Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004

Previous Claim: CH130   |   List of Claims   |   Next Claim: CH132

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Claim CH131:

Source:

Response:

1. The passage saying the earth is round is Isaiah 40:22:

   He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.

   This passage may reasonably be interpreted as referring to a flat circular earth with the heavens forming a dome above it. Such an interpretation is consistent with other passages of the Bible which refer to a solid firmament (Gen. 1:6-20, 7:11; Ezekiel 1:22-26; Job 9:8, 22:14, etc.). It is also consistent with the cosmology common in neighboring cultures.
   
   Isaiah 11:12 refers to the "four quarters of the earth", but we do not take that as indicative of the earth's shape.
   
   
2. The shape of the earth may already have been known in Isaiah's time. Ancient astronomers could determine that the earth was round by observing its circular shadow move across the moon during lunar eclipses. There is some suggestion that the Egyptians knew of the earth's spherical size and shape around 2550 B.C.E. (more than a thousand years before Moses). The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who was born in 532 B.C.E., defended the spherical theory on the basis of observations he had made of the shape of the sun and moon (Uotila 1984). If this information was known by educated Greeks and Egyptians during biblical times, its use by Isaiah is nothing special.

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