FIRST-PERSON: A creationist watches ‘Bugs Bunny’

In honor of Columbus Day ...

Oct 3, 2005
By Ronald Morris

SHELBY, NC. (BP)--There are many tensions between so-called "flat earth creationists" and "round earth creationists," those who believe the earth is flat and those who accept contemporary theory of the earth as round.

For a long time, I believed that Scripture was silent on the question of the shape of the earth. After all, the Hebrew word for “corners” or “quarters”: kanaph, kaw-nawf' means “an edge or extremity” (“the edge of a wing, of a garment or bed-clothing, a flap, of the earth, a quarter, uttermost part, wing”, for example). The Greek word for “corners”: gonia, means, “an angle, corner, quarter”. In recent months, however, as I have been teaching through the Ancient Near Eastern cosmology of the Bible and working on a lengthy article on general revelation, I have slowly changed my mind. The main issue for me is not the exegetical arguments for the use of the word "corner" (although there are some compelling evidences there for a flat, four-cornered earth in the Bible).

[Here are other scriptures of the Bible that indicate a flat earth with ends, edges, 2 verses that say the earth is a flat 2-dimensional circle (like a coin), that the earth is immovable, set on pillars or foundations. (Dan 4:10-11, Isa 40:22, Prov 8:26-28, Mat 4:8, Job 38:13, Job 11:9, Deu 13:7, Deu 28:49, Deu 28:64, Deu 33:17, 1 Sam 2:10, Job 1:7, Job 28:24, Job 37:3, Psa 2:8, Psa 19:4, Psa 22:27, Psa 33:13, Psa 33:14, Psa 48:10, Psa 59:13, Psa 61:2, Psa 65:5, Psa 72:8, Acts 1:8, Acts 13:47)]

I think, however, what convinced me that the earth is much flatter than we've been told was watching a Looney Tunes starring Bugs Bunny called Hare We Go. In this cartoon short, Bugs Bunny, as mascot, accompanies Christopher Columbus and his crew as they sail the ocean blue to America in 1492, but Columbus gets all the credit for discovering the continent. Specifically, the problem for Christian theology is the part where Christopher Columbus insists that the world is as round as his head. The King replies by hitting Christopher Columbus on the head with a mallet, saying, "It (the world) is flat like your head.” Bugs demonstrates the planet's roundness by tossing a baseball, which comes back from the other direction, covered with travel stickers. You may laugh at the cartoonish gag involved, but, if we are to believe the unquestioned assertions of modern myths of atheistic “science”, then, theoretically, if one could throw a baseball far enough at the correct gravitational position, then such a baseball could indeed be tossed in one direction and be caught from the other. This is the logical conclusion of the belief that the earth is round. Yet such an idea is foreign to our God-given awareness of creation. Flying baseballs with covered travel stickers?! Is this the earth God created and declared good?

Due to recent and rapidly expanding discoveries in physics, astronomy, geology, topography, and other major disciplines, hundreds of scientists are leaving the “round-earth” reservation. No longer able to adhere to an untenable theory with inexplicable gaffes and holes big enough to fly the Challenger space shuttle through, these scientists are conceding the point that the only plausible explanation for an intricately designed universe is a flat earth. It should be noted that many of these converts to flat-earth thought are not Christians or even religious; they are simply scientists who feel they can no longer deny and suppress the incontrovertible scientific evidence.

For several decades diehard “round earth” scientists have enjoyed the censorship of all their critics in America’s public education. Nothing but the spherical theory of the earth has been allowed into public school classrooms. All other explanations for the shape of the earth have been banned under the presumption of unconstitutionality - as if our Constitution prohibits public schools from teaching anything but the cockamamie theory of a round earth. Instead of questioning established assertions and seeking evidence to the contrary, which has always been the nature or true science, the science propagated in today’s public schools demands students’ blind allegiance to present and popular hypotheses. It does not teach students to be inquisitive but inflexible; it does not teach students how to think but what to think.

In a desperate attempt to protect their monopoly on public education and to discredit the growing chorus of dissenting voices among distinguished scientists, liberals are trying to frame the growing debate over the “spherical earth” and the “flat earth” as a debate between enlightened intellectuals and unintelligent religious fanatics. By doing so, they hope to fool the public into believing that only the obtuse object to the harebrained “round earth” theory.

Why, one wonders, are so many today so determined to keep all evidence of the Bible’s validity out of the public school classroom? Is it, as they portend, to protect the purity of scholasticism? Or is it something most sinister, such as “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18)? According to the Apostle Paul, men’s denial of the truth of God and His creation is not only inexcusable (Romans 1:19-20) and idiotic (Romans 1:21-22), but indicative of “a reprobate mind” (Romans 1:23-32). Thus, contrary to popular opinion, it is not smarts but sin that is behind the expulsion of the flat earth from our public school classrooms.

I find the primary texts for understanding the shape of the world are Isaiah 11:12: “And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH.” Revelation 7:1: “And after these things I saw four angels standing on FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.” Job 38:13: “That it might take hold of the ENDS OF THE EARTH, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?” Jeremiah 16:19: “O LORD, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction, the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ENDS OF THE EARTH, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit.” Daniel 4:11: “The tree grew, and was strong, and the height thereof reached unto heaven, and the sight thereof to the ENDS OF ALL THE EARTH:”

Saint Augustine (354–430) questioned the existence of a spherical earth, arguing against the idea of people inhabiting the other side of the earth and called them a "fable" (De Civitate Dei, xvi, 9).

Those who affirm [a belief in antipodes] do not claim to possess any actual information; they merely conjecture that, since the Earth is suspended within the concavity of the heavens, and there is as much room on the one side of it as on the other, therefore the part which is beneath cannot be void of human inhabitants. They fail to notice that, even should it be believed or demonstrated that the world is round or spherical in form, it does not follow that the part of the Earth opposite to us is not completely covered with water, or that any conjectured dry land there should be inhabited by men.

Since these people would have to be descended from Adam, they would have had to travel to the other side of the Earth at some point, which is a universally absurd proposition; Augustine continues:

it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man.

In the current era, Samuel Shenton of the International Flat Earth Society has studied much of the so-called “evidence” that has come in the wake of the advent of the space program. Following careful research into supposed NASA photographs of earth from deep space, Shenton concluded: "It's easy to see how photographs like these could fool the untrained eye".

And yet, if Christians are ever to provide a "counter-theory" to the Pythagorean astronomy myth and the heliocentric model of Copernicus, we must account for a world that certainly does seem spherical, not only in terms of the obvious mathematics, but also in terms of (often even more suspect than mathematics) human experience.

I am more and more convinced that flat earth theory answers these questions in a way that is faithful to Scripture, the historic confessions of the Christian church throughout the ages, and to the longings of the human heart for a God who created a world he declared "four-cornered."

This doesn't mean we have a ready-made scientific answer for every possible objection to a four-cornered understanding of the earth, sitting on pillars, with the domed-firmament of the cosmos above. Sometimes we must recognize that we are not at the point where we can know exactly how the shifting standards of science fit with divine revelation.

More important is the fact that we have an account of creation that answers the most basic questions of all human beings, an account that resonates with our human experience of both dignity and grandeur.

Christians should recognize that to us has been revealed the "mystery" of the purpose of creation (Eph 1:9-10). We know that the Wisdom that ordered the cosmos, the Word that called the stars together, is a Person -- our King Jesus. We should recognize that the ends of the earth have been created as an inheritance for Jesus (Psalm 2:8). He has been appointed "the heir of all things, through whom He also created the world" (Hebrews 1:2).

It should boggle our minds when we look at the far-off images from the Hubble telescope to recognize that these stars – hundreds of miles beyond our reach - have been formed for Jesus and will be reconciled by the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:19-20). This means we should learn to interpret all of reality in terms of how it fits with God's overall purpose to "sum up all things in Christ" (Ephesians 1:10). As the believing community, we have the interpretive grid for this -- the Scriptures and the Spirit whereby we share "the mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16). In so doing, let's remember to train up our children to recognize the “spherical earth” theory for what it is. But let's also remember to never be ashamed of what Scripture tells us -- that long ago in an ancient land a king and a queen stood on a six-day old, flat earth, and God called it "good." That might not fit with your local high school's geology textbook. But it makes better sense than Bugs Bunny.
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Ronald Morris is dean of the School of Cosmology and senior vice president for academic administration at Northeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.