Perhaps out of frustration, they finally concluded that the earth must be flat. The soon-to-be converts thought that they easily could disprove that the earth was flat, but they quickly realized that they couldn’t. Flat-earthers, for example, typically testify that when they first heard about the earth being flat, they thought it was the dumbest thing that they ever heard. When someone comes along with a few arguments for the earth being flat, most people have absolutely no knowledge or resources to counter them. Consequently, few students ever develop proper critical thinking skills. This amounts to indoctrination rather than education. Much of education amounts to memorizing many facts but with little reasoning as to what these facts mean. Rather, long before arriving in my class, students were spoon-fed what to believe but with little understanding of why they believed. The problem I saw was that my students had never been given reasons for knowing that the earth was a sphere. You see, I was making this point long before flat-earthers were! If a person hasn’t truly been taught the why of believing something rather than the what, then they are an easy prey for all sorts of odd ideas. Furthermore, I’d also point out that photographs could be faked. Then, I’d point out that the first satellites were launched in the late 1950s and that people had thought that the earth was a sphere much sooner than that. Eventually, a student would bring up photographs from space. When I asked my students how they knew the earth was a globe, not one student could give me a good reason. I retired from the university more than six years ago, just about the time the modern flat-earth movement was starting, so I expect that if I were teaching classes now, I frequently would encounter students who think that the earth is flat. All my students would answer that the earth was a sphere. I would ask my students what shape they thought the earth had. The context of this question was the early history of astronomy. Though I’m no sociologist, I’ve fleshed most of the 20 points into a narrative, which I share here.įlat-earthers raise an excellent epistemological question: how do we know what shape is the earth? For three decades, I asked this very question of students in the first semester of my introductory astronomy class. In preparation for this event, I gathered my thoughts on the sociology of the flat-earth movement into 20 bulleted points, and we discussed these over dinner before the premiere. There I joined a panel discussion with “The Creation Guys,” Kyle Justice and Pat Roy, the producers of the video, as well as Hebraist Steve Boyd, who, along with me, appeared in the documentary. In early May, I attended the premiere of the documentary Faith on the Edge: Exploring the Biblical and Scientific Case Against Flat Earth at Calvary University in Kansas City. I’m very curious as to what motivates flat-earthers, how they became convinced that the earth is flat, and what their thought processes are. As I’ve studied this movement, I’ve become fascinated with its sociology. In this time, I’ve published more than a dozen web articles or blogs on the flat-earth movement, and I’ve written a book on the subject that will soon be published. I have been studying the flat-earth movement for nearly three and a half years.
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