Flat Earth and Geocentrism

[Sword of Christ]

More fiat assertions, very unhelpful

Not assertions is this factually what I know happened. You can read about what the ancient philosophers/scientists of the classical world figured out and thought up yourself if you're interested. The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler a very good book on the subject but there are a great many others. Christian and Islamic science was for the most part taken from the classical world and figures such as Aristotle. The orbits of the planets around the Earth was accounted for by a series of rotating interlocking glass like spheres and the maths they developed for this system worked very well. Unfortunately they did have it completely wrong but the mistake was one of science. It's not the case that science came along and fixed incorrect religious beliefs it just corrected it's own view of the universe. No doubt there are things science has wrong today, particularly if you consider what people say 1000 years from now will know that we don't. They may find our current view of the cosmos just as laughable in some way.

, especially in light of all the bible verses that imply a flat earth.

If you're going back to the bronze age the Jews will have shared the same view of the world as the Egyptians and other peoples of the near East of the time. The world was flat, rested on pillars and had a glass like firmament or dome above it but they had no way to know any better. By the Christian era they had figured out the size, shapes, distance and movement of things. There were heliocentric models of the solar system but this was a fringe hypothesis and there was no real way to demonstrate it without the aid of a telescope. It's also worth bearing in mind that Galileo was a devout Catholic when he demonstrated the heliocentric solar system through his telescopic investigation. So this isn't a "science vs religion" kind of thing where science won. That's the way atheists like to portray it but it isn't how it happened at all. Religion did not hold science back. The European dark ages were brought about through the collapse of classical civilization not Christianity. Christianity if anything helped to preserve literacy within it's monastic communities.

Not to mention the fact that, despite your claims that christians knew the earth was spherical "from the very beginning,"

They had figured out the shape of the Earth as early as the 4th century BC this was common knowledge by the time of Jesus.

historically you get a lot of saints and biblical scholars arguing about the nature of the firmament- you know, that giant dome that Genesis describes as dividing the water in space from the water below? Thomas Aquinas argued for a solid firmament, over which there is fire.

Thomas Aquinas saw the firmament as being some kind of wall of ice out in space beyond the orbiting spheres of planets or whatever. As a rule people didn't believe that the Earth was flat and resting on pillars at this point they had calculated the shape and dimensions of it and realised that it was a sphere floating in space.

Remember that verse in Matthew where Jesus could see the entire planet from the top of a tall mountain?

He could could have had a vision of the planet from the top of a small mountain? It's not like he telescope up there.