The Real Lie Behind the Flat Earth Theory

First of all, I would like to thank Jeffrey Burton Russell, whose exceptionally well-documented and thoroughly researched book, “Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians”, enabled me to produce this article, which I share with you. In this article I provide a summary of his book, supplemented by my own reflections and research.

Introduction

With the advent of modern science and new technologies, the question of a flat earth was thought to have been settled once and for all. Yet in recent decades we have seen renewed interest in this theory, and today an extremely powerful lobby promotes it worldwide: The International Flat Earth Society. More and more truth-seekers and conspiracy theorists are being persuaded by this theory, but what does the evidence tell us? What are its origins? What purposes does it really serve, and who is behind it?

This article aims to dispel any remaining doubt about the nature of this theory, using practical arguments that anyone can verify and historical arguments tracing its true origins and promoters, enabling you to grasp its full implications. You will see that the flat earth theory is no minor detail, but actually has far more serious consequences for our worldview and spiritual guidance.

I. Concrete evidence that the earth is not flat, but round

Let us begin by presenting a number of physical and empirical arguments that demonstrate clearly, and beyond any doubt, that the earth cannot be flat but is indeed round. No advanced scientific knowledge or superior intelligence is needed to understand these arguments and verify them for yourself. All that is needed is a sound mind capable of thinking for itself, uninfluenced by its own biases and impervious to propaganda in all its forms. Truly intelligent people are those who show discernment and know how to revise their established beliefs in light of the arguments presented to them.

1. Objects gradually disappearing or appearing at the horizon

One of the clearest arguments proving that the earth is round is that we can observe objects appearing and disappearing at the horizon with the naked eye as they approach or move away. A familiar example is watching the sun disappear or appear at the sea horizon at sunset or sunrise.

If the earth were flat, the sun would become smaller and smaller at the horizon until it was a tiny point of light, without ever disappearing behind the horizon. Yet these photographs clearly show that the sun remains a substantial size when it begins to disappear behind the horizon, proving that the earth does indeed curve because of its spherical shape.

In fact, the sun is not the only object that allows this phenomenon to be observed with the naked eye. Any object large enough to be seen with the naked eye at the horizon also allows us to observe it: for example, a ship, wind turbines … or a city, such as the Chicago skyline shown in the following photographs.

2. Being able to see further from a greater height

If we stand in a flat location without elevated terrain, such as at sea, the higher we go, the more distant objects we can observe that we could not see from the water’s surface because they are hidden by the earth’s curvature.

For example, if the same observer stands at the same location but at a greater height, they could then see part of this skyscraper that they could not see from ground level because of the earth’s curvature.

The observer at the top of this 100-metre tower can see the mast of boat B, whereas if the same observer were only 10 metres high, they would have to move closer, to the position of boat A, to be able to see the mast of boat B.

3. Lunar eclipses

The flat earth theory offers no explanation for lunar eclipses, since lunar eclipses occur when the spherical earth lies between the moon and the sun, placing the moon in the earth’s shadow. However, this configuration never occurs in the flat earth theory, leaving no explanation for lunar eclipses.

4. The illumination of the earth

With a round earth, an entire hemisphere is illuminated by the sun at the same time, which can easily be verified by observers at different locations in the illuminated hemisphere.

By contrast, in the flat earth theory, barely a quarter of the disc/globe—depending on whether the earth is considered flat or round—is exposed to the sun, which does not match what is actually observed.

5. Different constellations visible in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere

Different stars are observed at different latitudes: for example, constellations can be seen from Sumatra that cannot be seen from Europe, providing further indisputable proof that the earth cannot be flat. Indeed, if the earth were flat, the same constellations could be observed from either the Southern or the Northern Hemisphere; clearly, this is not the case.

 

Conclusion

There are many other arguments that I have not developed in this article to prove that the earth is round rather than flat: for example, changes in day length and the seasons throughout the year, the equinoxes, polar night and polar day, the perfect motion of the stars implying that they move on a perfect sphere, and the fact that stars rise earlier in the east than further west … and so on. As you have seen, no advanced modern technology is needed to make all these observations. In any era, anyone can carry out these checks with the naked eye, which leads us to ask whether there ever really was a time when most people thought the earth was flat.

Yet this is what modern history claims: that until the Middle Ages, most people thought the earth was flat, and that belief in a round earth was finally established only thanks to Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, Copernicus’s heliocentrism and Magellan’s voyage around the world. But is this historical reality, or rather a modern rewriting of history?

II. The real lie behind the Flat Earth Theory

You will see that the real lie about the flat earth is not the belief that the earth could be flat, but rather the belief that there was ever a time when most people believed it was flat. I will show you that such a time never actually existed. To do so, we need only delve into the writings of the great scientists and philosophers who lived up to the Middle Ages to realise that the general consensus among the educated population was instead that the earth was round. I am not saying that all people and scientists in those past eras unanimously believed that the earth was round: in every era, including our own, there is and has always been a small minority who adhere to the Flat Earth Theory.

In fact, most renowned scholars throughout the Middle Ages and long before shared the belief that the Earth was round, including Aristotle (384–322 BC), Ptolemy (100–168), Macrobius (370–430), Martianus (410), … Roger Bacon (1220–1292), John Buridan (1300–1358), Nicole Oresme (1320–1382), Giles of Rome (1247–1316), … and Johannes de Sacrobosco (twelfth century), who in his Treatise on the Sphere drew on the writings of Al-Farghani, a ninth-century astronomer of the Abbasid Caliphate, to prove that the Earth was indeed round.

Bede, known as the Venerable (672–735), the great historian and scholar of natural science of the early Middle Ages, maintained that the earth lay at the centre of a spherical cosmos. The earth was a globe that could be treated as a perfect sphere because the irregularities of its surface, caused by mountains and valleys, were too small in comparison with its immense size. Bede established that the earth was “round” not in the sense of “circular”, but in the sense of a ball. The same analogy appears in the Quran, where one verse says that night and day alternate on earth in the shape of a ball. In the ninth century, the greatest philosopher of the Middle Ages, John Scottus Eriugena, was equally firm on this point.

He created the heavens and the earth in truth. He wraps, as around a ball (يكور ) night over day, and day over night, and He has made the sun and moon subject to Him, each pursuing its course for an appointed term. He is indeed the Mighty, the Great Forgiver!

S39:V5

The word “يكور” shares the same root as the word “كرة”, which means “ball”, clearly showing that the earth does indeed have a spherical shape, which explains the wording used in this verse: “wraps, as around a ball, night over day, and day over night”.

In his English translation of the book Image du Monde, Mirour of the World, William Caxton (1422–1491) explains:

“The world is round like a ball, with the sky surrounding the earth on every side like the shell of an egg.”

Another verse of the Quran uses this same comparison:

And as for the earth, after that, He gave it the structure of an egg 

S79:V30

Indeed, we can see that this comparison is entirely apt, since an egg has exactly the same structure as the earth: the yolk corresponds to the earth’s molten core; the white to the layer of the earth composed of heavy metals extending from the core to the crust; and the shell to the protective atmosphere surrounding the earth. Through the first verse quoted, God reveals the earth’s shape to us: a sphere. Through this second verse, God reveals its structure, made up of concentric spherical layers.

So where does this false modern belief come from—that until the Middle Ages the scientific community as a whole thought the earth was flat? And who are these supposed medieval scientists who supported this theory and are now presented to us as the eminent representatives of their age? Did they really say this, or have their writings instead been distorted to make them say it? A study of their writings seems to support the second possibility.

For example, one of the most widely read encyclopaedists of the early Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636), is often cited as a supporter of a flat earth. It is true that his Etymologiae, a twenty-book encyclopaedia written towards the end of his life, contains some passages that may cause confusion, but this ambiguity is due only to his lack of interest in the question. However, in his Treatise on Nature, he gives an estimate of the earth’s circumference, implying that his true belief was that the earth was round.

Another example is Virgil of Salzburg, an Irish bishop who lived in Austria in the eighth century and was reprimanded by the Church for his belief in the antipodes. Modern historians and writers confuse the question of the antipodes with that of the earth’s sphericity, and have therefore concluded that he was condemned for asserting that the earth was round. This led them to the mistaken conclusion that the Church Fathers commonly believed at that time that the earth was flat. But this was not the case: in the ancient and medieval worlds, the term “antipodes” referred to lands on the opposite side of the globe, or, more commonly, to the human inhabitants of lands on the other side of the planet. Christian doctrine in the Middle Ages and earlier, resting on the belief that all humans descend from Adam and Eve, held that there could be no inhabitants on the other side of the globe, because the ocean was too vast to cross or the equatorial regions were too hot to sail through. Thus, by their reasoning, if there were people on the other side of the globe, they would not be descendants of Adam and Eve, contrary to their fundamental doctrine. This is the real reason Virgil of Salzburg was condemned, not because he said that the earth was round while the Church Fathers thought otherwise.

In reality, Christianity and religion in general have never been opposed to science. On the contrary, religion has always encouraged science and looked upon it favourably. Students in the Middle Ages learned geography as a subject associated with astronomy and geometry, two disciplines belonging to the standard medieval curriculum of the “Seven Liberal Arts”. The general outlook in the Middle Ages and earlier was not to set science and religion against each other, as is believed today; this is merely a projection by the historians and scientists of our own time. On the contrary, the prevailing outlook was to reconcile them: religion addressed morality and offered a metaphorical view of the world, while science offered an analytical and empirical view of the physical world, accessible to the senses and human reasoning. Indeed, absolute knowledge belongs exclusively to God, for God alone knows all the secrets of creation. Human knowledge, by contrast, remains and will forever remain approximate and prone to error, owing to the imperfection inherent in human nature … even though its tendency will be to draw ever closer to the truth.

The Church Fathers were not the enemies of science they are portrayed as today, just as enlightened religious people today are not enemies of science and technology. Rather, they considered that the shape of the cosmos and the earth was irrelevant to being a Christian, which concerned morality and spirituality rather than philosophy. For example, John of Damascus (675–749) considered that “geographical knowledge was a pointless vanity, but if philosophers and scientists can show that the earth is round, so be it”. Indeed, in every age, the true believer shares the same way of thinking: “Who am I to aspire to understand the creation of the Universe and everything in it, when I am merely a speck of dust compared with God?” He therefore leaves this to God and focuses instead on what is within his reach, such as matters of morality and what is accessible to direct experimentation. Only those with an inflated ego, who are in no way guided by God, are vain enough to hope that one day they will know all the secrets of creation. Such is the case today with this misguided humanity, which claims it can possess the explanation for the origins of life, even though we are not even capable of digging more than 3 kilometres beneath the earth’s surface, so unbearable does the heat become.

John of Damascus followed the teachings of the great Eastern Orthodox theologian Basil of Caesarea, also known as Basil the Great, who explained that the mass of the cosmos presses towards the centre of the earth from every direction, and therefore concluded that the earth was probably a sphere. Basil told his monastic audience: “The Bible seems to favour a flat earth, so they should simply content themselves with praying to God and thanking Him for His creation, whatever the shape of the earth.” In reality, the Bible has never claimed to be a book of science, but instead presents itself as an allegorical book when it comes to science. 

Although the general consensus among the educated population of the Middle Ages was that the earth was round, there will always be people, as there still are today, who believe that the earth is flat. This is usually because such people read sacred texts literally rather than metaphorically. For example, Severian (380), Bishop of Gabala, says in his Homilies on the Creation of the World that God did not create a spherical heaven, as the Greek philosophers say, but that heaven is shaped like a tent. This belief stems from the idea that the Tabernacle of Moses, the tent that housed the Ark of the Covenant, was built to reproduce the shape of the world, and that the world must therefore necessarily have the same shape as the Tabernacle. 

Another error that led modern historians to believe that, until the Middle Ages, the established belief was that the earth was flat comes from the many world maps of that period depicting the earth in two dimensions. Yet these world maps in no way expressed the supposed popular belief that the earth was flat; they were merely intended to depict a portion of the known world on a flat map. These maps did not claim to meet the criteria of a modern atlas, just as modern flat maps of Europe or Africa are only intended to depict part of the planet.

“Maps do not necessarily have to show Euclidean space.” A map can represent any concept, not just in spatial terms. There are “maps of the heavens”, “maps of the unconscious”, “maps of personal finances”, “maps of the economy”, and even “maps of the future”.

David Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space”, p. 511

The dimensions of different territories were also often deliberately exaggerated to represent the supremacy of a particular monarch. This confirms for us that many maps in the Middle Ages were not really scientific in purpose, but purely symbolic.

Further evidence that these maps were purely symbolic, and that the established belief in the Middle Ages was that the earth was round, is the fact that many monarchs of the Middle Ages and earlier were depicted with a globe in the palm of their hand, symbolising their power and authority over the world. One example is this coronation portrait of Richard II (1367–1400) in Westminster Abbey:

In this other medieval depiction of Jesus Christ, taken from the Book of Hours, Jesus can be seen holding the globe representing the earth in his hand, signifying his authority and influence over the whole world.

In this other depiction, dating from 1375, we can see a Malian king named Abu Bakr II (c. 1320) holding the globe symbolising the earth in his hand, more than 200 years before Christopher Columbus’s discovery and the supposed transition to belief in a round earth.

The two medieval figures on whom modern historians chiefly rely to support their false theory that, until the Middle Ages, people considered the earth flat are Lactantius (245–325), an African pagan who converted to Christianity, and Cosmas Indicopleustes, a sixth-century Greek merchant.

Lactantius’s view was that, since the Revelation, Christians had faced two competing approaches to truth: one based on the authority of revealed Scripture, and the other on the authority of philosophical logic. It was consistent for Lactantius to believe that Revelation should prevail over any human system of thought. He therefore adopted a purely literal approach to Scripture, without considering its symbolic dimension, unlike Saint Augustine (354–430) or John Chrysostom (344–407), who rightly distinguished scientific fact from religious fact, which in reality have no need to be reconciled. Lactantius’s writings were condemned by the Church, and his entire body of work was declared heretical after his death, proof that the Catholic Church in no way endorsed his outlook, including his belief in a flat earth. Moreover, contrary to what modern histories and encyclopaedias say today, Lactantius’s work was in no way an argument for a flat earth. Rather, his literal interpretation of the Bible led him, among many other misinterpretations, to say that the earth was flat, and this was really only a minor point within his work as a whole. In reality, there was no controversy in the Middle Ages pitting supporters of a flat earth against those of a round earth. Few people were really concerned about the earth’s shape, and the general belief among the educated population was that it was round. Thus, to make Lactantius a champion of flat-earth theory and say that most people in the Middle Ages shared his thinking is a pure invention by modern historians, blinded by their humanist biases, fierce opposition to religion, and sense of superiority over people of past ages.

As for Cosmas Indicopleustes, although he truly believed that the earth was flat and that the universe was shaped like a tabernacle, his influence on medieval society was virtually nonexistent, since his writings were in Greek whereas Latin was the language in use in the Middle Ages. In reality, Cosmas Indicopleustes was completely ignored until the ninth century, when Patriarch Photius of Constantinople again rejected his outlook. Indeed, no medieval commentator can be found citing Cosmas Indicopleustes, which clearly shows how marginal he was at that time. The works of Cosmas Indicopleustes were not translated into Latin until 1706, further proof that he had absolutely no influence on medieval Western thought. For example, a distinguished historian claimed in 1926 that Cosmas “was very popular among the educated population until the twelfth century”, which is a pure invention. Another standard book on geography simply conceded in 1938:

“Cosmas and the other supporters of flat-earth theory did not hold all the cards—even during the Dark Ages.”

The Making of the Modern Mind, John Herman Randall Jr.

Thus, as with Lactantius, to make Cosmas Indicopleustes one of the principal representatives of prevailing medieval thought is a shameless lie, illustrating both the ignorance of modern historians and their many biases.

III. The hidden purpose of the Flat Earth lie

Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes were not the anti-scientific, obscurantist “villains” of the Middle Ages that modern historians have portrayed to us. Rather, they were deliberately caricatured to serve as symbols of their age and be used as weapons against anti-Darwinists. Indeed, for centuries after the Middle Ages, there was no controversy over the shape of the earth, and the Humanists, propagandists of the Enlightenment, did not go so far as to accuse the Catholic Church of asserting that the earth was flat, because this was clearly not the case. But from the 1870s onwards, the Humanists began to set religion and science against each other in military terms, especially Hume, who planted the idea that science and religion were in conflict. In the same vein, Auguste Comte (1798–1857) argued that humanity was struggling laboriously to establish the reign of science, presented as “good”, with all opposition to this movement still presented today as “evil”. Religion was thus portrayed as backward and bad, since it allegedly prevented humanity from developing.

In reality, precisely the opposite is true: in every age, religion has encouraged science and acted as its patron. Theologians of the past considered science and religion two different views of the world, with different roots, which should never be confused. We see an illustration of this, for example, in the emergence of Islam and the Revelation of the Quran, which completely transformed pre-Islamic Arab society, propelling it to the forefront of scientific knowledge, something everyone acknowledges today. Indeed, religion concerns revealed truth and focuses primarily on morality, the relationship with God, and social interactions. Science, by contrast, addresses an entirely different subject: the analytical study of nature through observation and experimentation. It therefore has a practical dimension rather than a philosophical and spiritual one, as religion does. Turning science into a religion, as the Humanists have done, is an undeniable error, because science concerns only physical elements, whereas religion deals primarily with morality. Conversely, turning religion into science in the strict sense cannot possibly work, and leads to obscurantism and a regression in knowledge, because scientific matters are very often addressed metaphorically in revealed books. If we take the Quran, which differs from previous Revelations in that it addresses a great many scientific matters and is the Pure Word of God, the knowledge it contains is not intended for scientific study as such, but rather to give science its broad direction. Ultimately, it is human knowledge, gained through observation, study and experimentation, that will explore in detail what God tells us in broad terms in the Quran, and that should be used in academic studies. Religion can be considered Supreme Knowledge, from which all other forms of knowledge—spiritual, philosophical and physical—derive, since God alone has Absolute Knowledge of Everything. Science as a discipline deriving from religion is True Science: it enables human beings to approach the divine through their own senses, and thus to know God and His blessings upon them better. By contrast, the “science” of the Humanists consists only of false theories and imperfections, and its true purpose is to eradicate God’s Religion—in other words, to lead us away from the truth and towards our own ruin. 

The open war of science, turned into a weapon by the Humanists to destroy religion and Divine Revelation, is declared with John W. Draper (1811–1882), who came from a religious family. His father was an itinerant Methodist preacher who forced him to attend a Methodist school at the age of eleven.

In adulthood, Draper gradually turned away from religion and adopted science as his new religion, later taking the helm of New York University. In 1862, he published his book History of the Intellectual Development of Europe , in which he denounced the subordination of science to religion. The papacy’s growing opposition to liberal humanist thought led him to go further still, publishing in 1873 History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, combining Gibbon’s Enlightenment scepticism with the political positivism of Comte’s liberalisation of faith. This latter book is of great importance because it was the first book by an influential figure to declare officially that religion and science were at war. Draper writes the exact opposite of what I described to you above as the proper relationship between science and religion:

The Catholic Church and science are absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; humanity must make a choice—it cannot have both.

Draper, History of the Conflict, p. 363

His book would serve as the starting point for the entire movement that followed, gradually consigning religion to oblivion in favour of science and liberal thought. In his last book, Draper offers an explanation of how, in his view, religion went astray. Here is an excerpt:

The antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science continues the struggle that began when Christianity started to acquire political power. A divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of any contradiction; it must reject all improvement in itself and look with disdain on everything arising from humanity’s progressive intellectual development […]. The history of Science is not merely a record of isolated discoveries; it is an account of the conflict between two contending powers: the expansive force of the human intellect on the one hand, and the compression resulting from traditional faith and human interests on the other […]. Faith is by its nature unchanging, stationary; Science is by its nature progressive; and ultimately a divergence between the two, impossible to conceal, must occur. It is the duty of educated people to take a position, for when Europe’s old mythological religion collapsed under the weight of its own inconsistencies, neither the Roman emperors nor the philosophers of their age did anything appropriate to guide public opinion. They left religious affairs to chance, and as a result these affairs fell into the hands of ignorant and furious clerics, parasites, eunuchs and slaves.

History of the Conflict, Draper, VI–VII

We can clearly see that Draper’s starting point was his own rebellion against God and rejection of His Scriptures, which left him blinded by his own biases. As a committed Humanist who embraced liberal thought and Enlightenment philosophies, he believed he could be his own guide apart from God, and adopted imperfect human science as a religion instead of Divine Law. However, he was not entirely wrong in what he said about the unchanging nature of religion compared with the progressive nature of science. For God’s law is immutable because God is perfect and therefore never makes mistakes, so His Law remains perfect from beginning to end. It should come as no surprise to intelligent minds that spiritual laws do not change over time, when we see that the same is true of the laws of physics. Since they are perfect from the outset, why seek to change what is already perfect? As for science’s progressive nature, this is in no way to its credit, for science continually contradicts its own earlier positions over time, each time recognising only afterwards its naivety and glaring errors, owing to the vanity and misguidance of those who have elevated it into a religion. We can see an illustration of this today: in less than fifty years, science has contradicted its own earlier positions many times, for example with the theory of relativity or the supposedly insurmountable limit of the speed of light, which ultimately proved false despite having been treated as established scientific truths for decades. Those who, like Draper—and they are the majority today—believe in the infallibility of science and adopt science as a religion have not seen the last of the disappointment and betrayal caused by their false beliefs. Science must keep to its place and religion to its own; there is no reason to set them against each other or favour one at the other’s expense. But only minds guided by God can understand this. As for the vain who refuse to submit to God and believe in their own divinity, they will inevitably be the losers, and their illusory world will collapse like a house of cards by the end of their lives, when God takes back their souls, when they see God’s angels with their own eyes, and when they must face their deeds at the Last Judgement.

Draper’s book, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, became a bestseller in the International Scientific Series. It was printed fifty times in fifty years in the United States and twenty-one times in fifty years in the United Kingdom, and translated internationally. Progressives—the Humanists who embraced the Enlightenment—followed in Draper’s footsteps and incorporated his work into school textbooks, presenting it as absolute truth:

The sphericity of the earth was a doctrine shared by many at that time (the time of Christopher Columbus); but this theory was not in harmony with the religious thinking of the period, and it was therefore unwise for anyone to publish their beliefs on the subject openly.

P. V. N. Mayers, “a general for colleges and high schools” (Boston and London, 1891), p. 513

What this excerpt says is completely false, because in Christopher Columbus’s time there was no public controversy over the sphericity of the earth. Columbus’s voyage was not intended to demonstrate that the earth was round, but simply to find new trading opportunities for the Spanish Crown. Indeed, in Columbus’s time, the Turks were blocking the old overland route to India and China, while the Portuguese were seeking an eastward sea route around Africa, opening numerous trading posts along the way. All that remained for Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs of the Spanish Empire, was to explore a new westward maritime trade route in order to compete with Portugal. Contrary to the fictitious figure of Christopher Columbus created much later by the Humanists, from the nineteenth century onwards, Columbus’s motives were in no way religious but purely commercial. He was never the champion of science and round-earth theory in a struggle against the “wicked” clerics and their supposed flat-earth theory. In reality, the only notable struggle Columbus took part in was his effort to persuade Isabella to finance his expedition. Columbus was not the upright, science-loving man portrayed by modern history; rather, he had to bend the truth to get around the repeated rejections by Queen Isabella’s special committee, made up of religious and secular members, concerning the feasibility of his expedition. Indeed, it took him six long years, from 1496 to April 1492, finally to achieve his aims, continually revising his figures downwards: in his final proposal, Columbus estimated the distance between the Canary Islands and Japan at about 4,450 km, whereas the actual distance is 22,000 km! In other words, he estimated his voyage at roughly twenty per cent of its actual length.

The irony is that Christopher Columbus relied primarily on the scientific expertise of a theologian and philosopher, Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420), without whom his expedition would never have received Queen Isabella’s approval. To say that Columbus was on a crusade against the clergy, and that his expedition’s main purpose was to prove that the earth was round, is therefore a most grotesque lie.

This is a far cry from the modern portrayal of Christopher Columbus as a science enthusiast fighting the clergy and pressing for his expedition solely to show that the earth was round, something every educated person already knew in his day. In reality, Columbus was far from the only figure whose life was romanticised to serve the Humanists’ relentless struggle against religion. Many other medieval figures, some of whom I mentioned above, were either caricatured or praised to the skies and portrayed as heroes, in order to produce the fictional narrative now called Modern History.

Having concluded this digression on the real Christopher Columbus and the true, purely commercial purpose of his expedition, let us return to our study of the succession of Humanists, propagandists of the Enlightenment, in their offensive against religion. After Draper drove the first nail firmly home by spreading the flat-earth falsehood wrongly associated with the Catholic Church, the supposed opposition between science and religion during the Middle Ages, and the false assertion that the only real truth is scientific rather than revealed truth, Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) took up Draper’s propaganda work and pushed it further still. Like Draper, White came from a deeply religious family of high-ranking Episcopalians and was also sent to a religious boarding school at an early age. He hated this religious education, which intensified his aversion to religion. White founded the first openly secular university in the United States, Cornell University, and became its president at the age of thirty-three. Whereas Draper’s aversion was directed against Christians, White extended his to Protestants as well. Initially, the latter had been the Humanists’ opportunistic allies against the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy, but this ultimately worked against them, since their original allies eventually turned on them. Meanwhile, the flat-earth falsehood associated with the Middle Ages was reinforced to the point of completely eclipsing historical reality. White presented Cosmas Indicopleustes as a typical representative of the thinking of his age, the early Middle Ages:

During the Middle Ages, some of the most prominent men in the Church devoted themselves to supporting [Cosmas] with new texts, putting forward new webs of theological reasoning.

History of the Warfare, White

As we have shown above, Cosmas’s writings were in Greek and were not translated into Latin until the eighteenth century. Yet the language of medieval Europe was Latin, proof that Cosmas had no influence on general medieval thinking. White also portrayed Lactantius as typical of “the great majority of the early Church Fathers”, whereas we have clearly seen that Lactantius’s work was condemned by the Church and declared heretical. But the supporters of the Enlightenment cared nothing for the truth and, blinded by their own biases, did not trouble to check the information on which they relied, treating any information that supported their position as the word of truth. White presents Christopher Columbus as a brave navigator “at war” with ignorant theologians:

Columbus’s struggle is well known to the world: how the Bishop of Ceuta portrayed him negatively in Portugal; how many learned men in Spain challenged him with the usual quotations from the Psalms, from Saint Paul to Saint Augustine; how, even after he had triumphed, and after his voyage had considerably strengthened the theory of the earth’s sphericity… the Church, through its highest authorities, stumbled lamentably and persisted in its error… in 1519, Science won an overwhelming victory. Magellan made his famous voyage… yet even this did not end the war. Many conscientious men continued to oppose this doctrine for another two hundred years.

History of the Warfare, White, pp. 108–109

Yet we have clearly seen that Columbus himself relied chiefly on the geographical expertise of a theologian, Pierre d’Ailly, to persuade the committee of experts appointed by Queen Isabella that his expedition was feasible. He was therefore in no way at war with religious people. This account is really nothing but an entirely invented narrative tracing the origin of belief in a round earth through fictitious episodes that in no way correspond to the facts: Columbus’s discovery in 1492, Copernicus’s heliocentrism in 1513, and Magellan’s voyage around the world in 1519 … Yet none of these episodes was ever intended to show that the earth was round, something every educated person already knew in medieval times. They served only to expand knowledge of the known world and were in no way part of a conflict between science and religion. As for Copernicus’s heliocentrism, whether celestial bodies revolve around the Sun rather than the Earth has nothing to do with the earth’s shape.

Finally, the last figure to drive home the nail of this falsehood, skilfully and patiently constructed over the centuries, which has now become an integral part of academic teaching and is no longer a truth open to discussion, is Washington Irving (1783–1859), with his novel A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). Far from being the historical work it is presented as, it has all the features of a novel, portraying Columbus as a hero confronting the foolish clerics of the “Council of Salamanca”.

Washington Irving

A further step was taken: Irving no longer even concerned himself with historical reality, but simply found his sources in a number of books from the Madrid bookshop belonging to his friend Obadiah Rich, a book collector. Far from doing the work of a true historian, Irving merely reproduced passages from various books that supported his position, without checking their contents, and added inventions of his own, already being known for his talents as a novelist. Regarding his account of Columbus, the main work in his oeuvre, Irving readily acknowledges having relied chiefly on Navarrete’s (1765–1844) collection relating to Columbus’s voyage, without even checking its information:

[…] wherever I find a document published by him (Navarrete), I am certain of its accuracy and do not trouble myself to examine the original.

Life and Voyages, Irving

Literally plundering Navarrete’s work, Irving used it to publish a book of more than five hundred pages in 1824, in just twenty-one months… a book that met with enormous success, Tales of a Traveller.

But Irving “simply did not have the time, knowledge or training to conduct such an investigation… his final statement was that he had turned the story of Columbus into a work of art”.

Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed, Wagenknecht, p. 184

Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky observes of Irving’s book on Columbus:

It is not really a “biography” at all, nor can it be called “history”. Although he could have produced one had he wished, given his access to the many manuscripts that Navarrete had spent decades collecting, Irving adds nothing new to the standard, though often contradictory, accounts of the life and voyages that preceded his own… Irving’s Columbus is more akin to a work of imagination… he embellishes, exaggerates, shapes and colours the events and incidents in the original sources… At times, Irving seems more a writer of fiction than a historian.

Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World, pp. 221–222

All subsequent authors who addressed the subject relied on Irving’s work, including Jean-Antoine Letronne (1787–1848), regarded as a secular saint, whose influence proved even greater than Irving’s. He ultimately established the flat-earth falsehood and all its implications for religion as an academic commonplace. Today’s modern history will ultimately remember Irving and Letronne as the founding fathers of the flat-earth falsehood, and their work is now presented as historical truth.

Conclusion

The true chronology of geographical knowledge is that, as early as the fourth century BC—and certainly much earlier, although there are no surviving writings on the subject from before that period, or very few—the Greek philosophers established the sphericity of the earth. The Romans then adopted the Greek view, and, with a few exceptions, the Church Fathers and writers of the early Middle Ages also agreed. It is true that, during the Middle Ages, Christian theologians showed little or no interest in discussing the earth’s shape. Interest in science was relatively limited in the early Middle Ages, although geography and astronomy were among the standard arts taught, and remained so throughout the Middle Ages. The earth’s shape was not widely discussed, as attention focused instead on theological questions. Various beliefs circulated among the uneducated, but among the educated there was always a consensus that the earth was spherical. With the growth of trade in the fifteenth century, geography became more important, but only from a practical standpoint, with the aim of exploring new markets. The educated medieval world unanimously believed in the earth’s sphericity, and Columbus’s voyage in no way claimed to prove that the earth was round. The idea that Columbus showed the earth to be round is therefore a purely modern invention. But this prepared the ground for the Humanists, and initially the Protestants, to invent the flat-earth falsehood. The flat-earth controversy remained a non-issue until the nineteenth century, and the Church reacted little to it, since there was no widespread controversy over the earth’s shape. Only when the flat-earth falsehood became a historical reality did the first concerted efforts seek to discredit it. At first, Catholic writers undertook this task to defend their religion against the false accusation of having supported flat-earth theory, alongside medieval specialists who did not want their preferred period to be seen as a Dark Age. But it was too late: this invention was already deeply imprinted on people’s minds, and that is even more the case today. How did we get here?

Many writers, historians, scientists and researchers often repeat and spread errors and misinterpretations, knowingly or unknowingly. Many of them often allow their own biases, rather than concrete evidence, to guide them. Historians, whose work places them in a good position to understand that every worldview is a human construction and that paradigms of knowledge are precarious and inevitably change, whether religious or scientific, often forget that there is not, and cannot be, a privileged system by which to judge the truth of other systems. This article therefore does not accuse all the authors who spread the flat-earth falsehood of having knowingly lied to achieve their ends, even though many blinded themselves through their categorical rejection of Divine Revelation.

The supporters of the Enlightenment wrote modern history, portraying the period before the Middle Ages as a golden age, in contrast to the Middle Ages, which they called the Dark Ages: an intermediate age—hence the name “Middle Ages”—between two golden ages, that of the Greek philosophers and pagan gods, and that of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, a period that continues to this day. These golden ages give pride of place to pagan gods and put humanity at the centre of everything, making human beings their own gods in the making, in opposition to belief in One Almighty God at the centre of all things. Religion has now been submerged amid a multitude of pagan beliefs held up as models for all humanity, as we can see in this three-season Netflix documentary devoted to so-called “religion”, The Story of God. The presenter and director of this Netflix documentary, Morgan Freeman, makes no secret of his sympathy for the Eastern pagan beliefs of Tibet, or of his contempt for and disbelief in the Religion of the Book.

This supposed Golden Age of Greek and Roman philosophers was idealised by the Humanists, whereas in reality the opposite is true. Indeed, Divine Revelation served to educate human beings and free them from the yoke of other people, making them entirely free; to unite them under the authority of the Only True God rather than a multitude of false pagan gods, who are in reality demons; and to guide them towards justice, truth and true knowledge rather than traditions, ancient barbaric practices and ever-changing false sciences. The real problem with these Humanists or Luciferians is that they accept neither God’s authority nor anyone else’s. They are simply rebels: they do not want the truth, but want to impose their own false truth on the whole world, even if that means lying and manipulating people for centuries… Through repetition and mass propaganda campaigns, they have indeed succeeded in convincing most people—at least those who are not under God’s guidance.

Through the flat-earth falsehood, the invented opposition of religion to heliocentrism—it was not only the Church Fathers who did not believe in heliocentrism before Copernicus’s discovery, but society as a whole, including secular society, and Copernicus himself was a Christian—and the fraud of evolution or Darwinism, the Luciferians who still lead this world today have succeeded in fabricating an alternative religion that they have called Science. It continually collapses upon itself, but is constantly supplied with new lies to keep it afloat. God’s Religion reflects God: perfect and immutable. The religion of the Luciferians, human science, reflects them: imperfect and constantly repudiating itself.

In reality, these Luciferian Humanists have carried out exactly the same propaganda work with science as they did with the history of the flat earth: they invented a fictional account of the history of science, crediting scientific discoveries solely to human intelligence and using this falsehood to portray religion as the enemy of intelligence and human development. Yet the truth is that ALL scientific discoveries since the beginning of humanity are due not to human intelligence, but solely to God’s goodness and Mercy towards us: He has literally handed us these discoveries on a plate. Indeed, human beings have invented nothing, but have merely copied God’s Creation. It is God who brings about the appropriate natural phenomena at the right moment and for the right person, the one with the knowledge needed to interpret them and derive knowledge useful to all humanity. God has always acted in this way, whether in religion or science: He rewards those who have made the necessary effort to research a particular field and have shown intellectual honesty, by supplying the missing building blocks so that their research can bear fruit and lead to discoveries that benefit all humanity. All great scientists, religious or secular, agree that their discoveries were made possible only by “pure chance in nature”—“chance” that was in reality brought about by God, since true “chance” does not exist. There is the true science that God teaches us, which is useful to human beings and finds practical expression in all the technology and complex knowledge we possess today, greatly easing our lives. This true Science is religion’s ally and concrete proof of God’s existence and goodness towards us. And there is the false science of the Luciferian Humanists’ lies, the false science of the Devil, their master, which only misguides those who embrace it and leads them ever further from God and the truth, without bringing them the slightest benefit. This false science is no real science at all, but a sheer lie that turns science into a weapon against religion and claims to explain the human mind, the origins of life and its future… even though religion already answers these questions clearly.

The real flat-earth delusion is not, in fact, believing in a flat earth, but believing that there was once a time when humanity as a whole believed the earth was flat—something that never actually happened. Luciferians, Humanists, followers of Enlightenment philosophies, Freemasons, rebels or traitors to God—names that in reality designate the same category of people—used the flat-earth falsehood and evolution to discredit religion, succeeding with the simple-minded people who do not follow God’s Guidance. Today they are repeating the same strategy, using their political, academic, cultural, media, technological and financial power to promote flat-earth theory again among truth seekers, so that they never reach the truth. In creating the false conspiracy theory that the earth is actually flat, the aim is not really to convince as many people as possible of this lie, but rather to lump all conspiracy theories together, including flat-earth theory, and discredit them all at once. In reality, those who allow themselves to be manipulated into believing that religion endorsed or endorses flat-earth theory are exactly the same people who allow themselves to be manipulated by all the mass-media lies spread by the Luciferian Global Elites. To those people I say: one day your beliefs will collapse like a house of cards, and your bad choices will surely lead to your own ruin. As for those who remain faithful to God and His Revelations, and who are under God’s direct Guidance, God will save them and they will prevail in the end; their belief in God’s Revelation will never fail them.

This Netflix “documentary” about today’s flat-earth supporters illustrates the Luciferians’ powerful propaganda. Given their lifestyles, we can clearly see in this documentary that the leaders of this movement are financed by the Luciferians in one way or another—perhaps through YouTube, hidden donations or other means—and that they were chosen for their glaring stupidity. The Netflix documentary deliberately seeks to ridicule this theory and its leaders, and they rightly appear ridiculous. But, as I have explained, the real aim is to lump all conspiracy theories together, including the global Luciferian conspiracy, which is nevertheless very real and confirmed by the Quran. Another purpose of the flat-earth falsehood is to enable the Luciferian Elites to gauge their ability to convince people of any “truth”, including the most blatant lies, such as the flat earth. This allows you to realise how the Devil and his servants among human beings have a greater power to lie and deceive today than ever before.

Many truth seekers fall for this trap because their approach is biased and because they are not really seeking the truth, but rather trying to convince themselves that they already possess it. These dishonest people therefore deserve to be deceived and led astray by these Luciferians. True seekers of truth, however, know that no one possesses absolute truth. To draw ever closer to the truth, we must be ready to question our own established beliefs, use our discernment, and distrust what this modern Luciferian/Humanist society presents to us as the truth.