The Flat Earth Conspiracy – Debunked
For those of you unaware, the Flat Earth Conspiracy asserts that the earth is flat, and that consequently all of the evidence for a global earth is either invalid or part of a grand conspiracy; this includes all photos that depict the curvature of the globe, GPS devices; the trajectory of the sun, moon, planets and stars; moon phases; lunar eclipses; and time zones.
But it doesn’t just stop there – by implicit extension, proponents also denounce Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, most of Physics and Astrophysics, and on occasion even Evolution by Natural Selection! It really is the motherload of conspiracies, because it insists that all scientists, from all countries, and that all governments have, and are, perpetuating this enormous conspiracy in order to either somehow profit financially, or, I kid you not, to make the average citizen reject the Abrahamic god… This is the Flat Earth Conspiracy – Debunked!
Here are links to the videos referenced:
1. Cosmic Skeptic’s:10 Flat Earth Arguments DEBUNKED:
2. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Flat Earth, Fake Science & Space Exploration:
3. Toy car sent into space:
4. Vertical curvature of the earth:
5. Amateur Rocket Reaches 121,000 ft.:
Now needless to say, there are thousands of “proofs” offered by Flat Earth proponents, and to address them all would take a significant amount of time and would bore even the most intrigued Flat Earth enthusiast, and so what I’ve decided to do is to address what I believe is the root of the conspiracy, and at the same time cover a few of the most prominent arguments.
This root is, in my opinion, one unfortunate fact, and two particular fallacies. The unfortunate fact is that our educational system has failed us; or as Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, “This is a deep failure of our educational system […] There’s something deeper going on in our society that somehow enables people to believe they’re making cogent arguments when they’re not. You know what I think it is – the way we teach science is, you’re just some empty vessel and we pour this science into you and then you regurgitate it on an exam – where as science is a way of thinking; it’s a way of understanding and probing the operations of nature.”
And the two particular fallacies are as following: the first is the Common Sense Fallacy, which occurs when someone appeals to first-hand sensory experience (normally being eyesight) as if it’s infallible. And the second is the Personal Incredulity Fallacy, which occurs when someone is either unaware of how something works, or finds something difficult to understand, and therefore asserts that it can’t be true.
For example, the Flat Earth Society states that, “The evidence for a flat earth is derived from many different facets of science and philosophy. The simplest is by relying on ones own senses to discern the true nature of the world around us. The world looks flat, the bottoms of clouds are flat, the movement of the sun; these are all examples of your senses telling you that we do not live on a spherical heliocentric world.”
Now to be fair, many of these assertions are true – our senses do in general tell us that the earth is flat, but here’s this thing – they also tell us that this image is moving, but it’s not; they tell us that these two red lines are different sizes, but they’re not; and they tell us that these lines are bent, but, again, they’re not.
The point being here is that arguments that appeal to our perception and senses, such as the assertion that the “Earth Looks Flat”, that “Clouds Look Flat” and that “Stars Don’t Move”, all commit the Common Sense Fallacy, because they act as if our senses can’t be mistaken, when, as we’ve just proven, they clearly can; our senses can be fooled, and therefore they are not reliable. This is something that should be demonstrated in school…
Anyhow, the description length can only be so long, and so for more please watch the video (what you doing reading this anyhow?! ^^)
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As always, thank you kindly for the view, and I hope that this video will help you combat Flat Earth proponents.
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