Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Those Who Misrepresent History

Possibly, we also learned that profoundly rearward Christian thinking suppressed, or at least forgot, that the world was known to be round. At least, that is what some historians tell us. For instance, the popular historian Daniel Boorstin wrote in The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself:

A Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia . . . afflicted the continent from AD 300 to at least 1300. During those centuries Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully, and so scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers.

Another popular historian, William Manchester, in addressing the matter of the world being thought flat, wrote in A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance:

During the long medieval night, Hellenic and Egyptian learning was preserved by Muslim scholars in the Middle East, where it was discovered by early Renaissance humanists.

But this, too, is erroneous. Such wrongheaded thinking started with Antoine-Jean Letronne, an academic with strong anti-religious prejudices, a member of the Institut de France, the French Academy. In his 1834 work, On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers, he clearly misrepresented the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth.

Washington Irving, at about the same time, wrote the amazingly popular The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. In it he convincingly tells the story of Columbus explaining to the incredulous Council of Salamanca that the world is not flat.  Some historians have bought into this and even today propagate the myth.