To me, it’s: That ancient people thought the Earth was flat.
We have records from around 430BC where Greek philosophers spoke of the Earth being a sphere. In 240BC the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth and was only about 2% out.
In general that old math theorems/ideas are named after the mathematicians who discovered them.
Pythagoras didn’t discover the Pythagorean Theorem. Pascal didn’t discover Pascal’s Triangle. Fibonacci didn’t discover the Fibonacci Sequence.
To me, it’s: That ancient people thought the Earth was flat.
Ancient peoples DID think the Earth was flat.
The conception of a spherical earth was only widely accepted in academic traditions derived from late Greek philosophy and even in those cultures, had a mixed reception in popular conceptions of the earth’s shape until the 16th century.
The question is not if they did or did not think, but if what they thinked was backed by historical facts at the time.
Yes. It was backed by the oldest book of events at that time.
There were mathematicians that wrote against Galileo, and a notable one, a Dominican I think.
Everything in the past moves to the category of belief.
Sun dial proves flat earth.
Just imagine a sun dial on a ball earth.
You need a very strong belief to believe in ball earth.Check out 4 Kings 20:11 (Go and read it).
We always believed rightly until people started believing imaginations and fancies.
So few years before Christ, we had few fanciful school of thoughts.Speaking to all:
How did Eratosthenes get the circumference of the earth?
The length of shadows.
Now for those who believe such a science:Let us pretend the earth is a ball.
In 24 hours, let us take the distance between the earth and the sun to be constant (not changing) (change negligible).
But in that same 24 hours, no shadow, short shadow, long shadow, very long shadow could be obtained.
So, constant distance, changing shadows.
Inference:
You cannot obtain the distance of the sun from shadows.
Conclusion:
If the distance of the sun cannot be obtained, Eratosthenes is finished!Let us return to our senses.
Where does the distance to the sun enter into this equation?
Did he make an assumption about the distance of the sun?
Did he assume parallel rays?
1 Kings , 2 Kings , 3 Kings, 4 Kings. (1st naming system).
1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings. (2nd naming system).
I used the first naming system.
