(November 17, 2019 at 4:44 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(November 17, 2019 at 7:22 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: One would think that
Well, I don't know. We all get quite skillful in interpreting scripture when we want to prove something we already believed.
Surely C.S. Lewis knew that you need an airplane to go to another country. Why would he put the entrance in the back of a wardrobe?
(November 17, 2019 at 1:47 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Clearly, most illerate individuals living at that time believed in a flat Earth
It's not clear to me. How do you determine "most"?
Is there persuasive evidence, other than scriptural interpretation?
From the Wikipedia link that I posted earlier:
Quote:Diodorus of Tarsus, a leading figure in the School of Antioch and mentor of John Chrysostom, may have argued for a flat Earth; however, Diodorus' opinion on the matter is known only from a later criticism.[87] Chrysostom, one of the four Great Church Fathers of the Eastern Church and Archbishop of Constantinople, explicitly espoused the idea, based on scripture, that the Earth floats miraculously on the water beneath the firmament.[88] Athanasius the Great, Church Father and Patriarch of Alexandria, expressed a similar view in Against the Heathen.[89]
Christian Topography (547) by the Alexandrian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, who had travelled as far as Sri Lanka and the source of the Blue Nile, is now widely considered the most valuable geographical document of the early medieval age, although it received relatively little attention from contemporaries. In it, the author repeatedly expounds the doctrine that the universe consists of only two places, the Earth below the firmament and heaven above it. Carefully drawing on arguments from scripture, he describes the Earth as a rectangle, 400 days' journey long by 200 wide, surrounded by four oceans and enclosed by four massive walls which support the firmament. The spherical Earth theory is contemptuously dismissed as "pagan".[90][91][92]
Severian, Bishop of Gabala (d. 408), wrote that the Earth is flat and the Sun does not pass under it in the night, but "travels through the northern parts as if hidden by a wall".[93] Basil of Caesarea (329–379) argued that the matter was theologically irrelevant.[94]