William Lane Craig On The Babylonian World Map

Ancient Greeks calculated the circumference of the earth before Christ was born.

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But it didn’t reach Christians and/or Jews until after that?

SCIENTISTIC MYTHOLOGY WARNING: - the idea that Christians believed the world to be flat before Columbus is pure 19th century myth. Throughout the history of Christianity, only two siginficant authors were proponents of a flat earth, and for different reasons.

The first was Lactantius, adviser to Constantine, who seems to have rejected the Greek idea simply because it was pagan, and he rejected all pagan philosophy when he came to Christ (though not ignorant of it, given his position).

The second is the fascinating Cosmas Indicopleustes, on whom I wrote here. I conclude that his error was based on a a profound insight that has only in the last couple of decades returned to mainstream biblical studies - nevertheless, at the time he was a fringe figure, ignored in his lifetime and only preserved in writing, in all probability, because of the reliability of his geography.

Other than that, I’ve never come across a flat-earther. Even in NT times, we need to remember that Jews, even in Judaea, had been exposed to Hellenistic culture since the time of Alexander the Great. I doubt that any of the Bible writers who cared were unaware that it was at least speculated that the world is round.

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Like I said, how do you do cosmology before anyone has thought up the concept of a “cosmos”?

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It seems like the curvature of the earth was obvious to anyone who was sea fairing, and perhaps anyone who climbed a mountain. The issue is whether or not cosmology actually mattered to people, and if there were people on the other side of the earth (Antipodians). Also remember Genesis was written before Greeks enter the scene. The whole notion of “cosmology” seems to be a Greek idea (@jongarvey correct me if you can). I’m not sure cosmology is a natural way to think about the world. That seems to be a type of concordism (of the negative eisegesis kind), an anacrhonism, to even talk about ancient Babylonian cosmology as if it was a think.

So I do not think they were flat-earthers, nor do I think they had a concept of a globe. They most certainly did not have a in mind a blue marble. This is why we can be certain that Genesis cannot possibly be describing a global flood. The original authors had no concept of a globe.

As possible analogy, think about the map from Game of Thrones. This might be closer to how they envisioned the “world”. With other continents analogous to other planets in our context. When we talk about the "whole world’, we are not including Mars and Venus. We are not including the Sun. We just mean the “planet earth,” but often we mean just our personal context, as in “my whole world.” The fact that we bring a focused point of view into our linguistic context is not to deny other contexts.

Perhaps the public just does not care if the planets go in circles or ellipses. To say we now hold to a Kepler-ian understanding of planetary motion just infers too much psychology onto people, and is not even going to scientifically precise enough to be a correct description of planetary motion. All this is to say that any discussion of “ancient cosmology” needs to establish first and foremost that they actually had a cosmology. I’m not sure ancient Hebrews did.

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More of a Tolkien fan myself. :grin:

But yeah, I get what you’re saying. Thanks.

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For more on the subject of beliefs about the shape of the earth through history, here is a great link: https://historyforatheists.com/2016/06/the-great-myths-1-the-medieval-flat-earth/

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Josh

I tried to think of a contemporary comparison to “the world before the cosmos”. Apart from the Universe, as above, my best idea was “music”.

We know lots about music, all the different kinds, how it works and so on. But nobody has ever come up with the concept of something like “The Muse”, ie the totality of all the music there ever is or could be. If, for some reaon, that became a thing, we’d have something on which to speculate - how much of “The Muse” have we discovered so far? Is it infinite, or are there boundaries? It’s something we’ve no reason to consider, as we explore and enjoy a rich musical world

But presumably it’s a thinkable thing to some philosopher.

In the case of the cosmos, derived from “orderly arrangement,” I’m not sure if the thought the Greeks first had was of a self-contained body like an animal, or a household under the Prime Mover. neither is obvious until someone suggests it, because it’s more intuitive just to think of all the things in the world rather than their unity, but after that it’s impossible to think any other way.

An analogous idea, of course, is the novel thought that not only do all things have characteristic “natures”, but maybe the whole world has an overarching “Nature of everything”… Hey, let’s call it “nature”… and then exclude God, of course. And maybe spirits. And human minds. And what human minds produce…

The amazing thing is that it’s p[ossible to do science without “nature”, as Francesca Rochberg explores in her book on Babylonian science - of course with some oblique relevance to ideas of “ancient science” in the Bible.

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Nice, well-deserved polemic! The Flammarion print at the top is, of course, illustrating the spoof, but it’s amazing how often it turns up in pieces about the foolish mediaevals and their quaint ideas. Few people realise it was executed in 1888, for a book about meteorology, by an astronomer (not a historian) with spiritualist interests, who also trained as an artist and may have drawn it himself.

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This all just supports my thesis:

Christians seem to have a problem with pseudoscience. Atheists seem to have a problem with pseudohistory.

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And rock and roll singers with their blue pseud shoes, of course. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I listened to Denis Lamoureux’s presentation at the American Scientific Affiliation conference in Nashville some years back and thought that he was missing the mark. I still believe he is wrong about ancient cosmology as it pertains to the biblical Hebrew who spent time in Babylon, but were of Nilotic ancestry. Their cosmology is more like a mountain or pyramid with the Creator at the peak. Eve, as the crown of creation, submits to a base creature that crawls belly in the dust (the bottom of the pyramid). In submitting to the serpent’s will, the whole of the creation is inverted. Now the pyramid is upside-down and awaits restoration. This is much more consistent with the overall symbolism and narrative trajectory of the Bible.

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@Alice_Linsley

  • Can you tell me more about how the pyramid is upside-down and awaits restoration?

  • I’m learning

  • Also, do you know if there are other pyramids other than those in Egypt in the Indus Valley?

  • I think the earth is a concave cell.

  • Because light continues to pull in the same direction through the Shechina light vessel, I wonder whether, after our physical body dies, our spirit soul can depart through the cell’s wall and leave earth. I’m curious whether there are more concave cells.