![]() ![]() The Flat Earth MovementĮducated people throughout Europe, the Middle East and western Asia have known for millennia that the earth is round. Worse, they can be reflexively sceptical towards any official, scientific or secular sources of information, and at the same time, extremely credulous towards outright crankery. While a certain amount of scepticism is healthy, conspiracy theorists and advocates of pseudoscience take scepticism to the extreme. American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said that the flat earth movement is evidence that “we live in a country with a failed educational system.” But it seems more likely that such beliefs stem from a pathology of scepticism. To the overwhelming majority of us, modern flat earthers can come across as either totally uninformed or profoundly ignorant. The most rigorous data we have is from a 2018 YouGov poll of 8,125 American adults, which found that 84% of respondents were firmly committed to a spherical earth and 2% to a flat earth the remaining 12% had doubts or believed something else: small numbers, but not insignificant ones. It’s difficult to know how many people really believe the earth is flat, as many don’t take the question seriously. “I think it’s right to be sceptical about alternative views,” said Darren Nesbit, “but what we never are is sceptical about the mainstream view that we’re told since we were children.” He acknowledged that his perspective was not the mainstream one, but he said that, instead of accepting what we are taught in school, we should believe our own senses, which tell us that the earth is flat and stationary. ![]() In May 2018, three men went on the British ITV programme This Morning to explain why they believed the earth was flat. ![]()
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