Y Safle

October 12th is Columbus day, but what is the real deal with Columbus? I am frequently presented with arguments such as this:

This sort of thing goes back to Ptolomy’s opinion that Earth is flat, such is “peer review” that all evidence to the contrary was rejected for about one and a half thousand years until Columbus sailed to the West Indies.

 

The issue with Columbus was not whether the Earth was round, but whether one could find a shorter passage to India by sailing west. You see, there had been some rather accurate measurements of the circumference of the Earth. The Greek philospher Erastothenes had measured the circumference of the Earth in 230BC by looking into wells on the summer solstice to measure shadow lengths at two locations at the same time.

The locations were Syene and Alexandria, some 500 miles apart, and the difference in shadow lengths allowed him to calculate the circumference of the Earth using some clever trigonometry.

His first figure wasn’t at all bad. Indeed, whilst he underestimated the circumference of the Earth somewhat, he was as close as experimental error might allow.

Now Ptolemy, who the above quoted writer incorrectly tells us posited the flat earth, had an estimate of his own for the circumference of the Earth. His estimate made the Earth much smaller than it is. King Ferdinand knew of the estimate of Erastothenes and others, and when Columbus told him that he knew a shorter westward way to India, Ferdinand turned him down on the basis of Erastothenes’ estimates.

Imagine if you replaced the continents of America with water, and you wanted to travel directly westward to India - your journey would involve crossing the Atlantic, the breadth of America and the Pacific ocean before you could make landfall.

As you can see, Ferdinand was right to reject Columbus’s mistaken calculations, and Columbus was lucky that America was where it was, to break his journey, or else he would have surely died. This mistake made by Columbus is why he named the place he made landfall as the “West Indies”. He mistakenly thought he had proven his calculation correct, and that he was in the west of India!

This myth about Columbus seems to have been put out by one or two atheists. Particularly the French historian Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848) and the American satirist Washington Irving (1783-1859). Apologists - particularly for Letronne - argue that he was simply working from questionable sources, but the prevalence of the Columbus myth is a good example of how atheists will abandon critical thinking and good scholarship when it comes to pushing an anti Christian view (something they often accuse Christians of doing in the other direction. Of course, no one is immune from this. That is how our brains are wired up).

So what do we see from this?

1. Columbus rejected peer review, was completely wrong, but was spared from death by pure fluke, and the gift of the gab (he pretended - against all evidence - that the West Indies were fabulously rich with Gold, in an attempt to justify his trip).
2. Academic study can reveal remarkably accurate and useful results, but peer review is essential to the process. All but Columbus rejected Ptolomy’s measure, because Erastothenes’ method was superior (indeed we are not told Ptolomy’s method at all).
3. The quoted writer above, like far too many people, are willing to accept information they are told uncritically. Such facts are blithely quoted about Columbus et al., but are just plain wrong. Like so many things, people like to think they know a lot because they learned facts about such things, whereas a lack of critical thinking shows that they really understand very little.
4. Atheists do not have a monopoly on good critical thinking skills.
5. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than right!