> But Saint Augustine (354-430) flattened the earth again:
>
> "Flat earth arguments usually evolve from literal, naive readings
> of the Bible. There's a great Christian precedent for these. Though
> men of the fourth century BC understood that the earth was round,
> Augustine, seven centuries later, thought otherwise. There couldn't
> possibly be people on the bottom side of the earth, because they
> wouldn't be able to see Christ come down from Heaven on Judgement
> Day.." ("The New Apocrypha", by John Sladek; Granada Pub. 1978)
>
This seems very unlike the Augustine that I've read. His hermeneutics
is both very reflective and extremely un-literal; I can't recall anything
I've read that bears on the flat earth problem, but he did insist, for
example, that the "days" of the creation story were not to be
taken literally. The best reference that I know of for Augustine's
scientific knowledge is Mandrou's book "St. Augustin et la fin
de la culture antique".
I can't take the major assertion of this quotation seriously, anyway:
"Flat earth arguments usually evolve from literal, naive readings of
the Bible". To which you might reply:
a) where in the Bible does it say "the earth is flat"? What exactly
is supposed to motivate literalists to say this?
b) what's your evidence for the shape that pre-scientific folks believed
the earth was? Lots of weird theories of sacred geometry out there.
(Look at Nicholas of Cusa, for example.)
c) didn't pre-scientific people in, for example, Australia, believe
that the earth is flat, and that without contact with the Bible?
Or, if not flat, what shape did they believe the earth was?
d) surely a prominent motivation for flat earth beliefs is the
evidence of the senses?
Graham White