Spoken << Hi Eileen, Thats because some of the popes did not read Isaiah 40:22. >>
Uh oh the creationist-concordist belief that “the Bible teaches the earth is spherical.” That is reading into that verse I’m afraid as
Robert Schneider shows in an article for the Christian ASA here:
“The critical line in Hebrew [of Isaiah 40:22] reads (transliterated and omitting vowels): hyshb 'l hwg h’rtz, which my colleague Dr. Robert Suder translates: ‘the one dwelling on the circle/horizon of the land.’ A survey of Hebrew lexica and theological wordbooks yields much information about the key word hwg (chûgh)…All but one of these contexts [where the Hebrew word appears] are cosmological, and in fact four of the five uses of chûgh occur in creation hymns. Isaiah 40:22a describes God as sitting/ dwelling above ‘the circle of the earth’ which God laid out – with a compass, as Job 26:10 and Proverbs 8:27 suggest, for the latter verses describe the act of inscribing the circle that fixes the boundary between the earth and the deep…Looking at these usages together, I am hard put to see how anyone could justify rendering chûgh in Isaiah 40:22a as ‘sphericity.’…if the translators [of the LXX] were familiar with the concept of a spherical earth taught at the Museon of Alexandria, then the center of Greek science, they give no hint of it in their translation of chûgh…”
“…a circle is no more a sphere in Scripture than it is in geometry. The preponderance of philological evidence and the translations of ancient scholars and modern experts alike provide overwhelming testimony that Isaiah 40:22a does not refer to a spherical earth. There is simply no warrant for Eastman, Sarfati, and Morris [prominent young-earth creationists] to declare, contrary to its plain sense and in violation of its semantic domain, that chûgh literally means sphericity. They have read the earth’s sphericity into the text, not out of it.” (Robert J. Schneider, essay for the [Christian] American Scientific Affiliation, September 2001)
Theologian and physicist Fr. Stanley Jaki would also disagree with the creationist use of Isaiah. The Bible is not a scientific text, and the case can be made that the world of the Bible authors was flat. Fr. Jaki makes the case here:
“If asked about his physical surroundings or about the physical world at large, the typical Israelite would have given a reply very irritating to the modern mind. It is irritating to say the least to hear that the earth is a flat disk, the sky an inverted hard bowl, and that the two form a vast tent-like structure. Of course, other inhabitants of the ancient Near-East would have given similar answers…To be sure, much the same would have been done by a typical ancient Egyptian and Babylonian…The hardness of the sky, but especially the immobility of the earth, had to appear all the more a divinely ordained physical fact as, according to the Bible, a mere man, Joshua, could be authorized by God to stop the sun and the moon in their tracks and, apparently, for a whole day…Obviously, to modern eyes dazzled by space rockets cruising along ‘world lines’ set by Einstein’s four-dimensional cosmology nothing could seem more jarring than the Bible’s physical world, which is little more than a glorified tent. To that tent the Bible assigns the sky as its cover and the earth as its floor, though hardly in a consistent way. In Genesis 1 the sky is a firmament, that is, a hard metal bowl, whereas in Psalm 104 and Isaiah 45:24 it is more like a canvas that can be stretched out…Herein lies one of the non-trivially unscientific aspects of the world as described in the Bible…Well before the advent of modern science, and indeed of heliocentrism, the contrast between that biblical world-tent and the world of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic geocentrism had to appear enormous.” (Fr. Stanley Jaki, Bible and Science [Christendom Press, 1996], pages 19-25)
All I’m saying, and the Popes are saying (see John Paul II on
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics to the PAS that I’ve quoted before) is the Bible does not teach modern science, and the science of the biblical authors was an “ancient” science (flat-domed earth, and geocentrism). The Fathers were mostly geocentrists (only a few were flat earthers), and they interpreted the flat-earth Bible in light of their science. Just as we should interpret the Bible in light of modern science (old earth and evolution).
Phil P
God Bless
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