Claim CH131:
The Bible says the earth is round, showing that its authors were inspired
to understand science beyond their time.
Source:
Morris, Henry M., 1986. Science and the Bible.
Chicago: Moody Press, pp. 13-14.
Jeffrey, Grant R., 1996. The Signature of God.
Toronto: Frontier Research Publications, p. 114.
Response:
- The passage saying the earth is round is Isaiah 40:22:
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
This passage may reasonably be interpreted as referring to a
flat
circular earth with the heavens forming a dome above it. Such an
interpretation is consistent with other passages of the Bible which
refer to a solid firmament (Gen. 1:6-20, 7:11; Ezekiel 1:22-26; Job
9:8, 22:14, etc.). It is also consistent with the cosmology common in
neighboring cultures.
Isaiah 11:12 refers to the "four quarters of the earth", but we do not
take that as indicative of the earth's shape.
- The shape of the earth may already have been known in Isaiah's time.
Ancient astronomers could determine that the earth was round by
observing its circular shadow move across the moon during lunar
eclipses. There is some suggestion that the Egyptians knew of the
earth's spherical size and shape around 2550 B.C.E. (more than a
thousand years before Moses). The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who
was born in 532 B.C.E., defended the spherical theory on the basis of
observations he had made of the shape of the sun and moon (Uotila
1984). If this information was known by educated Greeks and Egyptians
during biblical times, its use by Isaiah is nothing special.
Links:
Harwood, William, 2000. The inconsistency of round-earth religionists.
http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/2000/4/004round.html
References:
- Uotila, Urho A., 1984. Earth, figure of. Encyclopaedia Britannica
vol. 6, 1-8.
Further Reading:
Meyers, Stephen, 2000. The Signature of God by Grant R. Jeffrey (review).
http://members.aol.com/ibss2/gospel.html
created 2003-6-7