All right, another question. Concerning the shape of the Earth. And the question is, what did the early Christians believe about secular science and the shape of the earth? Do the early Christians have anything to say that alludes to a flat earth? More people seem inclined to believe this lately, and it is troubling. Yes, I would say it is very surprising. When I was in, let's say, high school, you heard about the Flat Earthers and that there was a Flat Earth society.
And it was something that was more of almost a standing joke. You weren't even sure if those people believed it, or it was just a way to have a you know joke. Okay, we're going to form this society and say that the Earth is flat. We'll meet once a year and all of that. But it's all tongue in cheek. We really don't believe it. Or maybe some of the people did, but it was seen as such a strange outlying thing that no reasonable person would buy into that.
Well, yeah, today, I mean, I have met a number of people who believe that the world is not a globe, that it is flat. Fortunately, it's not one of the doctrines of the Christian faith. So I don't think you're going to lose your salvation depending which side of that question you're on. But yeah, it troubles me. I don't think as Christians, I think we need to be very careful about being drawn into conspiracy theories. It doesn't mean that there aren't evil things going on out there in the world.
I think we need to keep awake. But I think we do need to be very careful that we don't start questioning everything that comes from science or accepting everything that comes from science. Scientists are human, and today a large percent of them are materialists, meaning they don't believe there's a god. Or if there is one, their whole focus is on the material world that it operates by itself. If there's a God, he's out there and he's of no concern to us.
That's the view of many, many, perhaps the majority of scientists today. So, yes, we have to be careful in accepting anything they say, but that doesn't mean that everything they say is nonsense and that we can't trust anything that they say. It doesn't quite work that way because one field of science has gone off the tracks. It doesn't mean everything else they say is necessarily wrong. During the period of the pre-Nicene Church, many learned persons in the ancient world believed that the earth was round.
In other words, that's not something that Columbus first discovered. It's not something that is a modern teaching. This was around you know way back in the first century and before the first century. So the scientists back then were the philosophers. Philosophy means the love of wisdom. So almost anything involving learning fell under the purview of the philosophers.
I mean, they're the ones who came up with music theory and taught music, taught mathematics, astronomy, physics, biology, you name it, as well as moral teaching. But see, all of these things came under the topic of philosophy. So a number of the philosophers, perhaps the majority of them, believed that the Earth was round. And they had different reasons for believing that.
One of them, the big ones was looking at the eclipses when the lunar eclipse, when the sun blocked out, I guess it was the Earth coming between the Sun and the Moon. And you could see then the shape of the Earth was round as it blocked out the sun. That was just one of the reasons. And so when you read the early Christian writings, most of these people were learned men, okay?
So generally, when you're reading the early Christian writings, and there are some exceptions, but generally, you're reading from educated Christians. So because they were the more educated part of the Christian population, they did tend to believe the same thing as the educated population of their day believed, which was that the Earth was round. I'll give you just a few example quotations.
Now, they may have been their beliefs may have been based hardly or mainly on what science of their day was teaching, but it also could have been based on what the Scriptures teach. Okay, so Athenagoras writes, " The world being made spherical is confined within the circles of heaven. " That's in volume 2, page 132 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. Tertullian writes, " There was a time when the whole globe underwent change because it was overrun by all waters. Even now, her shape undergoes local changes.
" That's in volume four, page six. So Tertullian says that describes the earth as a globe. Arnobius, writing about the year 305, he says, " In the first place, indeed, the world itself is neither right nor left. It has neither upper nor lower regions, nor front nor back. For whatever is round and bounded on every side by the circumference of a solid sphere has no beginning or end. You can find that in volume 6, page 477.
So, yeah, the early Christians were not these ignorant people that maybe the secular world would want to portray them all as being. They understood that most of them, or at least the ones who were doing the writing and the teaching, that the Earth was a globe, which means you don't really have an up and down or a left and a right in a true globe. So many of the things that we think of as modern ideas or modern science, I mean, this was known way back then. But did all of them believe that the world was round? No.
If you'd asked maybe the typical Christian and most of them were illiterate, uneducated. I mean, when you look out, the ground looks flat. I mean, there are indications you know if you're on a you know looking at a ship coming in, you see the top of the mast first, where if it was flat, you should see the whole thing appear at one time. At least that is the argument. But looking out, it looks flat. When you're walking, you have no sense of I'm on a big globe.
And so I'm guessing the average illiterate Christian probably thought the world was flat. I don't know. Now, there is one writer I found, Lactantius, and he was an educated man. In fact, he was the tutor of Constantine when Constantine was a young man. And maybe where Constantine got some of his Christian indoctrination was perhaps from Lactantius. Now, he ridiculed the idea that the Earth could be round. He said, if it was round, then you know everything would fall off of it.
I mean, the ones on the bottom, they would fall off. What would hold them there? Well, of course, back then, they did not understand the theory of gravity and how gravity works. So to him, it seemed ridiculous because it didn't meet what our eye would see. But of course, science, I think, has largely proven him wrong.
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