuated by the Flat Error. From the fourth century B.C. almost

all Greek philosophers maintained the sphericity of the earth. The Romans adopted the Greek

spherical views; and the Christian fathers and the early medieval writers, with few exceptions,

agreed.  During the Middle Ages, Christian theology showed little if any tendency to dispute

sphericity. Among the educated, there was a consensus that the earth was a globe. With the re-

introduction of Aristotelian science in the twelfth century and of Ptolemaic geography in the

fifteenth, medieval ideas of sphericity of the globe became sharper and more exact than ever

before (Russell, 1997, p. 69). The idea then, that Columbus showed the world was round is a

modern invention. As secularism gradually replaced the Christian worldview in the academia

and as the Christian epistemology was identified with an ‘obsolete’ and ‘outmoded’ medieval

worldview, Christian doctrine became a symbol of superstition. And since Christianity was

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perceived to be superstitious, it becomes quite logical to assert that Medieval Christians could

have easily believed something as foolish as the Flat Error.

It seems then, that the reason why the Flat Error still persists is because scholars and

scientists repeat and propagate errors of fact and interpretation, since they are led more by their

biases than by the evidences. As Russell poignantly explains,

“If we were not so ethnocentrically convinced of the ignorance or stupidity of the

Middle Ages, we would not Fall into the Flat Error. The hope that we are making

progress towards a goal leads us to undervalue the past in order to convince

ourselves of the superiority of the present… the terror of meaninglessness, of

falling off the edge of knowledge, is greater than the imagined fear of falling off

the edge of the earth. And so we prefer to believe a familiar error than to search,

unceasingly, the darkness” (pp. 76-77).

Thus, in order to feed our own biases and to continue believing in the myth of progress,

we ignore contrary evidence basing our worldview more in what we think that happened

than in what really happened.

Conclusion

It is wise to end this study with a final reflection on the paradigm shift that took place

when the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system was replaced by the Copernican system. In his book The

Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis wrote about how the medievalists were able to combine “their

theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental Model of the Universe”

(2009, p. 11). This was the medieval image, discarded by later writers. This Model, in Lewis’

view, was not only a supreme work of art, but it was also the central work of the medieval world,

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“that in which most particular works were embedded, to which they constantly referred, from

which they drew a great deal of their strength” (p. 12). However, despite being so central, the

concept of Model is never more than provisional for it will “have to be abandoned if a more

ingenious person thinks of a supposal which would ‘save’ the observed phenomena with fewer

assumptions, or if we discover new phenomena which it cannot save at all” (p. 16). That was the

primary reason why the Medieval Model was refuted. The Copernican Model “saved the

appearances” (p. 219) with fewer assumptions. Lewis’ lectures remarkably foreshadowed

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. Lewis contended that every

model was “a construct of answered questions” and the expert is:

Engaged either in raising new questions or in giving new answers to old ones.

When he is doing the first, the old, agreed Model is of no interest to him; when he

is doing the second, he is beginning an operation which will finally destroy the

old Model altogether. (p. 18)

It was in this manner that the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic Model of the Universe was replaced by the

Copernican Model. The Medieval Model was rejected not because the Copernican Model was

mathematically simpler or better at prediction, but because the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic Model

“had failed to solve its problems; the time had come to give a competitor a chance” (Kuhn, 1996,

p. 76). In other words, it was not that the Copernican Model was unquestionably a more elegant

and accurate model of the universe. It was just that the Ptolemaic Model was becoming more

complex with every new observation, and did not show signs of getting any better. The rise and

fall of cosmological models do indeed have a humbling effect on what we claim to know and the

certitude of our knowledge. For even our sure knowledge of scientific and historical realities

may in the future be overthrown by more accurate or less accurate Models. Therefore, we must

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approach the past with epistemological humility and empathy, refusing to feed our prejudices or

to intellectually (and dishonestly) kneel down at the altar of progress. The scientific revolution

has taught us that science is always changing, and likewise, the Flat Error has also shown us that

historical interpretations are always changing either due to ideological falsification or due to an

honest search of historical truth. May we then “search, unceasingly, the darkness” rather than

“believe a familiar error” as Russell has said. What C. S. Lewis said of scientific models could

equally be said of historical models, thus, let us end this reflection with these discerning words:

No model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a

serious attempt to get all the phenomena known at a given period, and each

succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the

prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age's

knowledge… It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death,

ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts… But I think it is more

likely to change when, and because, far-reaching changes in the mental temper of

our descendants demand that it should. The new Model will not be set up without

evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes

sufficiently great. It will be true evidence. But nature gives most of her evidence

in answer to the questions we ask her (pp. 222-23).

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