Debunking and Demolishing Flat Earth Myth

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00:19

Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Apologia TV. Thank you for joining us. This is the gospel heard around the world.

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I am Jeff Durbin, they call me the Ninja, and that's Pastor Luke Pearson, he's the bear, and this over here is

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Joy Tembe, the girl. Hello. And we are right now in our makeshift studio. Once again, if you haven't seen yet, we encourage you guys to go to Apologia Radio on Facebook and make sure you guys like the page because every

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Tuesday evening at 10 p .m. Eastern Standard Time, we have our new nighttime talk show platform to engage the culture with the biblical worldview and the gospel, and that airs 10 p .m.

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Eastern Standard Time. It is next week with Jeff Durbin, and so all that's taking place in the studio next to us.

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So this is our makeshift studio right now, and until we actually get the new one going, this is how we're gonna be for now.

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I wanna encourage you guys to go to ApologiaRadio .com to get more of the episodes, the television shows, the aftershows, and Apologia Academy.

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You guys can do that by partnering with us with All Access. So we're gonna have a really, I think, important show today, and after this show is up, you can go to ApologiaRadio .com

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and you guys can get the aftershow, and so let's get into the discussion. So first thing, introduce everybody to this quickly.

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We did a show a while back on Flat Earth. Right? Not for the

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Flat Earth. It was against the Flat Earth. That's right. We did a show, that's right. Look, Luke even brought his -

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Brought my globe. He brought his globe. It's not flat. That's right, not flat. If you didn't notice, that's not flat, it's a globe.

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I'm just gonna hold it if you don't mind. That's fine, you can do it as a show. As a reminder. That's right. Make sure everybody knows. We should've got him a mic, let him speak for himself.

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Put a microphone in front of that. I'm around. Put some eyes on him. So we did a show on the myth of the

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Flat Earth, and we went ahead and posted it up on our YouTube channel, which has millions and millions of views, and we were,

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I have to say, shocked. Truly shocked by the amount of people that profess to love the

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Lord Jesus and the word of God that have adopted the Flat Earth myth. Yeah, I was flattened.

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So we were all very, very surprised by it, and what we wanted to do is do another show on the

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Flat Earth myth with somebody that we really respect and we're grateful to have on the show. So let me go ahead and introduce our guest for today.

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His name is Dr. Danny Faulkner. He's an astronomer, a speaker, an author, a researcher. He earned graduate degrees in physics and astronomy and taught at the

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University of South Carolina, Lancaster for over 26 years. Dr.

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Faulkner is a member of the Creation Research Society and also serves as the editor of the Creation Research Society quarterly.

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He has written more than 100 papers in various astronomy and astrophysics journals and is author of Universe by Design and the

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New Astronomy book. So very, very excited and honored to have Dr. Danny Faulkner.

03:19

Welcome to the show, brother. Thank you very much. Good to be here. It is our pleasure, and again, it's an honor.

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So Dr. Faulkner, let's just do it just by way of brief introduction. Why do you think this subject is so vitally important to get right?

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Well, it's been a phenomenon the last two or three years. It's sort of blown up in Christian circles.

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It's being spread through the internet, through YouTube videos primarily. And I'm convinced it's just really bad stuff.

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And I've seen it take a very serious toll upon a lot of Christian folk. They fall into this.

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They think they're encountering good arguments, and it tends to really push them off into really weird directions.

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And my attempt is to try to prevent people from falling into that hole, try to give them some answers.

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Good, and I think we think it's very, very important. Dr. Faulkner, somebody may be watching this and thinking, on the one hand,

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I hadn't a clue that people actually thought that this was actually real.

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And on the other hand, we're gonna have people that are very, very committed to this belief system, and they propagate it, and they get into online battles over it.

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So Dr. Faulkner, where do we begin in this discussion to make any sense of this? Where did all this begin?

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Is there a starting point for this where we can really get to to do a good examination from there? Or what are we talking about?

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Well, this all blew up in the last two or three years. I became aware of it about a year and a half ago. And it's had a bad effect on a lot of people.

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They go out there on the internet, they see some what appear to be convincing articles and more often YouTube videos, and they don't have good answers to some of the objections to a spherical earth that people raise.

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And so if they keep watching these things, they finally get sucked into it. It's difficult to get them back out.

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And so I think it's vital that we combat this stuff with true answers about this and the true history, and try to offer resources to people who are truly searching, trying to find some answers before they fall into this.

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Because I've seen what a deleterious effect it has upon people. And once they get in deeply enough, it's very difficult to pull them back out of this.

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And it is, I think, just a deceptive thing that's been unleashed on the

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Christian world today. And it just breaks my heart to see so many people falling into this trap. So it's really important we do combat this.

05:51

Well, Dr. Faulkner, here's the problem. What you're not considering is that the Bible teaches the earth is flat.

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That's the claim that they make. There are a lot of claims that people make. First of all, let me just tear into the history of this a little bit.

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The way it's usually portrayed on these videos is that nearly everybody thought the world was flat until about 500 years ago.

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So consequently, the Bible teaches the earth is flat. And consequently, the church taught it was flat.

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Then about five centuries ago, about the time of Columbus, all of that began to change. And now people are wanting to go back the way it used to be.

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Well, that's, to be very blunt, is rubbish. That's not the situation at all. That's right. There was a man named

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Jeffrey Burton Russell about 25 years ago, a medieval scholar who wrote a very good book called "'Inventing the

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Flat Earth." And he had recounted the history of how this whole mythology arose in the 19th century.

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People in the ancient world understood, at least by more than 2 ,000 years ago, 2 ,500 years ago, understood the world was spherical.

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There's some good reasons for that. And the church never taught that. In fact, it was interesting, in the 19th century, it was critics and skeptics of the

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Bible trying to discredit the Bible and Christianity who began to falsely claim that the

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Bible teaches the earth is flat and that the church taught that. And unfortunately, the flat earth people today have picked up those arguments and just repeated them, not knowing at all that those arguments were never used by Christians originally.

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It was used by critics as a fake argument. And it's just really kind of weird. That's incredible.

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People are not that discerning. They can't understand that. That's right. Powerful stuff, guys. So what we'd like you guys to do is stay with us.

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Important show we're doing here on the subject of flat earth. What does the Bible say about this?

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How do we approach this subject? And is it even meaningful to have this discussion or important? And so what we're gonna do is come back right back after this commercial break right here on Apologia TV.

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Again, you can get more at ApologiaRadio .com. We're gonna be right back here for another segment talking about the subject with Dr.

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Danny Faulkner. Stay with us, guys. Hi, this is

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I also wanna tell you we talk about apologetics and theology and we do a lot of swing dancing and we make a delicious chicken gravy.

09:10

ApologiaRadio .com. Welcome back everybody to another episode of Apologia TV.

09:16

If you guys haven't seen us before, you can get more at ApologiaRadio .com. Get all of our radio show episodes.

09:22

You can get all of our TV shows, the After Show and Apologia Academy at ApologiaRadio .com. Lots of helpful resources and actually a few episodes about this particular subject.

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But we wanted to get the help of Dr. Danny Faulkner as we talk about this subject some more because we do think it's an important subject to understand and begin to talk about.

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And it does have, I think, dramatic impact on the witness of the church. So Dr. Faulkner, that is a common argument.

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People will say the Bible says the earth is flat. Okay, you talked about the history there for a moment now.

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How do we address the subject that the Bible talks about? They'll say the Bible says the earth is flat. Well, they try to use several passages to make that case.

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And in fact, I've written on this. It's an article we put up at our website, answersingenesis .org.

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If you go there and search for flat earth, you'll come across it. But they try to argue that you've got the four corners of the earth mentioned three times.

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And they try to say, well, this means the earth is flat. Right away, you're in trouble because virtually no ancient cosmologies had a round flat square earth or a flat square earth like a checkerboard or something.

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They had a disc basically, which doesn't have any corners. So you really can't make the case that the ancient cosmologies are being supported here because they were round and flat, the really, really old cosmologies.

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But even more to the point, particularly in the book of Revelation where it mentions the four corners of the earth, it mentions also the four directions, the four winds.

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It talks about four angels standing in the four directions. And I think it's talking about the cardinal directions.

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And it turns out it's an idiomatic expression still used in English today, referring to those four directions and also to the remotest parts of the earth.

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Similarly, the ends of the earth are used as if the ends is talking about some space. You come to the edge of the earth and you can go no further.

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Again, it's an idiomatic expression still used in English today, simply referring to the remotest part of the earth.

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And you won't find anybody claiming otherwise until the 19th century, again, coming from skeptics and critics and atheists.

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It was Christians later on who foolishly picked this up and tried to use this argument.

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Another one they tried to use is Daniel chapter four. It talks there about a tree growing up so tall that you could see it from the entire earth.

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And the question is, well, you can't see that from a spherical earth because the earth will get in the way, but a flat earth, you could.

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Well, hold on a minute. Look at the context. This is in a dream. It's in a dream by King Nebuchadnezzar.

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And first of all, dreams are not real. We don't know if this thinking in the dream reflected

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Nebuchadnezzar's cosmology or not, but Daniel gives the interpretation of the dream and he identifies

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Nebuchadnezzar as the tree. It doesn't say you're like the tree. He says, you are that tree.

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Now, how can it be a Nebuchadnezzar be a tree if that's literally the case? Actually, there's some symbolism used in here representing something.

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So the whole thing begins to fall apart when you try to make those sorts of arguments. Many people try to claim, they say, well, show me in the

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Bible where the earth is a sphere, where it's a ball. Well, I don't know if I can really do that, but there's a lot of things

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I can't prove to you from the scripture. For instance, I can't prove to you that I exist. There's nothing, there's verse in the

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Bible that says anything about Danny Faulkner existing. So by that reasoning, I must not exist or this computer sitting in front of me must not exist.

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That is just a silly argument to argue, well, if the Bible doesn't teach it, it must be true.

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It's amazing to me people even try to use that argument. Again, these arguments people use supposedly from scripture are not original to Christians.

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They were originally came from the skeptics in the 19th century. And I'm just amazed that people don't know the history of this any better than that.

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Yeah. And it's a tremendous indictment upon,

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I think the evangelicals in the West that we don't understand the types of language and genres that the

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Bible actually moves through. So even you have God being described in the Old Testament as covering us under his feathers and his wings and God is a consuming fire,

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Jesus is the door. The Bible uses metaphor and uses a graphic hyperbole at times.

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And speaks in such a way, even at times to be poetic or it even uses phenomenological language and just what's observational from our perspective.

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Yeah, there are many idioms and figures of speech used. And a lot of these people, we did a program here on Flat Earth recently at Answers in Genesis and all people got upset because we said, we don't believe everything in the

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Bible is literally true. Right. The Flat Earth people are saying, yeah, the Bible, everything in the Bible is literally true. And I say, well, if Jesus is a door, where are the latches?

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Where are the hinges? Jesus said, at the last supper, here, I took the drink and the cup and the bread.

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He said, here, eat and drink. This is my body and my blood given for you. Well, unless you believe in transubstantiation, which

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I don't and I don't know many people who do. Amen. It's not literally the blood and body of Jesus.

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It's a symbolic sort of thing. And so when the Bible talks about the colors of the earth, you know, it's not talking about literal columns holding the thing up.

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In fact, that would fly right in the face of the Old Testament passage. It talks about the earth being suspended or hanged upon nothing.

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Now, sometimes people in the Flat Earth persuasion will produce these diagrams that shows around Flat Earth with a hard dome over top and the stars and the sun inside, moon inside of that.

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And it's sitting on top of pillars and all this stuff. They say, see, this is what the Bible teaches. My question is, well, what

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Bible did you find that in? I've had plenty of Bibles. I've read many of Bible. I've never seen a diagram like that inside of a

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Bible. But those diagrams began appearing in the late 19th century and guess who drew them.

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It were the skeptics and people who weren't taking the Bible seriously. Some of them were very liberal

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Bible scholars, quote unquote at the time, who were trying to discredit it. And what they were trying to do is they were trying to read the

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Bible in terms of what they thought at the time was the Middle Eastern cosmology.

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Turns out that was wrong too. There was no single the in Middle Eastern cosmology, ancient

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Middle Eastern cosmology. There were many and they just glommed onto one and thought that was it. And this also ties into the

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JEPD theory, this very late authorship of the Old Testament. So they're reflecting what they picked up in the captivity.

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All this stuff is coming straight out of the liberal handbook out of the 19th century.

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And it's interesting that conservative Christians of 100 years ago would have none of it. They didn't endorse these diagrams.

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These things have started appearing in more conservative, still not real conservative, but more conservative circles only in my lifetime, last 30 or 40 years.

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And so again, that's not the cosmology of scripture. But people try to say, well, we read everything literally.

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And here at Answers in Genesis, we don't claim, we're accused of it, but we don't claim that everything in the

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Bible is literal. We understand hyperbole. We understand simile. And people say, well, how do you know when you come to the

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Genesis account of creation that that's not simile or hyperbole? Well, because the context says otherwise.

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It's historical narrative. Yes. And so you can't say, well, once you admit to any kind of allegorical or figurative language in the

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Bible that opens the door to all sorts of things like billions of years in theistic evolution, it does not.

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It's very clear when the genres are using imagery and hyperbole, and you're not finding that in the creation account or in the blood account for that matter.

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That's right. Yeah, and it's really not a question between a literal interpretation and figurative interpretation.

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It's a question between whether you wanna be creative in your interpretation or whether you wanna read the Bible biblically. Right. That's right.

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Unless, of course, we believe that there's a harlot running around, drinking the blood of the saints and martyrs, riding a seven -headed, 10 -horned beast, where's she at?

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Yeah. And so we need to consider that. So I'll ask you one more question. I'm actually gonna kick it over to Joy and Luke.

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We have about a minute and a half here. We can at least start the answer. Dr. Faulkner, give me one of the strong arguments from those who believe in the flat

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Earth and then the refutation of it. So give me the convincing argument and then a refutation. I may have to cut you off in the middle because of commercial break here, but let's get, how is it so convincing?

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What could they say to us? I found the really big thing is when people can see things at great distance, there's a famous picture that gets shoved out there, a lot of this photograph taken of the

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Chicago skyline from about almost 60 miles away across Lake Michigan in the state of Michigan. And if you do the calculation, you find the curvature of the

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Earth would put the Chicago skyline below the line of sight. It drops eight inches every mile squared and it's really a few thousand feet below your horizon.

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So how can you see that if the Earth is spherical? And to most people, that's a very convincing argument.

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And there are other variations of mountains off in the distance and so forth that people have seen at greater distance than they could see.

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That's the very most powerful argument that the flat Earthers give. Okay, hang on to that right there. I wanna make sure you get a good opportunity to actually respond to that.

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So we're gonna go into a commercial break here and have Dr. Faulkner give us an answer to that. And I'm gonna actually hand it over to Joy and to ask some questions and then of course to Luke.

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And so you guys stay with us, apologyairradio .com is where you guys get more. Thank you for being with us for this very, very important episode here with Dr.

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Danny Faulkner. We will be right back. I want their faith to not just be something that stands but something around which culture can be built.

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We want students who can think critically about arguments but also about the culture around them that can then speak clearly to it and that also have the ability to influence and shape because of the power of their message.

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Because that's really what the gospel does. The gospel throws down all the arguments against it. It speaks to the hearts of people, it influences and it changes.

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Welcome back guys, Apologia TV. Get more at apologyairradio .com here with Pastor Luke and Joy and Dr.

20:23

Danny Faulkner. We're talking about the flat earth myth. Dr. Faulkner, you brought up a fantastic example.

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That's what I think I see the most is that long distance and seeing the horizon, all those things. So it's very convincing initially.

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So what would be a good way to answer that? Well, you gotta know a little bit about physics to be able to understand what's going on.

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There's not a problem here. These are always photographs or sightings seen over water.

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That's very important. The water's flat, gotta be a clear day to do this. Now this is key. If the argument really works, then you should always, always be able to see distant objects when the sky is clear enough.

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By the way, I tried this myself over Lake Michigan about two months ago from Mequon, a place high on a bluff north of Milwaukee and it's about a hundred miles over to Michigan.

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I used a pretty good telescope and I couldn't see Michigan at all. If the earth were flat, I should have been able to see it, but I didn't.

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And what's going on is that many of these photographs people take are taken in the spring and into the summer when you get what's called a temperature inversion.

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Most people know that the air near the surface is usually warmest and then as you rise in altitude, the temperature gradually decreases.

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That's the normal way things go. But sometimes you can get a temperature inversion where the air is actually cooler right next to the surface.

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You get a little altitude, just a matter of feet sometimes, the temperature actually then increases and then it starts decreasing again.

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So this inversion of low cooler air near the surface, this particularly happens in the spring and summer over large bodies of water.

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For instance, Lake Michigan doesn't warm up very quickly because water has a high specific heat.

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So in late spring and summer, the water temperature in Lake Michigan tends to be much warmer than the air temperature on a warm day.

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Now, what that does, that traps a layer of cool air in contact with the water and as the air tries to, the light from the

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Chicago skyline tries to move parallel, almost parallel to the surface of the water and tries to move up very gradually through that warmer air above, it can't because the speed of light is different up there and it gets bent and bent around the edge of the earth.

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And this is a very common occurrence. Temperature inversions are very common, again, in the spring and summer.

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Similarly, you may see videos of boats, ships going out to sea and the hull should disappear first, but the hull doesn't disappear.

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You can see the hull out to a considerable distance. Again, supposedly that proves a flat earth. Well, I did my own experiment.

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Last November, I went to a Virginia beach and it was a cool day at that time of year. It was middle of autumn and the temperature that day was about 50 and started dropping below that.

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But the water temperature, I looked it up, was in the 60s. It was still warm because you're into autumn now.

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You're not getting a temperature inversion. So I took this telescope and I set it up and I started looking good and taking photographs and here's a container ship.

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These pictures are actually on our website and you can go there and look at them, but you can see there the

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NKY line. It's a very well -known shipping line. You can see the shipping containers up here and there's the hull.

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And actually some of the lettering on the bottom there is cut off because it actually is going over the edge of the earth.

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I put some more photos. Here's one taken a little later as the ship moved further away and notice you can't see the lettering at all.

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You can see the course of container ships up here and here's the bridge castle, but the hull is partly obscured now.

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And a little later, I take another photograph and the hull's almost completely disappeared. You're starting to see a reflection of the things above, including the bridge castle.

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And that is called an inferior mirage. That happens when you have a temperature inversion.

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And then later on, the hull is completely gone and now you're starting to see containers starting to disappear.

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And then the ship turned. We're seeing the stern there and we're not even seeing all the containers anymore.

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You can see the bridge castle. And then finally, all you can see is the bridge castle and it's actually reflected.

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You're seeing an inferior mirage. Now, if the earth is flat, this is impossible.

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You cannot see this. But if the earth is spherical, you do.

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So now we have contradictory information. We have things like the Chicago skyline. I alluded to it. Here's a reproduction of one of those.

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You can see the Chicago skyline there and the Lake Michigan. Now, flat earthers say, well, this happens all the time.

24:59

Well, it doesn't happen all the time. I just proved that it didn't. I explained why on a spherical earth you often get things visible over the horizon by a temperature inversion.

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I particularly and specifically did my experiment on a day when there was no temperature inversion and I got the results expected from a spherical earth.

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So this very clearly disproves what the flat earthers claim here.

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This is their exhibit A and yet I've just demolished it in this simple set of pictures that I took here.

25:31

Powerful and important stuff. There's something that people need to do. Dean Ogle is the guy out there. He's a pastor down in Opelika, Alabama.

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He's got a video out there where they went down to Mobile Bay and he's taking pictures of the skyline, some cranes at the port that he calculated shouldn't be visible, but they were.

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And he said, this proves the earth is flat. Well, he gave the date. It was in April. Classic temperature inversion.

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Mobile Bay waters are still quite chilly in April. You wouldn't wanna go swimming there, but it's a warm day in April.

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You could tell the way people were dressed. It was a very warm day. Classic temperature inversion. Dean, go back and do this in November on a cool day and you'll see what

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I'm talking about. You will not see the bottoms of those cranes and other things.

26:17

Just gotta repeat it when you don't get a temperature inversion. That's powerful. Joy? Well, you,

26:23

I mean, if you go, if you look up Danny Faulkner on Answers in Genesis, you'll see that he's, you've done lots of these little experiments where you take the claims of flat earthers and you lay it all out.

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And a lot of them have accompanying pictures. They're really great, actually. You guys should all go look at them.

26:47

But another one that you did just caught my eye because I think it's amazing, but you actually took pictures of the sun, right?

26:57

Yeah. I did this a year ago. It was a year ago. It was August of last year. And if you take the spherical, the flat earth model, you've got this flat earth sitting here with a dome over top.

27:07

And the sun is going around like this. And we're, say, over here. So in the middle of the day, the sun's gonna be pretty high in the sky.

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We're right here where my middle knuckle is. But as the sun sets, it's gonna be over here, farther over like this.

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And you can see that this is a much greater distance than when it is up here. Okay, when the sun's high overhead or when it's low in the sky, the distance is much greater.

27:29

Now, I can take their model and it's talked about their model. I've got, for instance,

27:34

Eric Debay's book here. And yes, I've read this book very thoroughly and took copious notes on it.

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And he lays out the flat earth model. He says that the moon and the sun are discs 32 miles in diameter and they're 3 ,000 miles above the surface of the earth.

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So I took that model. I said, okay, when the sun is high in the sky, for us, it was about quarter to two.

27:55

Dr. Faulkner, hang on to that one second, sir. I wanna make sure we get a chance to get a full explanation. We're gonna do it in the after show, guys.

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Catch us at apologiaradio .com. Fascinating stuff, important stuff, guys.

28:06

Thank you so very much, Dr. Danny Faulkner. We're gonna come back right in a moment here at apologiaradio .com for the rest of the discussion in the after show.

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We'll see you guys over there. The conversation is going to continue at apologiaradio .com.

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That's where we're gonna have our after show. We're gonna have more content, more conversation, some really great stuff. You go over there to get it at apologiaradio .com