Ch 5.2 - Biblical Cosmology

"God walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon" — James Irwin, Astronaut of the Apollo 15 mission

Narrative: Flat Earthers will believe anything the Bible says and are incapable of basic science.
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a. Creation
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”Used the Bible to show a pastor the scriptures stating the Earth is flat. So he pulled out a science book and told me that I was wrong.” - Unknown

"Why did Christians reject Darwinism but embrace Heliocentrism?" - Unknown, on why Heliocentrism is necessary for Evolution to work

"In the _beginning_ God created the _heaven_ and the _earth_." - Genesis 1:1 KJV

"In the first 10 words of the Bible God creates the trinity of trinities." - Kent Hovind

Beginning -> time -> past, present, and future
Heaven -> space -> height, width, and depth
Earth -> matter -> solid, liquid, and gas

Without space _where_ would you put the matter that was created? Without time _when_ would you put the newly formed matter and space?

But who made God? God exists outside our world and has always been there. "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God." - Psalm 90:1-2 KJV

But if you try to know the creator through the creation, the devil will do whatever he can to stop you. God sits right above us, watching. This means that if the Earth is flat, we are in a protected dome at the center of the universe, looked over by the Lord himself. It also means you can get to know him through the things he made:

"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork" - Psalm 19:1 KJV, also on the tombstone of Wernher Von Braun NASA's leading rocket scientist.

“And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” - Genesis 1:7-8 KJV

“In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” - Genesis 7:11 KJV

“The LORD shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow.” - Deuteronomy 28:12 KJV

“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,' says the LORD Almighty, 'and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.” - Malachi 3:10 ESV

"Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a cast metal mirror?" - Job 37:18 ESV

"Tremble before him, all the earth! The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved." - Chronicles 16:30 KJV

"Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest?" - Isaiah 66:1 KJV

"...Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool..." - Matthew 5:34-35 KJV

"For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house made not with hands, eternal in the heavens." 2 Corinthians 5:1 KJV

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." - John 1:1 KJV

"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." - Romans 1:20 KJV

"I don't know what the earth is. It's defiantly not a ball spinning at 1000 mph with a 25k mile circumference. That's easy to prove. I don't know what it is. I know Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not riddled with fall out radiation. They never were. It's very very easy to prove that. I don't have the opportunity or resources to prove what the earth is or exactly what bombs they dropped on Japan. But I can prove very easily that their claims are false because the evidence to their claims doesn't exist and can't exist. It's not a fair standard that if I can show your claim is false I then have to prove what heaven and earth is and exactly how the military works. That's ridiculous." - Owen Benjamin

"We should speak of seeking evidence that disfavors the hypothesis that the earth is flat of which there is plenty, starting with the historical evidence about how stellar constellations shift if you travel, how the length of shadows changes, to Newton's 1/r2 force law that is the law for a sphere, not a disk, not to mention Einstein and gravitational red shift and the perihelion precession of mercury, and so on, and so forth. The problem that flat earthers have is that they cannot do most of these observations themselves. So if you buy the idea that it's only your personally collected evidence that you should accept, then it seems you cannot refute the idea that the earth is flat, so flat Earther's philsophy forbids them to accept scientific fact." - Sabine Hossenfelder on why Flat Earth 'Science' is Wrong, but not Stupid

b. 8 inches per mile squared
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Here's some evidence for you... Let's start with basic math. If the earth is a sphere, things should fall away from you when you look over the horizon. You can do this calculation yourself (the math shown below). The formula to know this dropoff based on how far something is away from you is: (8 inches) x (# of miles distant) x (# of miles distant), otherwise known as '8 inches per mile squared.' This formula is a very close approximation to the dropoff based on the curvature of the Earth using a parabola (almost exactly overlaps with the formula for a circle at distances up to 1,000 miles and starts to diverge at 2,000 miles noticeably). Also, 8 inches per mile squared is at the equator. The number of inches increases the closer you get to the poles. Why 8 inches?

The math is shown below:

L = Length of horizontal line (distance the object is away from you in miles)
d = dropoff based on point on circle (rate at which object falls away from you in inches)
r = radius of the earth (3,958 miles)
r-d = dropoff from the radius
Draw circle, draw L as tangent on outside circle, draw d as dropoff
Draw a rectangle and look at the triangle inside the circle
Then, use Pythagorean theorum to solve:
r2 = L2 + (r-d)2 <-- triangle on the inside of the circle r2 is hypotenuse, L2 is distance, (r-d)2 is dropoff
r2 = L2 + (r2 - 2rd - d2)
0 = L2 - 2rd - d2 --> assume d2 is very small so approximately 0
0 = L2 - 2rd
L2 ~ 2rd
L2/d ~ 2r (divide both sides by d)
d/L2 ~ 1/2r (invert both sides)
d[in]/L2[mi2] ~ 1[in]/2r[mi][mi] (multiply both side by constant [in]/[mi2])
63,360[in/mi] / 2 x 3,958.8 [mi] ~ 8.0024 [in]/[mi]2 --> 5,280 ft/mi x 12 = 63,360in & 3,958mi is radius of earth

8x1x1 = 8 inches of dropoff at 1 mile
8x2x2 = 32 inches of dropoff at 2 miles
8x3x3 = 72 inches of dropoff at 3 miles
8x4x4 = 128 inches of dropoff at 4 miles

Catalina Island is 33 miles from Newport Beach, CA. Mt. Orizaba is the highest point on the island at 2,097 feet. 8x33x33 = 8,712 inches / 12 = 726 feet. You can see way more than 2/3 of the island from Newport Beach.

Lake Benton, MI, is 53 miles from Chicago, IL. Willis Tower is 1,450 feet tall (1,729 feet, including the antenna). 8x53x53 = 22,472 inches / 12 = 1,872 feet. You can see most of the Chicago skyline from that distance.

Things that are impossible to see are clearly quite visible using your own eyes. If we can't trust science to explain the shape of the earth, what else is science lying to us about?

Life isn't about having the ‘correct' beliefs for most people. It's about having the most useful ones. It doesn't matter whether the idea is factually accurate or not. If believing something helps you fit in, that’s what most people are going to do.

Which one would you rather live on:
1) Sagan's "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" - or -
2) God's “house... eternal in the heavens"

The second one sounds a lot better to me than the first one. I believe it's true because it makes sense, and makes me feel better, and the Bible says so. I'm not changing my mind until someone takes me up in a spaceship and proves me wrong.

Speaking of sunbeams, look at the angles they make the next time you see one. The sunbeams you see when you look up shine at all different angles. This suggests the sun is only 75 or 100 miles away. A star 93 million miles away would make sunbeams that are straight up and down/perfectly vertical.

8” per mile squared = .666 feet per mile of dropoff
93 million miles x 2 x 3.14 / 365 / 24 = 66,600 mph speed earth travels around Sun
90 degrees - 23.4 degrees axial tilt = 66.6 degrees
90 degrees - 23.4 degrees north/south = 66.6 degrees Tropic of Capricorn/Cancer

”Nothing to see here! Move along!” - The Naked Gun

c. Antarctica
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66.6 Degrees South of the Equator is the Antarctic Circle (just another coincidence)

"There are zero places in the South Pole you can see the 24 hour sun" - Unknown, on you being able to see the 24 hour sun at the North Pole, but not at the South Pole

"Put a lion in a 50-mile safari park, and when he gets to the edge, he will just turn around. A human will want to know what's on the other side and who put the wall there." - Flat Earth Dave

If you were a divine creator and wanted to keep an intelligent species confined, what better way than an inhospitable ice wall that extends hundreds of miles in all directions?

They also want you looking up, so you don't look South. In Biblical Cosmology, we believe that the North Pole is the center of the map and that Antarctica is the outside edge (just look at the UN logo if you want to know what the actual map looks like).

"The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment." - Job 38:14

If you were to take wet clay and put a bowl over it, the edges would rise, just like the firmament created a 5,000-foot high wall of ice when it was placed over Antarctica.

Our space program began, coincidentally, ten years after people started going to Antarctica. Once people began exploring the furthest reaches of our planet, all of the global leaders at the height of the Cold War spontaneously decided that Antarctica would be off-limits even though we were supposedly enemies and never could agree on anything.

Either 1) they found something (e.g., the firmament), or 2) our world is far larger than they're letting on.

"We thawed out something we shouldn’t." - Buzz Aldrin on what spooked him after going to Antarctica and why the 1% always seem to visit there.

You could change my mind about flat earth by opening Antarctica to exploration or circumnavigating the globe via the poles (for some reason, when people go around the world, they only do so at the equator). If the earth is indeed a sphere, why does everyone go around it the same way? All they have to do is go from Santiago, Chile, over Antarctica and show up in Cape Town, South Africa, or in Adelaide, Australia.

d. North Pole
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Magnetic declination. The non-red end of the compass does not work well the further you are from the North Pole. Antarctica is too close to the South Pole to get an accurate compass reading! You can't take a compass made for North America and use it in South America and get accurate readings. Under the effect of Earth's magnetic field, the needle always points toward the north magnetic pole.

Can you find true north without a compass? Use the Big Dipper - The most accurate and reliable direction finder is right over your head. It's Polaris, the North Star. Polaris is over the North Pole, so you'll know where the North is if you find it in the night sky.

Is the Garden of Eden actually in the North Pole? The four headwaters are Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. We know where the Euphrates river is (Iraq). But what if it shifted after the flood of Noah. The 15th and 16th century Mercator maps of the North Pole showed a land with 4 specific headwaters bearing geographic similarities to what was recorded in the Bible.

"And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates." - Genesis 2:10-14

"And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald." - Revelation 4:3

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