Is the Earth Flat?

[Music] in 1 chronicles 12:32 we read about the sons of Issachar who had understanding of the times and I want to ask us do we have understanding of the times do we know what is happening in our Western world we see the collapse of the Christian fabric the collapse of the Christian worldview why is that because a foundation has been removed and the structure is collapsing what foundation the foundation of the authority of the word of God it's about time God's people went out there unashamedly uncompromisingly stood in the Word of God and said this is what it's all about proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ show that we can defend our faith if we start standing on the Word of God that's what's gonna change this nation is the earth flat No thank you for coming I really appreciate it what I answered the question oh you only need to give some reasons okay that's fine I can do that okay well the Flat Earth is believe it or not become a moment a movement in the last few years about - 2015 it started up and people may wonder well Danny why are you so concerned about this why are you talking about Flat Earth so much well you see our critics for a long time have been equating belief in creation with belief that the earth is flat and so I view the Flat Earth movement as a personal assault really upon my calling and upon the ministry of Answers in Genesis so I think it's very important vitally important that we're here to give people thoughtful good reasons why the Flat Earth movement is wrong and to answer questions people may have about it and we've been getting many inquiries about this over the last few years we may say didn't we answer this question settle this question five centuries ago I mean after all didn't Christopher Columbus prove that the earth is a globe well actually we didn't settle it five centuries ago we settled it twenty-five centuries ago and in fact I think that's part of the problem we have here is the fact that people's understanding of history on this whole matter is rather poor well how do we know it goes back that far well Pythagoras you may have heard of him with the Pythagorean theorem and a few other things that he did in the late late 6th century BC he actually talked about the earth being a sphere we don't know what his reasons were we can only speculate about that but it went forward from there but within a hundred years most Greek thinkers were thinking the earth was a sphere and I do credit this whole question as being a good epistemological study I used to raise this question with my students in my astronomy classes when I taught at the University I asked them quietly the students the question what shape is the earth and eventually somebody say oh it's a globe it's the sphere it's a ball and I'd say ok how do how do you know that and I very rarely found any students that could give me a good reason again I think that's part of the problem as well what do I mean by being a good epistemological study well epistemology is defined by Miriam Webster as a study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity that's kind of a long-winded definition let me give you a much shorter definition epistemology is how we know what we know I'm afraid that much of our education is geared towards cramming into the heads of students as much information facts and figures and dates without really assimilating that into an understanding and what I wanted to get across to my students at the University was not so much what to believe but to understand why these things are true that's the real education part is getting people to understand the reasoning behind these things and so we have some good reasons for believing the earth as a globe how do we know that well here we have a photograph of a total lunar eclipse I took this in January of last year about 15 months ago now and it was quite a last total solar eclipse but a lunar eclipse visible from here and this is during totality this is about a 12 second exposure because the moon was very dim but I also took photographs during the partial phases before and after the Eclipse and here's one of those photographs right there I show the moon moving in from the right upper right in fact and that's exactly how the moon move in on the Earth's shadow and you can already see the edge of the Earth's shadow there and you can get an idea of the shape of the Earth's shadow it's kind of a curved section there now I took this about an hour before totality I took another one afterwards totality and I put it in the st. right position here and I think you can understand now a little better what kind of shape the earth shadow is if you're really not seeing it at all I can help you out and put a circle in for you turns out the the circle of the Earth's shadow was about two and a half times that of the circle of the moon so the moon can be entirely engulfed inside of that shadow giving us a total lunar eclipse Aristotle and 350 BC argued to wrote a book called on the heavens and he wrote that in his book that this is one of the arguments why we know the earth is a sphere he gave a couple others here's another one I like he looked at the altitude of stars in both the northern and southern parts of the sky have a photograph here of the Ark Encounter many of you will recognize exactly where that was taken over near M's aras cafe looking at the front there this photograph was taken by a good friend of mine Jim bouncer from Iowa a pastor there a good friend of the ministry and we had special permission a couple years ago we went down there and spent about half a night shooting this this photograph and a few others and this is a half hour exposure you can see the stars are going in a big circular pattern near the center of that just above the arc you'll see one single star that's Polaris the North Star and the Polaris or the North Star is within a degree of this point of sky we call the North celestial Pole to the eye and even to this photograph it's going to look like the North Star stay still and all the other stars been around in now less known is the fact that that angle that it makes with the northern horizon is equal to your latitude so at the arc that's around 38 39 degrees so that's how high that the North Star is and as I travel around the around the country and around the world I always make it a point to look at where the North Star is in the sky if I can find it some parts of the world you can't let me illustrate that for you let this green circle represent the earth and this vertical line represent the rotation axis the Earth spins around that that rotation axis once a day the north pole will be at the top and the south pole will be at the bottom let this horizontal line represent the equator the earth actually the equator is going to be a gonna be a circle going around this plane intersecting the earth there but from the side view it's just gonna look like a wine well let's place the observer at some position some latitude north of the Equator this is very close to what it would be for us here in northern kentucky around 39 degrees latitude you can see it's a little less than half so that's a very good representation of where we would be now if you placed an observer at the end of that line representing some temperate locations such as ours then the horizon would be defined by the tangent plane to the circle if suya is the sphere the earth at that point it's gonna be a tangent plane and I'll represent that by a little dotted circle going around like that so if you stand there at that point everything to the upper-right of that circle that plane represented by the circle would be visible and nothing to the lower left would be visible it would be below the earth's surface and blocked at that point now we can construct a little dome there to show what it looks like and yes the sky at night looks like a dome doesn't mean it is a dome it looks like one that's a bit of an illusion that's why a planetarium works so well we have a planetarium here at the Creation Museum a new one in fact we've changed everything in it so when we reopen after the köppen 19 scare is over then we can you can come visit our planetarium hopefully we'll have new shows eventually but it's a beautiful planetarium I can't wait to start using it but we can do that because it has a dome and it does a fairly good job of representing what the sky looks like so yes the sky looks like a dome but it doesn't mean that it is a dome now I can draw a line for my location parallel to the rotation axis and that's gonna point to the direction in the sky around which the entire sky will seem to spend the North Star will be located very close to that so all the stars will spin around that point now if I draw a line due north like that there will be an angle you can see the angle there between the point of the north celestial direction and the north direction and that angle is equal to your latitude if you've studied geometry you could take this diagram and you could work that out and prove that it's a nice little geometry problem so we've got some home schoolers here taking high school geometry that might be a good assignment if you know something about geometry you should be able to do that one now what would happen what would happen if I went farther north say up Oh up into Canada somewhere well it's gonna shift like that because my latitude is like that'll go back to Kentucky now up to Canada back to Kentucky up to Canada so what's going on I'm shifting position as I do that and I'll notice something notice the angle that the the North celestial pole or the North Star will make with the horizon for me in Kentucky look at it farther north the angles much higher isn't it it's much higher again that angle is equal to your latitude and you can show that if you do geometry if you go back farther south it's a little lower now notice that I look to the lower right I can see stars down near the southern horizon but if I go farther north the southern horizon rises up and there are stars that I cannot see down to the south you know a couple years ago I was in the United Kingdom and I made a trip up to Scotland while I was there and went to Edinburgh had a wonderful time while I was there by the way and it was a clear night - one night and and Birsa I went outside to look for the North Star and it was almost two-thirds the way up from the from the horizon and back here in Kentucky it's not even halfway up you know a few months later I was in South Florida visiting my sister latitude on 27 28 degrees and maybe 27 26 even and the North Star wasn't even a third of the way up again all that I see when I travel is consistent with this it easily explained in terms of a spherical earth in fact it's required it's it's a proof as it were because if it weren't true it would disprove this spherical model completely now if you want more proof this is a do to cleaning the Eldar in the 1st century AD he noticed at first we the first person we know who they pointed this out other people may have noticed it before but that ships as they sail away disappear whole first and I don't live near the ocean so I can't test this very often but I was at Virginia Beach a few years ago and I took the photographs of a departing container ship you can see the ship right here it's got the MK Y line on the side that that is a soupy NYK line that is a major Japanese shipping firm and you can see it's already blocked off when I got to the beach that day and I set my telescope with the camera on it looking out over the water this ship had already gone out some distance and the bottom of the the hull is totally blocked by something it looks like the water to me now why would it be blocked by the way those those those letters don't go to the water line now I've seen plenty of their ships close up and they stopped before they get to the water line so again I know part of the hall is being blocked here what's blocking the hole well I believe it's the curvature of the earth now flat earthers will try to claim you do min that you will be able to to bring it back in i've folks i've got owned nearly 1400 millimeter focal length on the telescope that i use that is a whale of a telephoto lens zooming in i've already done it the bottom of the the hall is blocked i took a number of pictures here's one a little later you can tell the ship's father out because well it appears smaller these are printed at the same scale you can see the white brig bridge castle there and it's much smaller on the second photograph than on the first photograph and you can't see the hull at all you can see a little bit of a what we call an inferior Mirage of some of the planking down by the deck there the later photograph you don't even see that the ship has turned now all I can see is the stern but I don't see any of the Hall I see just containers and some of those are actually being mirrored in that inferior Mirage and then finally as we get late in the day you can't even see that all you can see is the bridge Castle part of it mirrored again more and more and more of the ship is disappearing eventually it would have disappeared entirely unfortunately it was late afternoon light levels were dropping fast the Sun was getting ready to set and I had to end what I was doing now building on this a man named Eratosthenes in the around 200 BC accurately measured the size of the earth when I point that out to my students they were always very surprised what I mean ago over 2,000 years ago they knew how large the earth was not only just how big it was it was a sphere but how what the circumference and the radius were yes they knew that information how did he do it Larrick hasta News was Greek he was living in Alexandria a city of Greek learning in north northern Egypt sattell was established by Alexander the Great twenty-three twenty-four hundred years ago and he worked Eratosthenes worked at the great library that was there at Alexandria he traveled down to southern Egypt one year around the summer solstice he's near this little town called Syene which is today would be called Aswan and it's on the edge of the tropics and on the June solstice at noon the Sun is directly overhead he knew this because he looked down into a very deep well and for a few moments around noon he could see the entire bottom of the well that's only possible in the tropics at my latitude if you have a deep well you won't see anything it'll be in shade because the sun's never directly overhead well he went back home to Alexandria and he waited a year he constructed a vertical pole he knew is vertical because there are very good builders they could they can design and build things very well there and he also knew the height of this this thing again they were good engineers and good architects what he did is he waited till the next year on the same June solstice and he looked at the shadow of this of this pole on the at noon on the June solstice now it's going to cast a shadow because that far north you're out of the equatorial regions out of the tropics the sun's never going to be overhead and he determined that that angle that it made he used trigonometry to do this by knowing the height of the pole and the length of the shadow he figured out this angle up here and he expressed it as a fraction of a circle is about one fiftieth of a circle and he realized then that the distance between those two would be one fiftieth of the circumference of the earth now one thing I haven't told you is Eratosthenes is the father of geography he coined the term and he was really the first first geographer he had a lot of surveys done and they mapped out Egypt pretty well and he knew the distance between those two is like 5000 stadia about 500 miles by our reckoning so what he did is he multiplied that 5000 Stadium by by 50 and he got the circumference of the earth to be 250 thousand stadia or about 25,000 miles or 40,000 kilometers pretty impressive for 2200 years ago so if people knew in the ancient world that the earth was found tall but in the West by the way the Greeks knew this they shared this information the Romans knew it and throughout the Middle Ages people in the West knew that the earth was a sphere this was not lost information so how did this Flat Earth myth arise that this idea that everybody and up until 500 years ago thought the earth was flat well I would attribute it to two things three things that happened in the 19th century number 1 archeology as we know it came about the way you excavate things in the way do the science was developed in the 19th century and prime targets were Egypt and Mesopotamia and as they excavated a Mesopotamia they came across this well I'll put it in quotes air quotes as well cosmology of the ancient Near East in this cosmology of the ancient Near East was this idea that the earth was a flat disk with a dome over top now don't you don't put this my oh here it is you put it up here and behind the screen ok little visual aid for you here I've got a circle that can represent their model here is this Flat Earth so here's the earth and there's a dome over top of the earth is what they were saying was the model they had there in ancient Mesopotamia and this then became the ancient Near East cosmology now put that in quotes in an air quotes because as it turns out a few years later they discovered that it wasn't the cosmology the ancient Near East is merely a cosmology of the ancient earrings there are many many others and it was very difficult to try to correct the record it just sort of stood out there also what happened coming out of liberal scholarship was what we call the documentary hypothesis that the Moses didn't write the the pen took the first five books of the Bible especially Genesis who knows they didn't think Moses even existed but if he did the the Pentateuch was actually written about a thousand years or more after when Moses supposedly lived this would have gone to the captivity or even after that and since then captivity they were in Mesopotamia they naturally picked up a lot of religious beliefs and cosmology and so forth from them and they just simply incorporated those into the Bible now folks who understand the authority and inspiration of Scripture should recognize very quickly this was a direct assault upon that now this then developed this is a diagram again they said this is what the cosmology of the ancient Near East is and by the way the cosmology of the Bible you've got this round flat disc and you got the dome over top and they didn't really get that from Scripture at all what they got it from was the assumption that the the Pentateuch is not inspired at all but rather was simply picked up from bits and pieces in Mesopotamia and then people began to choose to read Genesis and other passages in that manner also during the 19th century we have what's called the conflict thesis and the conflict thesis was this that there's always this conflict of between Christianity religion they meant Christianity really and progress going on throughout the Middle Ages and it was only and when they through all that often the age of reason and the Enlightenment that supposedly things got better in the West and around the world and of course this fit very nicely with the narrative it was that point when critics and skeptics began to argue well they Bible is a Flat Earth book and unfortunately some some Christians at the time picked that up as truth and wore it as a badge of honor that is where the Flat Earth movement began now though I mentioned in passing that even earlier in a 19th century Washington Irving who's an author I really like quite a bit he in 1828 wrote a history of the life and voyages of Christopher Columbus it was a multi-volume set went through many many volumes throughout the 19th century read quite a bit and he's supposedly researched it in Spain and so forth but much of her mythology about Columbus came from washington irving's supposed to buy a hog Rafi he had a way of blending fact and fiction in a way that we understand a little better today but two hundred years ago people when they read biography didn't even conceive of the idea that there might be some fictional things thrown in which he did a lot of that for instance the the idea that his his crew was about to to mutiny because they thought they're gonna fall off the edge of the world that's nonsense they were a bit concerned about being so far from land they've been going out for a couple of months and at that time you never sailed more than three days out of sight of land very scary thing out there oh I've got a photograph here of a of a drawing a depiction of the the creation of day two you have there on the Left Jesus the creator of course according to Apostle John a New Testament and you have there the earth and it's surrounded by this expanse this rakia from him at the King James says around the earth with waters above that's very clearly day two creation and I want you to look at the shape of the earth do you get the impression that it is flat no you get this distinct impression it is a globe it's a ball it's a sphere now where did this depiction come from it comes from a Bible that belongs to King John the good of France now we know how oldest Bible is because I think was in year 16 1356 he was defeated by the English in the battle for TAS and this was taken by the English as part of the prize spoils of war and it's been in continual possession of the English ever since and we think the Bible was actually put together around 1350 this is 150 years or so before Columbus voyage so again by 1350 people were clearly we're believing the earth was a globe common knowledge actually in the West now I mentioned about the Flat Earth being born and a very pivotal man in this was Samuel Robottom he was a 19th century Englishman he wrote some books did a lot of lecturing and speaking he made a lot of what he called the Bedford level experiment the Bedford level is this region in eastern place in eastern England where the land appears to be very flat there's a very stern a basic has been dug that's very straight and the with no real tilt there's not much of a current at all and they've got this long thing that goes on for six miles that's reasonably flat and what he did is he got down into the the water there point a on the right in the diagram eight inches above the surface of the water that's key because if the earth is a globe twenty five thousand miles around then if you're eight inches above the water in one miles distance your view will be blocked by that edge of the earth anything beyond that sitting right on the water theoretically will not be visible so what he did is he had somebody get in a boat a rowboat and they rode away from him the entire six miles first mile of course he's in view but beyond that II reason being eight inches above the water with this telescope the bottom of that boat should start to disappear and the boat should continue on disappearing and disappearing ahead you can see a flag or a marker sitting up there about six feet up and the boat and by the time you get the entire six miles away the boat should be should be hidden by a good 10 or 12 15 feet of curvature well Robottom was able to see that boat the entire length they said aha if the curvature would block out my view of the boat over over six miles and yet I'm still seeing the boat then the earth must be flat you see this little of this little red line I'm showing you here draws from the boat back towards the observer but because of the curvature of the earth it's greatly exaggerated here of course it exists exits out into space moving off on a tangent so it's not visible now I put down there that the problem is he ignored atmospheric refraction caused by temperature inversions I don't have time to talk about the physics of all of this but the speed of light depends critically upon in air at least depends critically upon the temperature of the air in warmer air the light travels more quickly and colder air travels more slowly as it turns out bodies of water stay relatively cool during the summer time because water has a large specific heat and the winter it generally stays warmer that's why if you have a location near a very large body of water the temperature is moderated tremendously the golf strain for instance moderates the temperature in the British Isles and parts of Northern Europe now if you do this in the summer or in spring on a warm day the air temperature is almost always going to be warmer than the water temperature the water temperature will chill the air close to it so you end up with a layer of very cold air and the air light moves more slowly in that as it starts to move on that tangent leaving the cooler air into the warmer air it cannot do that it's gonna be refracted or bent downward it's gonna curve along the edge of the earth there's a perfectly reasonable logical and physical explanation as to why people sometimes get these results those road bottom did 150 years ago 180 years ago now they're on the Bedford level now there are modern examples one of the examples that flat earthers liked to talk about is this particular photograph and ones like them it was done by Joshua nawicki I want to emphasize that Joshua Noah key is not repeat not a flat earther flat earthers love his work and I'm sure he's frustrated to learn that well what did mr. wooden know what he do he's a very good photographer by the way I'm impressed with his work he goes out to Grandmere State Park and other locations in southern Michigan on Lake Michigan but on the state of Michigan and Chicago is more than 50 miles across the lake now sometimes he gets some elevation to do this but other times he's closer to the water the point is no matter how high he gets over there there are no high hills over there you shouldn't be able to see Chicago because the Earth's curvature would amount to nearly 2,000 feet of curvature and nothing on the skyline of Chicago is that tall so there it is again why if this is such evidence that the earth is flat they even better than the Bedford level experiment that Robottom did how is Joan Joshua nawicki not a flat earther well again that said he's a good photographer he knows his craft he knows what he's doing he goes out here on very clear days when there's a temperature inversion precisely the conditions he knows that on a spherical earth you're gonna be able to get these impossible photographs you see if he shoots across there during a time of no temperature inversion and he doesn't see Chicago that is not a very interesting photograph is it but this one is this is fascinating photograph and he's done this a number of times in fact he's done some of these I've seen on some of his videos online he puts them in a time lapse video and what you find is that the skyline Bob's up and down like this you see more and less like this is it Bob's up and down now if this is evidence that the earth is flat what does that mean well it must mean the Chicago is bobbing up and down but nobody in Chicago seems to notice that the reason why it Bob's up and down is because the amount of refraction that's going on over those 50 miles varies tremendously with gusts of wind and shifting air masses and so consequently it's not surprising it's about gonna bounce up and down in fact it's what we would expect again contrast this with my earlier photos I went on a day that it was there was no temperature inversion it was an early November the air temperature was 50 degrees when I started and dropped to 49 before I finished the water temperature I looked it up was 62 degrees it was 12 degrees warmer than the air temperature was there was no temperature inversion so I knew that I would not be able to get a photograph like this I would get the thing you're supposed to see see the problem is flat earthers don't like to do these problems these these experiments in the middle of winter over over with cold air temperature and warm water they much prefer to do it in spring and summer but that's precisely the conditions that are gonna be prevalent to cause these temperature inversions and refraction so robot ones begins with this experiment and the flat earth movement was born throughout the 19th century he was teaching this on up until his death late in the century and the movement kind of peaked around 1890 or so and they even continued into the 20th century but begin to wane considerably in the 20th century by the time you get to the 1930s or 50 1950s hardly anybody's believing it and since then since the 50s there have been several flat earth societies that have started up and some of those been kind of tongue-in-cheek others more or less serious but it's it's a grab-bag there have been various Flat Earth societies and the Flat Earth movement was revived in a 21st century about five years ago around 2015 and it's really been fuelled by social media and YouTube that that's that's a platform that anybody can put anything they want up there and I many of these flat earth sites are really not genuine at all these are people who are wanting to to just have fun to people's expense and see how many people they can snooker by some remarkably bad arguments many times and I found with my study over the past four years plus of the flat earth movement there's a broad range of theological beliefs there are very conservative Christians there are New Agers there are Muslims there are many different beliefs they flat earthers are fond of saying that aren't any atheist among the the the Flat Earth as I guess the idea is is that this is a flat earth round earth with a dome over top is a very contrived sort of cosmology so why would how could you possibly not believe there's a creator of some sort the problem is it doesn't naturally then lead to a belief in the God of the Bible the Lord Jesus Christ that's very important point because again broad range of theological ideas I'm most concerned with the Christian version of this however and so I would like to talk a little bit about some of the supposed biblical arguments for a flat earth I don't have time to do all of them I have discussed many of them in other places and I will give you more references for that later on but I can't talk about all of them I will talk about the rock here that's a Hebrew word this is something that God made on day to its purpose was to separate the waters above from the waters below people have debated exactly what those waters above are will continue to debate that but this appears to be the cosmology of the Bible if you will now on day four two days hence the from the day to creation God put the luminaries or the lights in the sky said he made the greater light and lesser light he made the stars also and I think that's referring to basically all astronomical bodies there's a reason why I would say that many flat-earthers today want to use the word star in the modern context and enforce it back on what most people throughout time thought stars were for instance the planets were stars as it turns out today we still times sometimes refer to them as say the evening star the morning star I've taken some photographs and put photographs up with us of some planets recently and I refer to them as stars why because that's what they look like in the sky I've had people recently asked me about this very bright star in the evening sky it's Venus it looks like a star and I'm having no trouble calling it that because that's what it looks like now the in the early translations of the Bible into into English they translated this word rakia into firmament however many are more modern translations that translated as expanse and there's a very good reason why they do that because that's probably the best meaning for the word I happen to know several world-class two bravest people who really not only know Hebrew but they know probably eighteen to twenty four other ancients related Semitic languages and by knowing the full range and all those other languages helps you to understand what the Hebrew means and they say you know animus li that means expanse it doesn't mean this hard thing up in the sky despite what many flat earthers try to claim now they also argue flat or say well the earth was made before the Sun how how can that be well we've always believed that the earth was made before the Sun the several days for the Sun that's not a problem alright doesn't doesn't automatically mean that the earth is a globe or it means it's flat it just means that the earth was made before the Sun no problem oh I don't I don't understand what the point about that one is they're saying well God if he if he made the earth first it can't be a sphere orbiting the Sun well why can't he he is God he can do what he wishes now ultimately have to ask the question if the Bible teaches the earth is flat then shouldn't there somewhere be in the Bible some sort of verse that says something like the earth is flat but there is no such verse there is no such verse that says that now what flat earthers do is they take a number of passages number of verses and they choose to read them in a manner that's consistent with a Flat Earth and then they say aha this is the meaning of what the scripture say and I'm saying well no you're gonna be hard pressed to find any Bible scholars any impressed anybody who's gonna agree with you on that sometimes they'll say well those just man's ideas yes but you are a man too so why should I believe you when you know very little about these things and these other people know far far more than you do it doesn't really work the complaint that they're merely men works both ways you see but somehow flat-earthers don't seem to realize that again there's nothing in scripture that demands that the earth is flat merely people want to interpret it that way and that is an example of I see Jesus reading into Scripture what you want to believe now one of the arguments is that you've got to read the Bible literally in fact people accuse us all the time you had Answers in Genesis you creationists you believe everything in the Bible is literal well actually we don't that's a common misconception for instance we believe we know actually that there are many figures of speech in the Bible we have figures of speech in English for instance if you wanted to translate the idiot the figure of speech you're pulling my leg in the other language it wouldn't make a lot of sense would it there are many other things like that then there are idiots as well and idioms can be tricky as well related to figures of speech then there are similes similes they're things that you say when you use the word like or ass for instance Jesus told a lot of similes he said the kingdom of heaven is like a sower going forth to sow seed or the kingdom of heaven is like a pearl of great price or a treasure hidden in the field he used the word is like this this is a simile he's not saying it is this he's saying it's like this but then there are metaphors and again there are many metaphors in scripture the Lord Jesus Christ in his ministry used many metaphors he once said he was the door he said he was a bread of life he said he was a living water you know the night of the Last Supper he told his disciples that he was the vine and they were the branches and then he started talking about taking out something to prune them with you know all these cases I don't think any of the listeners least the disciples following him thought he was literally saying these things the woman at the well she thought Jesus was talking about literal water and he wasn't of course it's very clear but she didn't get it but the disciples I'm pretty certain that night didn't think that they were literally were branches on the literal vine that he had there and when you come to the poetic and prophetic books and that flat-earthers rely heavily upon these you find huge amounts of symbol symbolism and allegorical themes coming into play the book of Revelation to me is it's difficult to understand I don't claim to understand it but I am fascinated with it as as most people and I find numbers all over the place the number seven keeps popping up in the first chapter you got the seven lampstands you got the Seven Stars and fortunately for us that's explained to us but as you get past that you have the seven bowls and the seven trumpets and the seven seals and then you've got for showing up a number times in 24 showing up each time in three a few times and what are those numbers mean oh well I don't know I think there's some poetry involved in that numbers can be poetic as we see but there are many many other forms of symbolism and allegorical themes showing up in the prophetic and poetic books now I do note that many of these non literal uses are absent from historical narrative the book of Genesis has some idioms and figures of speech but the other devices there are largely missing you see the fear that some people have is okay if you start admitting that anything in the Bible is non literal then the door is wide open for reinterpreted days of creation and the flood and so forth in some other way that doesn't mean what it says that it means well that's nonsense you see you're confusing the two genres it's very easily to identify the poetic and prophetic passages in Scripture there are certain factors that they have in and we grouped them together in the poetic the five poetic books and the 17 prophetic books in the Old Testament now the near historical narratives the first 17 books are very different they do have some non-literal uses but they're not prevalent at all that's how we can be certain when it's talking about a straightforward thing it's not using symbolism or allegory you need not to be lazy in these things you need not to be fearful you need to rightly divide the word of truth now one verse the flatterer just love is Isaiah 42 to 40 22 that's one of their favorite ones it is he who sits above the circle of the earth and its habitants are like grasshoppers who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to dwell and they say AHA circle a circle is two-dimensional it's a flat plane it is a round thing equidistant points from a center in a plane therefore a circle this means the earth must be a circle aha the earth is flat and and as you can see here well if you want to take that definition of the word circle your particular peculiar definition of it and you want to impose it upon ancient Hebrew well that's fine but again that is eisegesis what does the hebrew word they're referred to well refers to something round now is a circle a two-dimensional thing is it round the answer is yes is a spear a globe a ball is it round and the answer is yes so both are round and the word here is a bit ambiguous it can refer to something that is a two-dimensional circle it can refer to something that is a ball they try to argue the flat earthers do that it means only a circle and not anything else and that simply is false now I know many Christian scientists in the past that I've talked to creation scientists they have been fond of quoting isaiah 40:22 and say aha this word here is best rendered as being a ball or a globe so therefore this is isaiah 200 years by the way before Pythagoras saying that the earth is a globe is that true and I don't think that necessarily is again I know some world class of brass and I've talked to him about this and they tell me that the word is a bit ambiguous it could mean a 2-dimensional circle like this but it also could mean a ball we simply don't know for sure so all right hang your cosmology on this one verse is a real dangerous thing to do but hang it they will they have the globe here you can see it's flat and round with isaiah 40:22 inscribed there and you can see what their model is at the center of this round disc is the North Pole there is no South Pole because you can't get there from here and the confidence are arrayed as much as you would by looking down from the North Pole of the earth and it's surrounded on the edges by this ice wall they call antarctica antarctica you see is not a continent it's simply an impenetrable wall of ice and somewhere beyond that the dome comes down and rests on that thing okay some flat earthers and I can't believe they go here they asked they point out the earth having four corners well does it have four corners let's look at it Isaiah 11 12 its he will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel and gather dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth or how about this Revelation 7:1 after this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth holding back the four winds of the earth so that so that no wind might blow on the earth or against any tree again the earth scripture says has four corners there are no corners on a globe so therefore the earth is not a globe it must be flat case dismissed slam dunk we're done as I said I can't believe some flat earthers actually make that argument which is it is the earth round or is it square well at least one flat earther in the 1890s Orlando Ferguson kind of split the difference he have what I call here the roulette wheel model of the earth it's square with little angels in the corners but then there's a round portion in there and it's kind of called the roulette wheel because it's kind of higher in the middle and kind of dimpled like this like a roulette wheel is sort of shaped that was his model and some flatters us today at least half heartedly talk about this one I think most flat earthers however realize that the four corners talked about twice there in scriptures once in the old once in the new are references to the four cardinal directions north south east and west even today we talk about whether the wind for instance coming out of the west-southwest well we're relating at the four cardinal directions that's the way most of us understand this okay what about the ends of the earth are twenty eight times the phrase ends of the earth appears in the Old Testament for instance Psalm 67 seven says God shall bless us let all the ends of the earth fear Him they say aha if you go to a globe you go around and around and around that globe you will never reach the end of that globe so this cannot be talking about a globe but if the earth is round and flat like this there definitely is an edge we call it the ice wall of Antarctica slam dunk the earth is flat a minute.this look at this just a little bit I've got an underlined there there's a parallel passage here it says God shall bless us and then let all the ends of the earth fear Him now I ask you if you're talking if it's talking here about the ends of the earth being a physical edge then you're talking about geography can geography fear God no it's not talking about geography people it's talking about the people living at the remotest parts of the earth let them fear Him because of awesome God we have isaiah 45:22 another one turn to me and be saved all the ends of the earth I for I am God and there is no other again real estate cannot be saved real estate cannot be stable only people can be saved it's talking about people living at the remotest parts of the earth even today we use this idiom even though very few people believe the earth is flat on a globe we still talk about the ends of the earth because it's talking about those remotest parts of the earth here's another one I can't believe some flatterers was used the tree of Daniel for they read daniel 4:11 it says the tree grew up and became strong and its top reached to heaven and it was visible to the end of the whole earth they say aha on a globe if you have a giant tree grow up no matter how tall it gets half of the earth can't see it it's on the other side of the earth but if the earth is round and flat like this then you can have a tree anywhere on the earth and people can see this tree well let's dig into this this is not a standalone verse in chapter 4 it's actually part of an entire narrative a nice thing capsulated the entire fourth chapter is an incomplete narrative of an event that happened to Daniel there in Babylon and we can look at this it says the previous verse says this the visions of my head as I lay in bed were these I saw and behold adrià tree in the midst of the earth and its height was great this was Nebuchadnezzar talking the king and he was having a dream a dream several points want to make it was a dream I could have several verses listed there verses 4 and 5 6 7 8 9 10 and 18 and 19 that many times it says it was a dream it was a dream it was a dream I think we can be pretty certain it was a I don't know about you but my dreams are pretty surrealistic I have dreams from time to time I remember don't remember most of them but when I do I wake up in the morning I thought wow that was weird I'll tell you one I had many years ago there was this big wall over here and suddenly this giant rhinoceros came crashing through the wall and charging toward me by the time the rhinoceros got to me it was a dove flying around it was my assuming it was a mother my mother came towards me and then when my mother got to me she turned into a dove and flew off that's typical of my dreams so if someone wants to dream about a giant tree growing on the earth that's actually more sane than the stuff I dream many times dreams are not real folks it's not reflecting the reality of the world also I need to point out that this was a dream reported by a pagan King at that time also Daniel interprets the dream and he says the tree represented Nebuchadnezzar now get this straight it's a dream so it's not a real tree but within the interpretations a dream that non real tree represents a person you see the several levels removed from reality this is it actually happened but it's a representation there's a lot of symbolism going on here and it's being laid out beautifully by what Daniels saying here that's the factual part of all of this the dream was real interpretation in Israel and by the way the other factual part was the dream was fulfilled the seven years that he lost his mind it's a dream folks the passage is not teaching cosmology furthermore it's not even clear at all that the dream with possible cosmology there even matched what he Nebuchadnezzar believed if I dream tonight that the earth is flat it wouldn't mean that I believe the earth is flat just means I was thinking about it and I had some sort of weird dream associated with it well what the current Flat Earth model this is a diagram that I've seen on many of their websites again you've got that circle disk there with a dome over top and you've got the stars there and what happens every day is that the stars the whole sky spins around you got this axis right here above the North Pole and the whole thing spins around now right away you'll realize that if it's all spinning around then nothing is rising or setting they're just going around and if the Sun is up there then why do it don't we have daylight all the time in fact how can flat earthers explain day and night well it's very simple they explain they say you have the little dotted circle there representing the motion of the Sun throughout the day and the Sun is a spot light it shines down a conical shape of light like this and so when we're under that cone we see daylight and we're not it's dark so this is a little little little video that shows illustrates that's nice this came from again from a flat earth website the little white thing over in the dark that's the moon the bright thing and the light that yellow thing that is the Sun as it goes around it goes around and those that's gonna be night for me then day and then night and then day cuz I live in North America and then night and notice as it does that the Sun gets progressively closer and farther from my location for Ike right here it will be very close here will be far away here will be close and there will be far away so throughout the day and throughout the night for that matter the sun's getting progressively closer and farther away from me now this allows us to test this I can simply apply mathematics to this I can use geometry and trigonometry to work this out because if the Sun is closer to me it's gonna appear larger to me if it's farther away it's gonna appear smaller that's pretty clear stuff that's what we call perspective folks flat earthers like to use that term I hope they understand at least a little what that means more distant objects look smaller to us so I tested this claim and I took the model many of them have not all of them it's 32 miles across and 3,000 miles high now again the Sun is not actually rise or set and they say it's a it's motion like that and superior due to what they call perspective now I worked out the requirements of this and I used this model but as it turns out it factors out it doesn't matter how high the Sun is or how far away it is it and how big it is all that matters is it's moving in a circle above a flat earth and it scales out beautifully so if I have the Sun only half that high and twila and half as big as I assumed in the model it doesn't make any difference it factors out and I get the same result it's a navigable result of mathematics which describes the worlds around us I tested this B three and a half years ago I did August 3rd 2016 I took the photograph of the Sun at seven I am Eastern Daylight Time when the Sun was 8 degrees above the horizon why did I do it then I did it out back by the observatory here at the Creation Museum and that was the first time the Sun got above the trees we have some trees off to the east and I couldn't see the Sun prior to that and then I did took another photograph of the Sun at 1:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time that was local noon that day when the Sun was as high in the sky as possible 63 degrees and if you go out and at noon or it's sunrise or sunset you can tell the sun's much higher here it's not at noon that it is at sunrise or at sunset and hence it must if the Flat Earth model is true it must be farther away at sunset or sunrise than it is at noon and so I've done the numbers on this I determined from that figures I had again distance doesn't really matter that the Sun ought to appear 6.4 times larger in the second photograph so let's look at the photographs here's the first one I took it in the morning the sun's kind of dull and red by and you can see a little tree branch to the lower right there around the five o'clock position again it's just getting above the trees I set the ISO setting on this I set the exposure time I had a filter on the front of the telescope the Sun is very dangerous to look at if you don't have a proper filtering and so you did the proper filtering I change nothing later in the same day except that the sun's higher in the sky the ISO the setting everything else was the same and here's the photograph of it it's much brighter and more yellow I ask you look at those two diagrams those two figures are they the same size or not and the answer is they are I've printed them out on paper and measured them and they're the same size no forget 6.4 this in itself disproves the Flat Earth model other examples of false claims they say that the North Star is visible well into the southern hemisphere I've been to the southern hemisphere 10 times look for the North Star it isn't there another one is the circular patterns of stars throughout the night can happen only on a flat earth I've seen both of these claims made repeatedly by flat earthers on the internet and both are completely wrong and false I'll give you an example here here's the model again let's suppose you got a position I happen to choose Australia here but you could pick anywhere you want not off the road not off the rotation axes that you're at that dotted line represent that rotation axis so supposedly the whole thing spins around and so a person there in Australia would see or any other location on the earth would see the North Star in the same position all the time so far so good now that's the prediction of the Flat Earth model everybody on the earth should see the same stars particularly they should all see the North Star and indeed some flat earthers claim that that that's what happens now in a spherical earth that's not the case here is the earth again as I showed you before there is the rotation axis of the earth early on I showed what the position would be from the northern location like here in Northern Kentucky I'm now gonna show a southern location south of the equator I'm gonna draw in the horizon circle and I'm gonna draw in the sky the dome that you would see there now notice that the North slushed a pole the North Star are located on the top of that diagram along that dotted line that's their axes the earth of North Pole South Poles below notice that you cannot see that from the southern hemisphere that is a prediction of the Flat Earth model as I may assume the other spherical earth model as I said I've made 10 trips to the southern hemisphere I have looked for the North Star it is not there I know the sky very well I know what stars are around the North Star and none of those were really visible I could tell very easily looking all night the North Star is never going to be visible much south of the Equator when flat earthers claim that you can see the North Star south of the equator they are wrong they're either lying or they're mislead themselves I don't know which but they are wrong flat earthers stop making that claim because it's blatantly false as anybody who was when the southern hemisphere can testify is the case now as far as the rotation of the stars if you're gonna position yourself on the earth I can put a star there on that little circle it goes from stars on the left to stars and right so if the dome is spinning around like this then stars are gonna go in a circle now if you are on the axis of that circle that is along that red line that passes down to the North Pole of the earth then the path of the stars will look like this it will look like a circle but what happens if you get off that act to say over to where I live in the United States or maybe on South America or Australia you're gonna be viewing that circle obliquely like this and when you view a circle obliquely like this what shape do you have you don't get a circle anymore you get an ellipse and the father off you get the more elliptical looks only on the North Pole at the North Pole on the earth would you see stars going and circles are on the skies you would not see them ordinarily you'd see them all doing this if the earth is flat with a spinning dome over top I simulated this in our planetarium I went in and took a photograph I I set the stars spinning around pointing at the zenith point overhead I set the camera off to the side representing position not at the the North Pole of the earth and this model and you can see what I got I got these ellipses flattened out circles this is what the sky looks like on a flat earth if this model is correct but this is what you see I took this photograph myself it looks very much like the one Jim bonzer took the same sort of thing the RSU only staying a half hour exposure but if you went to completely through 24 hours they'd be complete circles there are no ellipses showing up here I've done videos of this is above the my house you can see the North Star above the point of my house there you can see the Big Dipper the upper left this is about an hour time lapse I took and you can see that things are spinning of counterclockwise around the the North Star they are a very close point to the North Star showing what you see in the northern hemisphere I took this one in Arizona last year on a raft trip and you can see the star looks to the south here and you can see the stars are spinning in a clockwise direction cuz I'm turning around I'm looking to the south I'm not looking to the north and the center of motion is down below the screen I can't see it because it's below the horizon I'll show you again here I've got the mountain the South celestial Pole put in there for you but everything else has been moved up tremendously and if you look there you can see that the motion is actually going around that circle a point at that point a point well below the horizon for us in the northern hemisphere but guess what if you go to the southern hemisphere like I have here I took these photographs this time-lapse you're gonna have be last year in South Africa and you'll notice that the Stars now are going to go clockwise and they're going around a point above them above the trees they're in the middle there's no South Star there's no bright star there they're going clockwise and a circle around that now folks we can't see any of those stars in that photograph from where I live in South Africa they're a bunch of stars they can't see that we see in the northern part of the hemisphere this is all demanded by a spherical earth that's spinning but not explainable at all in terms of a Flat Earth model so that model does not work how to flatter others explain lunar eclipses well they try to point out that lunar eclipses have been seen with both the Sun and the moon in the sky and that actually happens occasional it's called a cell and Helion they try to impugn that that this isn't possible well it is possible because refraction can raise if the Sun the moon or low in the sky can raise them up about a half degree but beyond that that's absolute fraction but the Sun and the moon and the earth shadow are not points they actually have a physical extent every lunar eclipse there's a region on one side of the earth a real thin strip where the beginning of the Eclipse is observable at sunset on the other side where the end of the Eclipse is observable at sunrise it happens at every Eclipse that this happens lunar eclipse you need excellent weather and you need a good no obstructions and a good clear view of the horizon in both directions that's asking a lot I've never seen a cell in Neeley on I'd love to see one but I've just never had the opportunity I've seen plenty of lunar eclipses however now notice however in all of this that flat earthers don't offer any positive explanation they just simply try to chuck rocks at the conventional cosmology well that's fine you're wrong but that's fine come up with your own explanation for lunar eclipses hey what about solar eclipses well they don't explain those either they say something comes in front of this the Sun but they don't ever seem to know what it is they're just convinced that the conventional understanding is wrong I I get so tired of talking the Flat Earth was about this I asked the question what caused the lunar eclipse and that what caused the solar eclipse how far away is the Sun all these kind of questions and the answers I get is I don't know I don't know but I know what it isn't they defined the world in a very weird way they define the world in times in terms of what they don't believe or don't know in terms of what they do believe or do know it's a most strange way of looking at the world they claim the moon as a transparent disc you can see stars shining through it again that is not true I've watched a number of lunar occultation z-- where this moon passes in front of a star and it does a star disappears you can't see it shining through and they make that claim anyway again that's another false claim that they make I have a photograph here didn't do such a great job on this I didn't have my best equipment with me but this is the star Arcturus I've got a arrow pointing to it hopefully you can see it on the video there and there's the moon it's the first quarter phase and after about another 20 minutes the moon moved forward there's the rest of the moon by the way because it's half lit and half dark and a little bit later on it moved forward and it covered up rock Taurus Arcturus is not visible visible they're assuming not off tours Aldebaran Aldebaran I misspoke okay solar eclipse here's a photograph that I think Jim Monster took this one oh well and this one is a beautiful solar eclipse and they want to argue that there's something else going on here well I'm gonna wrap it up here soon you know if the earth is flat then nothing can orbit the earth so there are no satellites and the moon doesn't orbit either it just goes in big circles there's can't break through the glass dome so there's nothing there there are no satellites there are no astronauts and we haven't been to the moon all right except mmm I've know of at least two Christians who walked in them and actually they won they came to Christ later but Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin Jim Urban is now deceased but I contacted Charlie Duke a few years ago and I asked him look would you give me a quote on this he said sure be happy to he said I was a lunar module pilot of Apollo 16 mission to the moon we at launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 16th 1972 we left Earth orbit for our three-day trip to the moon about three hours later as we maneuvered our spacecraft to dock with our lunar module the earth came into view about 20,000 miles away it was an awesome sight as you can see in the photo it the earth is obviously a spear and not a flat circle as we journal the journey to the moon we could look out our windows and see a smaller earth and each time we would see different land masses so it was obviously rotating on its axis Charlie Duke Christian astronaut or consider Jeffrey Williams he's more recent he spent a lot of time as Space Shuttle took a lot of photographs of the Earth from the space shuttle and space station excuse me and he he had a book called the work of his hands I have a copy of that book it's marvelous photography it has and he has many pictures of the earth some of them showing clearly that the earth is a glove no tricks here no fisheye lens this is actually picture all right what is the motivation of the flat earthers I think some are undoubtedly well-intentioned they mean well they really believe this they're convinced of this but they're just wrong I think some are doing this is a prank and they're literally having quite a bit of fun credit of amusement at the people who are taking this all too seriously when it really is just a prank I'm also convinced that some out there are just do this for malice they're attempting to make Christians at the book look foolish in to discredit Scripture and the people who want to argue the earth is flat from a biblical standpoint are doing their bidding for them and that is hurtful and it really hurts me to see people do that well if you want to learn more about this I have written a book it's called falling flat a refutation of Flat Earth claims we have it available from Answers in Genesis we also have a DVD called faith on the edge we didn't produce this but I'm in this and few other people down by the creation guys and we carry this product as well we also want to mention something else of going on the creation apologetics course you can take there will ESL 6 self-paced courses enroll now for only 19 bucks at the answers education dot-com and also by virtue of watching today you can you can get some free shipping and a discount if you order $49 or more from our website the way to get advantage of that is to use the code SAVE 10 that is sav e 10 and this expires on April 30th speaking about 10 days to do that they've got Answers in Genesis org store down there you check it out and now we have also having any orders more than $50 $50 or more we offer free shipping or doing that now through the duration of the closures we have that here at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter were not open but we hope to open soon but until then and when that happens you can order still order things but even though other bookstores aren't open and you can you can order those things with free shipping for $50 or more until we open again I mentioned the heart hits were taking we are looking for donations we are in need as so many other people are in need as well but we do have bills to pay even though our revenue stream has reduced tremendously so you can go to Answers in Genesis org donate and finally I want to close off with the live programs we'll be doing right now the schedule is 10:00 a.m. 12 noon 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. and of course you're enjoying one of these right now or maybe not enjoying it but you're here another the less I appreciate you coming today and just want to thank you all for being here you

Channel: Answers in Genesis

Views: 20,249

Rating: 4.1227651 out of 5

Keywords: Biblical authority, Creation Museum, Answers in Genesis, truth, flat earth, Is the Earth flat?, Bible flat earth

Id: 289cGJ7hOkM

Length: 63min 11sec (3791 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020