Video: The Biggest Hoax in History (DocDrop)

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During the time of Columbus, no one thought the world was flat. You know this, right? So in times of Columbus, did people think the earth was round or flat. I believe they thought the Earth was flat. Flat, was flat. Just flat. Or do you? The myth that medieval people thought the earth was flat, just won’t die. It has only become stronger with the rise of the modern flat earth movement.

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You can find this myth in tweets by science influencers like Neil deGrasse Tyson in this speech by Barack Obama. If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they would not have believed that the world was round. Even in remarks by professors of theology. And this belief goes hand in hand with another myth. Maybe you were even taught this at school, that historically seen the church has stood in the way of scientific progress.

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And with the coming of Christendom, the light of reason was taken away and a dark age fell over Europe. I'm here to tell you this is all 19th century propaganda of a number of guys fed up with the church and applying their personal grudges to the entire history of Christianity, And they totally succeeded. So what is this invention and why is it still with us? I talked about this before in this video.

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This myth is mostly the blame of the novelist Washington Irving, but Irving is only part of the answer. Today, I want to tell you the full story of the myth of a medieval flat earth. By the way, before we start, this video is not about modern flat earthers, although they also believe in a myth of a Medieval flat earth. If you go to their FAQ and their site, they mention their supposed connection to Christianity. Well, I guess it's just another myth to believe in.

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I'm not sure if it's relevant for the video, but I'm not a religious person. I am just a historian that likes the facts. Okay, so this story has a lot of special characters. The first of our 19th century friends is this guy Washington Irving. He is an American author who really knows how to sell books. Take his fictionalized account of the history of New York to give the book some extra buzz. Irving makes up this hoax that it's written by Diederich Knickerbocker.

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Some old grumpy dude from Dutch descent. Yes. This is where these pands and New Yorkers with Dutch Heritage get their name from. His history was entertaining. It even included historical research. But it also took quite a big liberty with the facts. And when people say something about that, he said he didn't think he was committing any grievous historical sin and helping out a few facts I could collect with figments of my own brain.

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He doesn't sound too sorry, does it? So when he then decides to write a book about the life of Columbus. Well his style is not suddenly going to change. In his story about the Geneose sailor there is a big scene at the University of Salamanca. Columbus is trying to convince a council of wise men he can make it to Asia by sailing west. In Irving's book, he's a simple mariner, presenting his idea with natural eloquence, pleading the cause of the new world.

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But the professors and friars wouldn’t have it. His mathematical demonstration was useless if it clashed with the Bible. Columbus was afraid he would be persecuted for his views. Some in the council even believe in a flat earth. You can feel that tension, right? It would be a good scene in a Hollywood movie, but it's also as fake as one. There was no university of Salamanca. This mathematical demonstration of Columbus was a terrible job.

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He cherry picked evidence and massaged facts. With his calculations. he came to the conclusion that the distance between the Canary Islands and Japan would be just 4.450 kilometers, when in reality it's actually 22.000. And no one in the council believed the earth was flat. One of their more unhinged arguments is that the curvature of the Earth might possibly make you not be able to sail back.

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The truth doesn't matter because Irving's account falls on fertile ground. It becomes a monster hit. It has 175 ambitions in the 1800s. It influences, the public and many other writers. But the scientific world, they will be convinced by someone else. Because, there is this French scientist that introduced the idea that medieval people thought the earth was flat, and he believes religion was to blame. He was influenced by an age old movement that created the idea

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of dark ages and the rule of the church and suppressing knowledge. If you go all the way back to the 1300s, we find one Italian poet that was quite sure of himself. Petrarch identified two times in history. The time of the Greeks and Romans that was an enlightened age. And basically everything after the fall of the Western Roman Empire was a dark age. He and others that read authors from the light Age

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see themselves bringing light to their time. Other pick up his dating system to make a distinction between this ancient age, a new age, and a middle time. And slowly this starts to creep into the belief that everything in this middle age is backward. This light versus dark theme gets a religious vibe during the Reformation. Protestantism, which is basically just the latest Christian sect,

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painted the Catholic Church in a very negative picture. They presented the church as a dark institution beset by dogma. So when in the 1600s, this idea of the Middle Ages as a dating device becomes popular, it sort of gets linked to the Dark Ages. And also these dark ages were first just described as a time that had less written sources. But it becomes good ancient history, followed by a period of darkness and religious superstition.

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Literally this middle time between an ancient and more enlightened period. Tell me, is this something that feels familiar? How do you see the medieval period as a time of returning, as a time of scientific progress? Probably not. Right? Let's talk about how you got there in a moment. The authority of religion gets a further push by Enlightenment thinkers. Men like Benjamin Franklin, and Hume really have a contempt for Christianity.

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They talked about theological dreaming and ignorant stupidity. But wait, we were talking about the flat Earth, right? Did any of these people say that Christians believe the Earth is flat? No, not at all. But these developments did set up this idea that all medieval people were ignorant and stupid, God fearing people, and that religion and the pursuit of knowledge were a bad combination.

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Something you couldn't mix like oil and water. So when the flat earth does get introduced, it locks in seamlessly with everything we've seen before. We're in the time of the French Revolution now, a time where revolutionaries break with superstitions from the past. They will only be guided by reason. You have this extremely decorated French historian and geographer that's on a mission. A mission to fight the church.

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He published this book on the cosmographical opinions of the Church Fathers, and he really goes for it. He writes how until recently, all science has had to be based on the Bible, and geographers were forced to believe Earth was a flat surface. According to him, this was all because of three irresistible arguments persecution, prison and the stake. It sounds quite horrible. Doesn’t it?

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The flat earth myth and the myth of a Catholic Church fighting against real knowledge gets taken up by another scientist. William Whewell. And this is, again, a very influential figure. This guy even invented the word scientist. And with his history of the inductive sciences, he actually has proof of Christian backwardness. He introduces two Christian authors, and they become a poster childs

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for Christian bigotry. Really evil figures. Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes. This Lactantius was attacking Greek ideas like the belief in a spherical earth, which he believed to be a marvelous fiction. And Indicopleustes took the Bible literally. And he's sure that the Bible says the earth is flat. The thing is, these guys are fringe Christian scholars. They have been either ignored or attacked in their time for their views.

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But Whewell presents them as the only voice of early Christianity. But they were just figures that no one took seriously. It's a bit like if future historians look back at our time and then they present Alex Jones as the one man voice in the views of Western civilization. The tyrants did it. Hitler took the guns. Stalin took the guns. Mao took the guns. Although this might be a bad comparison because there's actually people listening to this guy.

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Whewells ideas are followed up by guys that really know how to stir shit up. First you have John William Draper, a scientist who was actually the first one to make a picture of the moon, although it looks kind of bad. Still, he has things to say. He writes a book called History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. So wait, suddenly religion and science have always been in conflict. He says how an intellectual knight settled on Europe with Christendom.

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He writes, How the Roman Catholic Church had a bitter and mortal animosity towards science. There was a rejection of everything you couldn't find in the Bible. His argument picked up. It was so persuasive because it was so simple. A plot of evil dogma versus the natural march of scientific truth. And this gets expanded on by yet another dude, Andrew Dickson White. He publishes the history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom.

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So hold on. We went from having a conflict to warfare. You have togive it to these guys. If they were living now, they'd make the best YouTube titles. White says that the early church fathers took fright at the idea that Earth was a globe and that they sought to crush the concepts with references to scripture. But he concluded, luckily, science was so strong that by the late medieval period, various writers felt obliged

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to accept the rotundy of the Earth Saved there. This idea of an age old conflict of science and religion is just an invention. It's not true at all. So why did they write these things? Well, they had a few reasons. Both these authors had some personal trouble with Christians in a time opposing them. They were also living in a time when the church was doing something that no Christian had ever thought before.

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Taking the Bible as scientific truth. This kind of started in the 17th century. Suddenly you have Christians using Scripture, the Bible, to look for the origin of the earth. And you have this one example of an archbishop counting how old the earth must be by like leafing through the Bible. And he says it's 4004 B.C., that the Earth is born. This goes on. And by the time that our authors are slamming Christianity

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with their clickbait, Darwin entered the scene. His ideas on attribution of species completely put a bomb under the Christian concept of creation. God didn't create the people on the animal kingdom, Darwin says. It was organisms reacting to a competition in their environment with this thing called evolution. You can hear Christian thinking: ‘people descended from apes’? That's just a bridge too far. So in the 1800s, there is a conflict between religious

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and scientific ideas that's brewing. But that wasn't always the case. What did early and medieval Christians think about the pursuit of science and the shape of the earth? So we don't really know who was the first person to determine that the Earth was a globe. But by around 500 before Christ, you have people like Pythagoras, Aristotle and Euclid that took this for granted. They determined the shape of the earth by looking at Earth's shadow on the moon.

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The disappearance of ships over the horizon, and the changing position of stars. There's even the famous Greek geographer Eratosthenes that determined the circumference of the earth and only being marginally off. It's also well known when Christianity came on the scene. So what does the Bible have to say about this? Well, if you looked in the Bible, there are some verses about the earth and its shape, but you can't find anything definitive about the form of the earth.

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So an early church scholar like Augustine basically says the Bible doesn't talk about the shape. So apparently we don't need it for salvation. If you do want to talk about it. Let's agree to the arguments of the philosophers who say it's a globe and in a sense it also doesn't really matter if the Bible had said the Earth was completely flat. Because Augustine and early church fathers are very clear about the Bible. They say the Bible is not the scientific truth, that stories

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are metaphorical, that we should look for moral truths in the Bible. And other church fathers from different ages agree. The venerable Bede says the earth is round in a sense of a ball. And it's not only learning Christians in a medieval time that have this idea. If you look at pictures of medieval kings, you very often see this royal work they have. Is this a symbol of Christian authority of the world? And the world is very much around.

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You have books like The Divine Comedy Man, Neville's Travels and the Canterbury Tales. That all talk about the Earth as if it's a globe. So almost everyone was clear on this Earth is round in the medieval period. What about Christendom and science? We have to do a side note first. The science as we know it. With like specific people and lab coats, testing hypotheses is like, really new. It's like end of the 1800s.

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And you remember that we had to invent the word for scientist. So, no, they didn't do that kind of science because, well, no one did. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire here was a breakdown of knowledge networks and exchanges in this area. but that doesn't mean everything was stagnant or the church was holding back development and suppressing knowledge. Monks were reading and copying Greek and Roman authors basically all the time.

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You have the invention of sophisticated mechanical clocks, eyeglasses, effective gunpowder, the printing press. There's this one monk that successfully tested the very first glider. And these knowledge networks don't break down in the Byzantine Empire, and they flourish in the Arab world. And so when the complete works of someone like Aristotle were rediscovered in the 1200s, this is a huge moment. You have Christian scholars just giddy with excitement, completely

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devouring these texts, translating them from Greek and Arabic into Latin. It leads to the founding of the first universities. And so one scholar of medieval history, Edward Grand, says that the scientific revolution of the 1600s couldn't have happened without the massive translation of Greek, Arabic science and natural philosophy into Latin. So Christianity and the Catholic Church putting down science. closing down the pursuit of knowledge, not so much.

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And I know, I know if you haven't started writing a comment already, I hear you saying. What about Galileo? Wasn't he persecuted for his views? Something about the earth as a globe and stuff? Well, first, he wasn't persecuted for saying that the Earth was flat. He believed in heliocentric universe. A universe where Earth is one of the planets instead of at the center. And Galileo also lives in a very turbulent time. It's a time of the Reformation. The 30 Years War is staring Europe apart.

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So the Catholic Church is actually under a lot of stress and with his book, he basically insults his former patron, the pope, which is never a good idea. So should he have been persecuted? No, but he was put on house arrest and was allowed to continue his research. Also, the views he had on Heliocentrism, what kind of model we should be use were already outdated in his time. So he also had very little influence on his contemporaries.

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Sorry. So in the 19th century, our religion for science guys are making the mortal mistake, projecting the experience of their age to the whole of history. Mistakes aside they are very influential. There's a period of about 1870 to 1920 they and others created a framework of warfare between science and religion, a warfare that had to last forever. It was so simple and therefore so effective. So by the early 20th century, historians are talking about the medieval period,

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how everything of value seemed to sink and only the light and worthless rubbish came floating on down the stream of time. School textbooks followed, and now you have a generation of generation of people just repeating these views. In terms of Columbus, if people think the earth was round or flat, flat. And why do you think they thought that? Because that's what I was taught in history, which isn't always correct.

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I know. And yes, in our time, in some places there is a kind of war between science and religion going on. Well, the Arkansas House has approved legislation that would allow educators in the state to teach creationism in science classes as one of the possible origins of the earth. But that's happening right now, not in medieval times. The Roman Catholic Church has accepted the fear of evolution since the 1950s.

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See, very often the way that history is treated. It says more about our time than the actual history. Projecting our modern views and anxiety back into history is not going to help us understand it any better. So why does this myth still survive today? Humans have this tendency to be quite smug about the time they're living in. The time of Columbus. Yes, I think they people think this was flat.

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And why do you think they think that? Because of the stupid. Look at us. We've got all the science and progress. This connects to the idea that a lot of people share the idea of history as in some way linear. History may have some ups and downs, but in the end it moves towards a better world. How we should define the better world is something no one seems to really agree on. But we are the smart people smarter than these many evil people

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living in the dark ages. And because of that, they must have believed in the flat earth. Religion and science must have always been in a mortal conflict. And that's just completely false. It's these kind of stories that make me so happy that I studied history. But to share this on YouTube, I had to learn a lot of things University didn't teach me, like editing, animation and filming. If you want to learn to do that as well, you can start right now on Skillshare.

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