Commentary on "The Flat Earth Bible"
by Donald E. Simanek

Bob Schadewald's document generates occasional email responses from Christians who apparently find it challenging to their view of the Bible. For a long while I was puzzled why they should find it disturbing, to the point that they wrote long diatribes trying to argue why Bob's essay was misguided or mistaken.

Usually they totally misunderstood the reason for the article, and misrepented Bob's purpose.

Here's a typical example, from an actual email:

First and foremost: Daniel 4:10-11  the huge tree
If you actually read ALL of chapter 4 you will soon realize that this tree is in a DREAM, not in the real world.  So why is it so hard to imagine a pre-Galilleo world having dreams about an inaccurate science?  God didn't say "this is how it is".  Rather a human had a dream.  I have dreams about flying all the time but I don't have wings and I certainly will never fly by myself.

Actually the bible talks about the earth and its true shape: Isaiah 40:22 " [22] It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in." Please note that the book of Isaiah was written MANY years before Galileo.  You will find that when you read the bible and actually pay attention to it—you learn some new things that might just alter the way you look at the world.

Is the bible infallable? Yes. Are there any inconsistencies? None that have been found yet. Is the earth immovable as the bible says in Psalms? Not anymore. If you read further on in chapter 93 you will see that the flood came AFTER the earth was made. After the flood the earth had earthquakes but not before. This is just a simple error in your world view. You probably don't believe that the earth was created in 6 days so that is what throws off your interpretation of Psalms.

Just thought I would set you straight about the bible. Let me know if you have any questions.

Isn't that helpful? I can't fail to detect an underlying tone of superiority and condescention (the "I know the truth, so let me educate you and set you straight" kind). Of course these short paragraphs demonstrate that the fellow is a creationist, who believes that before the flood everything was perfect, the laws of physics as we know them do not apply, the laws of thermodynamics did not operate, so nothing ever wore out or ran down, and the earth was fixed and immobile. Only after the "fall of man" did things start to go to wrack and ruin.

He brings up the "grashopper" verse of Isaiah 10:22, even though Bob had already done so and had authoritatively showed that the verse does not imply sphericity. This fellow does not read very carefully. It's curious that he consistently did not capatilize the word "Bible" yet he does capitalize "Psalms". Both are titles of books, which usually require capitalization.

It's unclear what point he's making about the "grashopper" verse. He seems on one hand to say that "circle" here means "sphere" (which point Bob already addressed and demolished). But then he undoes himself by saying this was only Isaiah's dream and isn't a description of the way things really are. Nice to have it both ways.

Then he reveals clearly what's bugging him. He believes the Bible is infallible. Apparently he does not believe the earth is flat. Therefore if the Bible seems to say the earth is flat (and never says it's spherical) we must be interpreting it wrongly.

These folks are troubled when anyone interprets the Bible in a way which reaches conclusions they don't accept. People who believe the earth is flat, and people who believe the earth is hollow, both use the Bible to support their views. Geocentrists do also. Perpetual motion machine inventors have even quoted Biblical verses they claim supports their beliefs.

Bob Schadewald was making several points in his essay. Bob was well informed about "creation-science" advocates who are opposed to the theory of evolution. Their fundamental reason for this view is their literal acceptance of the creation account in Genesis, which they take literally. In their view a "day" of creation means a 24-hour day of the same length as our day today. They used to accept the 4000 year age of the world as derived from Biblical sources by James Ussher and John Lightfoot, but now are willing to accept an age of maybe 10,000 years, but no more.

Bob was showing that if you take that literal a view of the Bible, you'd have to also accept a geocentric solar system and a flat earth, for those ideas are just as well-founded in the Bible. Of course that annoys creationists who don't happen to believe the earth is fixed and unmoving, and flat.

My email correspondent engages in still more apologetics to defend the inerrancy of the Bible. He supposes that the earth was initially created as fixed and unmoving, but later God changed that, and a lot of other things as well.

Bob's essay stands quite well on its own, and shouldn't need further commentary or defense. That is why I generally ignore such emails, for I learned long ago the futility of trying to have rational discourse with those who filter everything they read or hear through their own rigid belief system. Attempting to have a serious discussion with such minds is like juggling eels or shoveling feathers. They define words in the own way to suit their own purposes, shift the argument when it gets uncomfortable, and concoct the most incredible rationales to shore up their belief system.

Sometimes someone asks what Bob's purpose was for writing this essay. From discussions of these matters with Bob, this grew out of his long term observations of the ways people construct belief systems. He was a scholar of such historical themes as belief in the flat earth, the hollow earth, and in perpetual motion. All of these have common characteristics: absolute belief in a world-view, selecting evidence to fit while ignoring evidence that doesn't, using debater's tactics against opponents, often unscrupulously. Theirs is not a search for truth, for they imagine they already know the revealed truth. They are not engaging in science, though they loudly claim to be "scientific". And, almost without exception, believers in these pseudoscientific notions base their ideas on their own interpretation of the Bible. The creationists and "intelligent design" advocates of today are cut from the same mould. So it is not surprising that Bob wrote essays exposing these parallels. Several of these are on my web page, with Bob's permission. A book of Bob's essays on these subjects is now being prepared for publication. Watch for it.