Billy D. writes of The Flat Earth Myth:
Anyone who writes “Is your Earth still flat?” is trading on an anti-Christian myth promoted by late-nineteenth century Darwinists.
I'm not terribly interested in the historical arguments about when flat earth arguments originated. The Flat Earth Society, as amply documented by the Wikipedia and Talk Origins, originated in the work of Samuel Rowbotham: Zetetic Astronomy. Rowbotham dismissed Newton and Copernicus for their obsession with "theory," and insisted on using only "facts." Sounds a little like creationists already, doesn't it?
Billy Dembski defends against charges that the flat-earthers are biblical literalists by noting that "The leading theological lights of that period [the beginnings of the Church] were Origen, Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, and Augustine — none of these thought the earth was flat."
What Billy doesn't point out is that Augustine wasn't a creationist, either, at least not in the way Dembski is. Augustine argues for a figurative understanding of Genesis, bounded in its interpretation by scientific knowledge.
In his work on The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine writes that:
even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. … If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.
Modern attempts at explaining a literal 6 day creation by scientific means only go back to George Macready Price in the 19th century. The only difference between IDC and flat earthism is that IDolators have millions of dollars from Howard Ahmanson funding their PR wing.
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The question is, will Billy D take on the Galileo thing?
I can see him saying : "Darwinists argue claim that Christians once thought for theological reasons that the Earth was at the center of the Soalr System. They say that they resisted scientific evidence that the Earth was not at the center on the basis of their religion. However, now, centuries later, no Christian finds any problem with his faith and a Sun-centered Solar System. All of this, though, is a Darwinist myth. No mainstream Christian philosopher ever believed that the Earth was at the center of the Universe after it the evidence was clear otherwise."
I wouldn't be surprised if he wrote something like that... and it would be complete prevarication. Of course there were Christians who objected to and decried as heresy the notion (and evidence) for a Heliocentric Solar System! History documents that well. What's more, this is a better analogy to modern-day creationism than is any Flat-Earth stuff.
-Rob
Why does anyone care what Dembski thinks about anything? If he keeps up this kind of idiocy, he'll be relegated to some post even lower than the one he occupies now. I am convinced Dembski is striving for total irrelevance. He's already there, as far as I'm concerned. And as far as Denyse O'Leary is concerned, she blackens the name of honest journalists everywhere.
Liz, you took the words out of my mouth. I guess we can give Dembski the award for finding the most complicated ways to say nothing, but that's about it. He belongs with Kevin Trudeau, Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra, and the rest of removed-from-reality gang.
Oh no--I hope this doesn't mean public television is going to show his lectures during fund-raising month!
They all come up with excuses for why they cherry-pick the Bible like they quote-mine real scientists. God made man in His image is fundamental, but thou shalt not wear clothing of mixed fabric is irrelevant. A few verses can be interpreted in a highly convoluted manner to explain away evolution, but a fairly straightforward reading of other verses that imply the Earth is flat or the center of the universe is a darwinian myth. Maybe you can only understand such things if you are as smart as Dembski.
Naw. The (Roman Catholic) church had a more nuanced approach to scripture than literalism. (Though perhaps not when it came to educating the laity--I wouldn't know.) And there was legitimate scientific controversy over the location of the centre of the universe/solar system--though perhaps not by the time the Church finally swung around. The Church did not cover itself in glory with that issue (to put it mildly), but its approach was quite different from the a-scientific, literalism crap of current creationists.
Hot dang
I remember reading that quote years ago and recently found a need for the same in an arguement of late. I was getting ready to go find it just as soon as I peruse my list of easy-reading blogs.....and surprise of surpises....here it sits. You bloggers make some things far too easy.
My mother-in-law goes to a pretty conservative church. When i was last there, the Pastor gave a sermon with nods to ID. I asked my mother-in-law what she thought of it. She said, "lots of really smart people say it's true".
Feh. That likely means the old widow is giving money to the cause. This is hardly "who cares".
One irony is that the Pastor in question owes his life to science. He's had a liver transplant. If Evolution were very wrong, he'd be dead.