Its authors could no more have taught that the earth is a globe than they could have explained a solar eclipse or, for that matter, quantum mechanics. The Hebrew Bible was written before anyone knew the true shape of the world. The Buddhist sutras contain detailed descriptions of a circular world with a great mountain at its centre – a vision with much earlier Indo-European roots. This is the case for the Rig Veda, the Bible, the Koran and the Confucian classics. So it isn’t surprising that they simply assume the earth is a plane. The foundational texts of the world’s great religions were written by cultures with traditional pictures of the universe. Today, there is still a level of defensiveness about the flat earth, particularly in respect of the contents of books considered sacred. The wrong-headed speculations of today’s flat-earthers should not prevent us from recognising that people who lived a long time ago can’t be blamed for failing to grasp things they had no way of knowing. The hypothesis of a spherical earth is alien to everyday experience, hard to demonstrate empirically and raises difficult questions (not least, why we don’t fall off). Nowadays, there is a broad scholarly consensus, in China as well as the West, that Chinese savants assumed the earth was flat until the seventeenth century or later. He added a tetchy footnotes to Ricci’s list to castigate the Jesuit’s ignorance of Chinese cosmology, suggesting that belief in the flat earth was recherché by the sixteenth century when it was still very much the norm. The historian of science Joseph Needham (1900 – 1995) was unhappy with this summary. However, they also believed that there are five rather than four elements, and that the earth is flat and square. He noted that the Confucian literati could accurately explain the cause of solar eclipses. Writing to his Jesuit superiors in 1595, Matteo Ricci (1552 – 1610) laid out the consensus about the universe among educated Chinese people at the time. But why is that? Where did it come from, why does it endure, and why is it so mocked? In this blog, James Hannam explores the Flat Earth phenomena.
There is often a sense of ridicule when people mention a belief in a flat Earth.
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