rekrunner wrote:
No he used it to support that the "globe earth" idea is only 500 years old, despite both the heliocentric (his source) and spherical (my source) wikipedia entries giving credit to the ancient Greek scholars more than 2000 years ago, and to Islamic astronomers around 1000 years ago, well before Western civilization caught up.
The flat earth idea was never really seriously proposed in any scholarly circles, and the popularity now is just indicative to the increasing number of people in the fringes, who have developed the capability to write blogs and produce youtube videos to communicate with each other, when in previous eras, they would be in isolation.
I have a theory too wrote:
Oh my. Did Rayo actually cite the heliocentric theory as though this somehow supports a flat Earth?
Um, Rayo, heliocentricity basically stomped on every remaining notion of a flat Earth with the ‘heavens above’. Geocentricity had already put the Earth in space as opposed to being the base of all existence by making the heavens as a sphere rotating around the Earth instead of moving around ‘above’ the Earth. This on it’s own was counter to everything people believed about the known universe and the essential basis of this thread. Evolving study and understanding of the motions of the stars and planets brought the heliocentric theory which placed the Earth and the planets in orbit around the Sun. Mainly this is due to retrograde motions of planets in their apparent positions relative to the stars over the course of time as the planets rotate around the Sun.
However, the changes brought forth by both geocentricity and heliocentricity created a coordinate system that provides a means of location for items in sky, the celestial coordinate system based on right ascension and declination.
Rekrunner, you should be immune from this thread for the levels of cognitive dissonance you display in your faith in Paula's 2.15.