How Flat is Your World?

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I talk so much about lenses in class that some of my students must think I’m a closet optometrist. The lenses I refer to, however, are those that we all wear as part of our culture. We can’t help it – being born into a worldview is part of the human experience. From my youngest days I recall learning that the earth is twirling around at a dizzying rate and we are hurtling through space around the sun so fast that my thoughts can’t even keep up. These are lenses. Then we turn to the Bible (or other ancient texts for that matter) and read about the creation of their world. To understand their worldview we need to take our lenses off.

Last night I could see the understanding dawning on some faces in the classroom as I described ancient Israel’s worldview. They were flat-earthers, each and every one. The world that is described in Genesis 1 is flat with an invisible dome over it, a dome that holds back the cosmic waters and provides a living space for the sun, moon, and stars. The flat earth is upheld by pillars that erupt through the surface in the form of mountains, and there is water around all. Genesis 1 does not describe the creation of water; it is already there. You can tell there is water above the dome because it falls on us whenever it rains. Oh yes, and dead people are in Sheol, somewhere under our feet. This is the world that God creates in six days. It is not our world. It was their world.

One possible rendition of an extinct worldview

It is not that the physical world has changed, but perceptions of it have. When I stand outside (this was especially noticeable when I lived in central Illinois), I see the world is flat. I feel no motion – I get sick as a dog swinging my head around too fast, so I would know! The difference is that I understand apparent reality is not the same as physical reality. The writers of Genesis 1 did not anticipate our world, nor did they describe how it came to be. They described the world they knew, a world that does not actually exist. Fundamentalists today claim that the Bible is factual in its description of the creation, and that may be the case. But only if you take your lenses off and admit that the world God created is flat and is covered by a dome. And by the way, it looks like the windows of the sky were left open because it is beginning to snow again.

8 thoughts on “How Flat is Your World?”

  1. Jonathan

    This was one of my favourite lectures. Of course, there’s another way we know that there’s all this cosmic water out there outside the dome. The sky is blue like water, isn’t it?

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  3. Tim

    The best, if not only, way to read Genesis 1 – especially when you consider its proximity and conflicts with chapter 2 – is to picture a bunch of fairly primitive folks spending their evening in the teepee asking their tribal chief “so, tell us the story of how it began”.

    It reduces the insistence, on both sides of the camp – the fundamentalists with their literalism and the atheists with their piss-taking. There is no verse-zero before the texts start saying “this is what really happened”, so to get stuck in a duality of asserting and denying that is rather pointless. But don’t let that stop you reading it as a tribal hi-story.

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  4. Steve Wiggins

    Thank you all for your comments. What interests me here is how otherwise rational, modern people can know in their heads that the biblical world was a vastly different shape than ours, and yet they insist that the 6-day scenario has to pass from the worldview they can’t accept onto the world they can. The same is true of the flood story and many other episodes in the Bible. The way my teacher described it was as the kind of story they told around the campfire on a cold night. Sounds like you got it right on the nail, Tim!

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  5. Tim

    Thanks; although that approach nothing new it was quite a blinding insight when I first dreamt it up for myself.
    Funnily enough, others have been there before us. Historically, going back to the first millenium CE, there has always been a huge diversity of beliefs within Christianity – not just creation, but the nature of God and so on; the modern insistence on specific minutiae of belief is a bad reaction to science, most notably Darwin and biology. (“We’ll just insist on this specific reading, only louder!”. D’uh. You know the “doctrine of the Immaculate Conception” was only proposed in the 19C when the Roman Catholics finally realised women have 50% contribution to children’s DNA, rather than it being 100-0% from the mother/father, so in order to preserve the separation of Jesus from “sin” passed-down from father to father, they had to invent a split in his genealogy on Mary’s side as well? Whatever else it was, that wasn’t Occam’s Razor being deployed there.)

    Fortunately, in liberal theology you’ll find folks practicing higher criticism of the text. It’s not just that there are problems with the odd story like creation or the flood or whatever, but we know dramatically more about the evolution of the bible than ever before: the book of Job was written first, as a collection of folk-tales, with the primary objective of dispelling the idea of “prosperity gospel” (ie that believers win and sinners lose in life – contrast your average televangelist). In the NT, we know that the books traditionally attributed to Paul come from at least 2, possibly 3, voices: they range from radical egalitarianism to conservative preservation of the social status-quo (so if you hear someone talking about “Paul’s letter to the Hebrews”, laugh loudly and run away!). We know Mark was the first gospel written, used with other additional material by Luke and Matthew in their gospels.
    There are methods used, that can be applied consistently (eg “historical method”: if a gospel saying is short and pithy, it’s more memorable and therefore more likely to originate with Jesus; similarly if it appears in more than one independent source manuscript). Etc.

    What strikes me as quite sad is that this simple history of the church and rigorous scholarly approach to studying text is not taught in many churches at all; there has been too long a phase of reading the Bible in English and taking that offset misunderstanding as the baseline for further building of world-models, presumably because this makes it simpler to retain a simplistic “faith”. And that is the origin of the modern atheist: an reaction of opposition (in the name of reality-driven science, fine) to a grossly distorted reaction to the Enlightenment. Some of us would prefer to reconcile things rather differently.

    Anyway, I rant. Thanks for the space to vent. 😉

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  6. Jonathan

    @Alastair: Have you never seen grey water? 🙂

    This is a classic example of primitive ‘science’ (if we can even use such a word) at its best. We know that water looks blue because it reflects the blue sky; ancients reckoned that the sky is blue because up above it is blue water. The details are backward, but there’s a recognition of some connection between sky and water.

    Even though the ancient Hebrews weren’t trying to write a science textbook, any time we try to explain something, there’s always going to be a certain fudging of the details: lies-to-children, if you will. Everyone knows what a modern diagram of the solar system looks like, but I can almost guarantee that you’ve never seen one drawn to scale. In order to fit the outer planets on a page, you wouldn’t be able to see the innner ones, they’d be so small. But it’s a convenient white lie that helps us understand how the solar system works. You couldn’t plan a mission to Pluto with that kind of map, but you could win an elementary school science fair. Likewise, the Hebrews couldn’t put a satellite into orbit with their cosmology, but they could explain to their children where the rain comes from, or why the sky is blue/grey.

    It’s all a question of how accurate an explanation you really *need*. When your ‘science’ doesn’t explain enough for your needs, you have to upgrade your paradigm, but until then, it doesn’t necessarily hurt you to think that way.

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  7. Steve Wiggins

    This does raise the issue of how science and religion *should* relate to each other. Genesis has frequently been the flashpoint on that debate, but it is only a small part of the whole. Paradigms do shift, and when they do there are always people left behind. I don’t believe that science is a religion, as some would insinuate. I believe it is the attempt to understand the physical world, and in the best of all those worlds, it should also attempt to understand religion.

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  8. Tim

    Both science & religion have dealings (and occasional unfortunate conflicts caused more by misunderstanding than absolute right&wrong) in the field of *reality*. Specifically, the sciences rightly deal with the feedback loop of experiment, hypothesis, test, result, conclusion, knowledge. Faiths deal with what I might call “head-space” (how we perceive the universe) and religions with social practicalities (“care for widows and orphans” and the wider issues of social justice).

    The two are not necessarily contradictory; it is indeed a lamentable cockup of the first order that Gallileo’s discovery was found objectionable by the religion of its time&place, for example.
    However, a positive way to understand both sides is bridging via ethics: science will tell you “if you push this button, that building will fall down”. Ethics will then ask “do we want that building to fall down?”. And if it is religion that drives some people to say, under the sphere of social justice, “that building houses N people who will then be homeless”, then you have a wide-angle perspective on the building and the consequences of its demolition and a motivating force to ask hard questions, which is not a bad thing.

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