Last Saturday, we looked at the reflections of Barry Arrington, a lawyer who practices in Colorado, on the claim that Earth is not special after all because the universe is so big.

He says he is planning a book on the current contentions between the non-materialist and the materialist point of view on many topics in science. Here he looks at the claim that Christians believed, centuries ago, that Earth was flat:

How many times have you heard that Columbus had to overcome the opposition of benighted flat-earther churchmen to gain funding for his voyage from the Spanish Crown? The story is pure nonsense. The ancients knew the earth was a sphere, and Eratosthenes even made a remarkably accurate estimate of its circumference as early as 230 BC. …

Columbus seriously underestimated the length of the westward route to the Indies. If he and his crew had not accidentally discovered the Americas, they would have starved to death long before reaching their intended destination. Columbus was wrong, and the clerics were right. Yet, for generations, American students were taught the flat-earth myth as unimpeachable truth. How did this happen? The source of the myth is a work of fiction funneled through an academic who was angry at Christian opposition to Darwin. In 1828, Washington Irving published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, a work of historical fiction based on Columbus’s voyages. In his fictionalized account of the Council of Salamanca, Irving had the clerics attempting to rebut Columbus’s accurate geographic calculations with specious citations to the Bible and the church fathers.

As [Stephen Jay] Gould explained, that did not happen.

Enter chemist-historian John William Draper. In 1860, Draper traveled to Oxford to speak about Darwinism at a meeting of the British Association. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley also attended the meeting, and after Draper’s talk, they had a legendary exchange in which Wilberforce attacked, and Huxley defended Darwin. The confrontation between Wilberforce and Huxley engendered in Draper the view that religion and science are at war, and in 1875, he published a book entitled History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. In his book, Draper decided to smear Christianity with the flat earth myth. His source? Irving’s fictionalized account of Salamanca, which he lifted almost word for word from Irving’s book.

A few years later, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, published A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology. White, also a fervent defender of Darwin, further perpetuated the flat earth myth…

The Draper-White “warfare thesis” continues to be influential to this day, which is unfortunate because not only were they wrong about Columbus specifically, but they were also wrong about the supposed “war” between science and religion generally. Indeed, they were more than merely wrong; as we shall see, their warfare thesis is preposterous. Far from being at odds with Christianity, modern science was largely built on a Christian foundation, and many of the greatest scientists from the beginning of the scientific revolution until the present time have been Christians, who obviously saw no conflict between their science and their faith.

Conflict? What Conflict? Science and Christianity Have Never Been at War, January 29, 2025

In other words, fashionable supporters of Darwin were attempting to weaken the influence of Christianity by constructing myths that have nothing to do with the actual history of the science topic. Unfortunately, most people wouldn’t have easy access to the correct information.

We’re pretty sure that when we can get hold of Arrington’s proposed book, we will find many more examples.

Note: The featured image above shows Eratosthenes teaching in Alexandria by Bernardo Strozzi (1635). Public domain.

Don’t miss: Now welcoming you to the Big Universe, Goldilocks Planet section… Barry Arrington looks at claims that Earth cannot be very special or important because we have only just discovered that the universe is very big. Not so.