The Making of the “Flat Earth” Myth

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Christopher Columbus Myth

1:28Christopher Columbus. It's hard to think of any historical figure whose stock has fallen faster in my lifetime. Columbus was revered in my youth, an icon. Now he is widely regarded as a despicable villain. And today I want to dissect a myth about Columbus that you might have learned in school. Not the myth that he discovered America. We all know that's baloney. I'm talking about another myth, that he crossed the Atlantic Ocean to prove that the world was round. I certainly remember learning that in school.

2:00And I hate to break it to people, but that is complete bunk. Still, the story of how that myth took hold is instructive. The tale begins with the ancient Greeks. It winds its way through Copernicus, and even includes a cameo by Rip Van Winkle. But however fascinating, this story should also embarrass us. Because it shows that the true fools here were not the medieval folks who supposedly believed the world was flat, but us modern folks who were dumb enough to think they ever did. This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Keen, a topsy-turvy, science-y history podcast,

2:42where footnotes become the real story. As far back as the 500s BC, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras argued that the world was round. And he was not alone. Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, they all agreed. They based this conclusion on simple observations. For instance, if a ship appears over the horizon, its mast appears before its hull.

3:15That makes sense only on a curved surface. In addition, new stars appear in the sky as you travel to different latitudes, which again only makes sense on a sphere. The Romans inherited the Greek belief in a spherical Earth and commonly displayed globes in public places. Early Christian scholars also generally believed in a round Earth. In their minds, the shape of the Earth was completely irrelevant to salvation. So if some philosophers insisted the Earth was round, sure, who cares? This business about Christian scholars is important.

3:48Later scholars would claim, especially in the 20th century, that the Greeks and Romans might have known about a spherical Earth. But as the Christian church grew more powerful, it supposedly suppressed that knowledge. But these modern scholars are wildly inconsistent about when this supposed cover-up happened. Some say the 5th century AD. Some say the 6th. Some the 7th. Some the 8th. This inconsistency is a good sign that something fishy is happening. Because if you look at what people actually wrote after the supposed suppression,

4:19they clearly believed in a round Earth. Dante, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, none thought the Earth was flat. No one even debated it. Still, there was one debate among scholars that led to some confusion. A few daring geographers in ancient and medieval times suggested that there might be a huge landmass to the west of Europe, somewhere off in the ocean. Similarly, other geographers proposed great landmasses in the southern hemisphere. Even more daring, these geographers suggested that people lived on those lands.

4:52Overall, they called these distant lands the Antipodes, which means points diametrically opposed on a sphere. Now, the Christian church did not like the idea of the Antipodes, especially the notion that people lived on those lands. Not because it implied anything about the shape of the Earth, but because it implied that there were people out there beyond the reach of the Christian church. In their minds, the church existed to convert everyone on Earth to Christianity, no exceptions. And if they could not reach those Antipodean people, that would upset God's plans.

5:26To paraphrase one historian, the church's objections to the Antipodes were not geographical, but theological. To be sure, there were some early Christian scholars whose writings might imply that the Earth is a flat disc. But the truth is, they were just being sloppy and using ambiguous words. It would be like someone today casually saying, the Earth is a circle, and then someone else pouncing on that and saying, aha, circles are two-dimensional. You must be a flat earther. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

5:56And to be even more fair, there were a few early church writers who did argue explicitly that the Earth was flat. One was named Loctantius. He was an advisor to Constantine the Great in the early 300s. Another was Cosmos Indicoplustes in the 500s. But they were marginal scholars. Nobody read Cosmos Indicoplustes. He was beyond obscure, and few of his works have survived. As for Loctantius, he was damned as a heretic. The church hated him.

6:27Neither of these flat earthers had any influence. At this point in the story, we get to Christopher Columbus. If you believe the idea that Columbus set out to prove the world was round, that makes him seem like an early rationalist, even a proto-scientist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Beyond his crimes against humanity, Columbus was an intellectual charlatan. Columbus wanted to convince the king and queen of Spain that he could reach Asia by sailing west. But there was a problem. Many people in Columbus' time believed an ancient Greek idea,

7:00that the globe was perfectly divided into 180 degrees of ocean and 180 degrees of land, what we now call Eurasia. That was a problem for Columbus, because no European ship at the time could have survived a voyage as long as the one he was proposing, around half the earth. So when Columbus pitched his idea of sailing west, he fudged everything. Instead of renowned Greek sources, he cited a shakier source that said Eurasia spanned 225 degrees. Then he fudged figures from Marco Polo's travels to stretch Eurasia even further, to 253 degrees.

7:36Then Columbus shifted Japan farther away from mainland Asia. That meant he could supposedly reach land sooner. And on and on. He distorted figure after figure. He eventually claimed that the distance from Spain to Japan was under 2,800 miles. It's actually more than 13,000 miles. Whoops. Now, several Spanish scholars at the time saw through Columbus' baloney and called him out. They were far more rational than him. But Columbus was charismatic. He won over the Spanish king and queen, and the rest is history.

8:08If Columbus had not blundered into the Americas, he would have been fish food. But despite all the arguments over distances, at no time did anyone debate the earth's shape. They all knew it was round. So where did that idea come from? There were several contributing factors. Some originated even before Columbus' time. During the early days of the Renaissance, scholars and intellectuals wanted to portray themselves as bold, new thinkers. And one easy way to do that was to bash their predecessors.

8:39So they invented the idea of the backwards Middle Ages, and they heaped scorn on people from those times. As one historian put it, the brighter the Renaissance humanists were to shine, the darker the preceding ages had to be. To be clear, these scholars did not claim that people in medieval times believed in a flat earth. But they did spread the notion that everyone in the Middle Ages was a foolish idiot, a notion still common today. Then came Copernicus. He, of course, proved that the earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa.

9:11And in defending his theory, Copernicus penned an analogy. It involved one of those genuine flat earthers I mentioned a minute ago, Lactantius. Copernicus was complaining about ignorance. He noted that the majority of people in his day did not understand astronomy. He compared this to Lactantius' ignorance in believing in a flat earth. But later scholars butchered the meaning of his lines. Again, Copernicus was saying that the majority of people in his day were ignorant about astronomy. And the later scholars assumed that he also meant that the majority of people in Lactantius' day

9:44were ignorant about the shape of the earth. In other words, these later scholars took Lactantius as a typical thinker of his day. This was a dumb mistake. They would get a D-minus in logic. But that's what they did. And when they did this, Lactantius suddenly got a posthumous promotion and became a supposed leading mind of his era. A similar butchering of logic took place with the idea of the Antipodes, those lands on the opposite side of the earth. Recall that the Christian church opposed the idea that people lived on the Antipodes

10:16because it put those people beyond salvation. But later thinkers trampled this argument, including historian Edward Gibbon and American writer Thomas Paine. They conflated the church's opposition to Antipodean people with opposition to the idea that the Antipodes even existed. An Antipodes implies a spherical earth. Hence, the medieval Christian church, they said, must have believed in a flat earth. It was a clever sleight of hand for Gibbon and Paine, who both despised Christianity. It was also historical malpractice.

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Origin of Flat Earth Idea

11:23So far, we have shown how the idea first arose that people in the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth. So how did that belief become linked to Columbus? To answer that, we need to turn to Washington Irving. He's a beloved American writer, best known for characters like Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. Irving also wrote non-fiction, at least in name. His non-fiction contains what we might politely call inventions. Sometimes Irving even invented fake footnotes for fake sources,

11:53just because it amused him. In 1824, Irving published a book that bombed. He was hurt and eager for his next book to succeed. He wanted to capture that old Rip Van Winkle magic. So he began poking around for a new book idea. He traveled to Spain, and a U.S. minister there suggested he might enjoy translating some documents related to Columbus' voyages. Irving jumped at the chance. This could be fodder for a bestseller. Unfortunately, the documents were the dullest things he had ever read.

12:24Unrelenting tedium. So in typical Irving fashion, he spiced things up. He noted ominously that the Inquisition had just started in Spain in the late 1400s. Then he invented a council of learned men who opposed Columbus' proposed journey west to Asia. Now again, learned men had opposed Columbus, because they knew his estimate of the width of the ocean was bogus. But in Irving's book, the characters opposed Columbus because they were religious nuts. According to Irving, Columbus knew the earth was round because he was a mariner

12:55who often saw the masts of ships appear before the hulls. The religious zealots countered with biblical passages supposedly proving that the earth was flat. Back and forth they went. Science versus ignorance. Reason versus prejudice. It made for compelling reading. It was also, as one historian noted, pure moonshine.

13:17Irving finished his 500-page biography of Columbus in just 21 months, and it was a smash hit. It went through 175 editions before 1900. This spread the falsehood that Columbus sailed to the Americas to prove the world was round. Two later scholars then firmly stamped this idea into the public mind. John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White were both polymaths. Draper was a doctor and chemistry professor who did pioneering work in photography.

13:47White founded Cornell University, then served as ambassador to Germany and Russia. Both men grew up religious and hated it. They therefore became opponents of religion in their writings. Above all, they promoted the now commonplace idea that religion and science were at war. Before this, spats between religion and science were actually rare. There's of course Galileo, but that incident stands out largely because it was an anomaly. Most people saw no conflict between religion and science. In fact, many prominent scientists,

14:18including Isaac Newton, were religious fanatics. Then came Charles Darwin. His notion that human beings evolved from apes directly threatened the authority of the Christian Bible. This was a real conflict. Religious leaders began denouncing Darwin in thunderous terms. The scholars Draper and White found these denunciations disgusting, so they began asserting that science and religion were incompatible, hostile enemies. And in arguing this, they poached Washington Irving's story about Columbus

14:48and held it up as a prime example of religious bigotry. Being men of their times, Draper and White viewed Columbus in glowing terms. And to them, Irving's account seemed like a perfect example of the church trying to destroy truth, destroy progress. They didn't know that Irving had just made it up. In 1873, Draper published a book called The History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion. It discussed the supposedly heroic Columbus battling flat earthers in Spain. It sold very well,

15:19going through 50 printings in the United States and 21 in Europe. A scholar later quantified the impact that Draper's book had. The scholar consulted a trove of history textbooks from before and after the 1873 publication date. Before, few textbooks mentioned Columbus arguing for a round earth. After 1880, few failed to. school children were now learning Irving's fiction as fact. And it wasn't just in textbooks. The fake story began to appear in picture books,

15:49in movies, in newspapers. By the 1920s, the decade of the Scopes Monkey Trial, science and religion really were at war. And Columbus was promoted to Galileo status, a near martyr for science. To be sure, not everyone swallowed the fake Columbus story. C.S. Lewis, of Chronicles of Narnia fame, studied medieval literature as an academic. He spouted off repeatedly about how stupid it was to think that anyone in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat. But no one listened.

16:19This myth persisted even after Columbus's reputation started fraying. The 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage in 1892 was largely triumphal. By the 500th anniversary, in 1992, far more people recognized the colonial evils that he unleashed. Yet the idea of him as a brave truth-teller remained. Despite all the villainous things he did, he was still celebrated for something he never even considered doing. This malarkey about Columbus is not the only such myth about the settlement of the Americas.

16:50Another held that Europeans arrived in North America long before Native Americans did. I've put together a bonus episode about this at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. U.S. presidents and senators believed in this myth wholeheartedly and they used it to justify the slaughter of Native Americans for a century. Hear this tale of archaeology gone wrong at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. So, will the myth of Columbus and the flat earth ever die? As late as 2005,

17:21the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman repeated this canard in a mega best-selling book called Wait for it, The World is Flat. He introduced a whole new generation to the myth. Still, I am encouraged that schools don't teach the idea anymore. After two centuries, Washington Irving's mischief is finally dying, as it should. Not just to chop Columbus down to size, but to be fair to people in the Middle Ages. They weren't dumb or benighted or backwards. True, a few isolated souls back then

17:52did argue for a flat earth, but that would be like judging all of modern civilization by the teachings of Daniel Shenton. And if you're asking yourself, who's Daniel Shenton? That's exactly my point. He's the current president of the Flat Earth Society. God help us, people still believe in that stuff today. So the next time you catch yourself thinking about how ignorant people must have been long ago, remember that we might be judged by our worst thinkers someday too. This is the Disappearing Spoon podcast.

18:30If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a five-star review, or tell friends and family. Reviews, subscriptions, and word of mouth really do help. Also, please support the show at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. It costs as little as seven cents per day for ad-free shows. You can also get bonus episodes and signed books. You can find more incredible stories in my books. Check out samkeen.com. You can also inquire about booking me as a speaker at your school or event.

19:01This episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Sam Keen. Thanks for listening.

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19:50You're on a GLP-1. Your appetite is changing, your cravings quiet down, and food noise is finally fading. But now you're wondering, how do I manage my side effects? What do I eat to stay strong? How do I break through a plateau? Because reaching your weight loss goals can take more than meds. That's where Weight Watchers Med Plus comes in. The support designed to help you navigate what comes next. With trusted experts who guide you, food plans that work with your body,

20:20support to help manage side effects, plus access to GLP-1 medication. Weight Watchers Med Plus is designed to help you lose more weight. Watch it work. Get started today at weightwatchers.com. All medical services are provided through our affiliated medical group, Weight Watchers Clinic. Medications require eligibility and prescription. Individual results may vary. See site for more details. a survey review for

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