I remember around the seventh grade starting to wonder how anyone in their right mind could have thought the Earth was flat.

Not just because I’d learned, year after year, the received knowledge that it’s round. But also because I couldn’t see Portugal while cruising high over Casco Bay in my father’s seaplane. And if I, having been correctly informed that there was land far to the east of me, could figure out this must be because the Earth’s surface is curved, then the Phoenicians, who 4,000 years ago could not see Cyprus from their ports at the far end of the Mediterranean, but sailed there anyway — they must have known it too.

Later I found out the Earth’s circumference was calculated to a reasonably accurate figure, given the available technology, by Greeks in the 200s BC. Then, it turned out there are hardly any indications from any age that anyone with a modicum of education or experience at sea ever thought the Earth is flat. Everybody has known all along it’s round. So why do we all learn that in 1492 Columbus was trying to prove what everybody already knew?

Interesting story.

In 1896, Andrew Dixon White, who was the first president of Cornell University, published a book titled “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.” According to historian of science Lawrence Principe, after the upset caused by Darwin’s theory of evolution, White wanted to defend the principles of secular science against “interference” by religion, and vice versa. One of the many arguments in White’s book was that (paraphrasing here) if it weren’t for science, people would still think the Earth is flat. A contemporary of White’s, John William Draper, included a similar argument in his “History of the Conflict between Religion and Science.”

The trouble, Principe observes, is that White’s two sources for the notion of flat-Earth belief are virtually the only ones that exist — Lactantius, an obscure Eastern church father of the third century A.D., and a far more obscure merchant of the sixth century whose manuscript wasn’t even discovered until the 1700s. White and Draper “made these two unimportant characters fill in for the entirety of intellectuals for a thousand years,” Principe says.

There is essentially no other evidence of anyone thinking the Earth is flat.

But White and Draper were academic figures of some influence, and their specious argument seeped into school textbooks and our general received knowledge, and here we are.

In fact, Principe says, White and Draper were largely responsible for popularizing the idea, also firmly entrenched in our media culture, that science and religion are eternal enemies at never-ending war. However, he says, “no serious historians of science or of the science-religion issue today maintain the warfare thesis.”

What about Galileo, then? If the church wasn’t anti-science, why did it throw him in jail for saying the Earth revolves around the sun?

The answer is that Galileo landed in jail as a result of a political intrigue so tangled and arcane that all of its details, facts and players are still not known today. Part of the tangle did involve his statement on a sun-centered universe, but it did not involve a wholesale rejection by the church of scientific method. In fact, early in the tangle, an important church official signed off on Galileo’s statement.

The church has never been anti-science. The Vatican has an official astronomer, fully up to speed on contemporary cosmology. The pope himself has a secondary school certificate as a chemical technician.

Science and religion are not mortal enemies and never have been. The notions that religion blindly upholds ridiculous ideas like the Earth is flat, or that all scientists are atheists, are false. They’re propaganda in a media conflict largely concocted in the 1800s. Unfortunately, some religious people believe the propaganda, to the detriment of science (think: the denial of global climate change), as do some scientific people, to the detriment of religion (think: “It has been proven that there is no afterlife,” as one correspondent bewilderingly wrote to me — I mean, no, science has no way, so far, of proving or disproving this).

The eminent astronomer Arthur Eddington in 1929 pointed out that physical facts are of a different order of reality from experiences of value and significance. The Dalai Lama, one of the most influential religious leaders of our time, calls science an important means of alleviating suffering, and says in his book “The Universe in a Single Atom” that no religious person in his right mind rejects what science establishes as a natural fact.

In this fake media war that has been going on during three different centuries now, Creationism gives unsatisfactory religious answers to questions about natural facts, and neurobiology gives unsatisfactory scientific answers to questions about value and significance. Creationism is science no more than neurobiology is religion or moral philosophy. They both try, and fail, to give answers to questions outside their orders of reality.

Your religious feeling, as William James termed it, does not oppose your scientific observation. In fact, to a backyard naturalist they are complementary experiences, like the ancient yin and yang circle. Thoreau teaches us to see how they meet: “Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.”

The Earth is not flat, it never has been, and no one but a careless-minded handful ever thought so.

Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at naturalist1@dwildepress.net. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.

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