Thursday, October 18, 2007

"The Bible says the Earth is flat." - Not Quite

In response to my "Bring it Atheists" article, Mark made the statement "The Bible says the Earth is flat." He used Daniel 4:11 as his reference. While I have heard many people make this claim before I have never heard anyone use this verse as a reference, so I was definitely intrigued.

It didn't take long at all for me to realize how faulty his argument was. If you simply read the verse before it you realize that someone is describing a dream.

Daniel 4: 10 (YLT) As to the visions of my head on my bed, I was looking, and lo, a tree in the midst of the earth, and its height [is] great: 11 become great hath the tree, yea, strong, and its height doth reach to the heavens, and its vision to the end of the whole land;

If you start at the beginning of the chapter, you'll realize the dream was that of a pagan king named Nebuchadnezzar.

How anyone can take a quote taken from a pagan king describing something he saw in a dream and use it to claim that the bible says the earth is flat is beyond me.