From: rsquires@cyclops.eece.unm.edu (Roger Squires)
Subject: The Flat Earth Error
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 92 00:13:50 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Followup-To: talk.origins


A thread that pops up periodically on t.o and probably elsewhere,
involves the thesis that the Middle Ages were a time of total intellectual
darkness, a darkness specifically caused by the advent of Christianity, 
and only lightened by the rediscovery of Greek and Roman literature and
the growth of the scientific method; the thesis being that if only
civilisation hadn't been shackled by Christian dogma for a 1000 years,
we would all be better off and more advanced today.

Another recent thread involved the idea of a flat earth, to which I myself
contributed a reference to Boorstin (see below).

With respect to the first of these, the more I learn, the more I become
convinced that this thesis is a *crock*, a crock that deserves to
be broken, and I've already spoken my mind on the subject in t.o,
but without much documentation to back up my opinion.  Here is a short
book that sheds some light on the flat earth theory, and on this
thesis as well: _Inventing the Flat Earth_, by Jeffrey Burton Russell.
The relevance for sci.skeptic (I think) lies in the dangers of accepting
without question the common knowledge one is taught in school.
I quote from the Forward by David Noble:

	Jeffrey Burton Russell, who has published extensively on the
	intellectual history of the medieval history of the modern
	world.  In _Inventing the Flat Earth_ he presents modern readers
	with a marvelously stimulating analysis of the powerful conventions
	that are used to define the difference between the medieval and the
	modern.  The great irony present in his analysis is that is subverts
	that conventional understanding.

	At the beginning of his book he quotes from current textbooks used in 
	American grade schools, high schools, and colleges which insist that
	there was a consensus among medieval scholars from A.D. 300 to 1492
	that the earth was flat.  This also was the thesis of the influential
	historian Daniel Boorstin writing for a popular audience in his book,
	_The Discoverers_, published in 1983.  Russell then uses his deep
	knowledge of medieval intellectual history to demonstrate that the
	opposite was true.  It was conventional wisdom among both early- and
	late-medieval thinkers that the world was round.

	According to what Russell calls the modern Flat Earth Error, it was the
	courage of the rationalist Christopher Columbus that began the 
	liberation of modern people from the superstitions of the Catholic
	church.  His voyage in 1492 supposedly destroyed the irrational
	mythology of the Dark Ages by empiricall demonstrating that world
	was round, not flat.  Although it was Europeans participating in
	the Renaissance and Reformation who invented the idea that there
	was a thousand years of darkness between the classical world and a
	new modern world, Russell believes that the Flat Earth Error did
	not become a modern orthodoxy until the nineteeth century. ...
	... But it became widespread conventional wisdom from 1870 to 1920
	as a result of "the war between science and religion," when for
	many intellectuals in Europe and the United States all religion
	became synonymous with superstition and science became the only
	legitimate source of truth. ...

	...as Russell points out, the evidence presented by medieval 
	historians and historians of science for the last seventy years
	has not undermined the persuasive power of the modern myth that
	medieval thinkers believed the earth was flat.  The explanation
	of this pattern for Russell is that the Flat Earth Error is part
	of a much larger modern faith in progress.  "Our determination
	to believe the Flat Error," he writes, "arises out of contempt
	for the past and our need to believe in the superiority of the
	present."

	Russell's book should be read in conjunction with another new
	book, Anthony Kemp's _The Estrangement from the Past_ (1991).
	...

Roger Squires
rsquires@cyclops.eece.unm.edu
Newsgroups: talk.origins