TO BE fair, she didn’t say outright that she believed the Earth was flat. But thanks to a few tweets, a popular broadcast journalist who used to be based in Cebu triggered last week a spirited discussion on the fact that, to this day, some people still believe the planet is not round.
Actually, it’s not. Scientists and your more pedantic Twitter contacts will tell you it’s an oblate spheroid, flat at the top and bottom, and a lot thicker in the middle—which is also the shape we’ll grow into if we spend too much time sitting in front of our desktops or glaring into our smartphones, trying to prove other people wrong on social media.
This is not about the broadcast journalist’s beliefs, to which she is entitled. Rather, it’s about a question that most of us, at some point, will arrive at: how do we reconcile our beliefs with scientific advances?
This may prove easier for Roman Catholics, given the Vatican’s clear and repeated declarations of support for scientific inquiry. In 1996, for example, Pope John Paul II told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that the theory of evolution should be seen “as more than just a hypothesis.” The bigger challenge exists among followers of evangelical churches, where many still read the Bible as a literal historical record, rather than as a theological one.
Evangelical Christians, writes Alan Burdick, represent one of several communities that now insist our planet is not round. (To be clear, most evangelical Christians do not think this way.) One school of thought posits that the Earth is flat and stationary, while others believe it’s a flat disk hurtling through space. But what about sunsets and moonrises, and what about all those space missions that have brought us images of the planet’s shape? Part of the flat-earther’s canon is that all these were nothing but the work of an elaborate conspiracy. “The flat Earth,” Burdick writes, “is the post-truth landscape.”
In November 2017, Burdick spent two days attending the first Flat Earth Conference in North Carolina. Reading his account of it, one gets the impression that flat-earthers also include contrarians who take the notion of “personal truths” to the extreme. How can you prove that Saturn or Jupiter (or other roundish planets) exist, one speaker reportedly said, when you haven’t been there?
Among the individuals the writer met was Darryle Marble, a soldier and one of the conference’s speakers. For him, coming out as a flat-Earther was the least he could do to warn others. Marble said: “I was already primed to receive the whole flat-Earth idea, because we had already come to the conclusion that we were being deceived about so many other things. So, of course, they would lie to us about this.” (Read Adam Burdick’s “Looking for Life on a Flat Earth” in The New Yorker’s May 30, 2018 issue, available online.)
All this reminded me of an older debate between creationism and evolution. Stephen Jay Gould was a science historian, evolutionary biologist and paleontologist who argued for seeing religion and science as “different domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains.”
Gould’s view was that no clash or conflict should exist between science and religion, each of which has “a legitimate magisterium or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap.” (See also Stephen Jay Gould’s “Non-overlapping Magisteria” in the March 1997 issue of Natural History, available online.)
Since then, NOMA has also drawn its share of critics, some of whom dismiss it as merely political correctness. But Gould was on to something, I think. We can’t persuade others their “truths” are baseless, if we begin by mocking them. Resistance to facts is a serious challenge, but we’d be better off approaching it with curiosity and compassion, for a start.