Fake News: Trump official, Scaramucci, says Earth is only 5,500 yrs old.

Gloateus: you made a statement without attribution nor evidence.
Do we understand the universe through form, or through function?
The ancient Greeks defined the universe through form.
The Bible understood the universe through function, using forms as illustrations of function. It was people using Greek philosophy who bastardized the Biblical message to claim a flat earth. An example of the differences is found here:
https://www.amazon.com/Hebrew-Thought-Compared-Greek-Thorleif/product-reviews/0393005348/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_rvwer?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=four_star&reviewerType=all_reviews&pageNumber=1#reviews-filter-bar
Bottom of the page.
Modern science was invented during the Reformation as people returned to Biblical thinking. Today we’re seeing a return to medieval “science” and I see the AGW crowd as one group trying to turn the clock back to before the Reformation.

Richard,
You could not possibly be more wrong.
Sorry, but your form/function distinction is nonsense. There is no science in the Bible whatsoever. It is entirely a collection of prescientific documents, remarkably in both Testaments, given the great advances in Hellenistic science by the first century AD.
Modern science did indeed begin during the Reformation, as you say, but not because of a return to biblical thinking. It began in AD 1543 by rejecting ancient authority, both of the Bible and Aristotle. Both the Catholic Church and Martin Luther were geocentrists, on the basis of the Bible and pagan scientists. Luther cited the same passages as the Church, such as Joshua stopping the sun and moon.
The least little bit of research on your part would have shown that Early Church Fathers were flat-earthers, because that is clearly the case in the Bible. Both Testaments. The texts they cited are the same as those mentioned by flat earthers today. From the ESV:
Job 38:13
That it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it?
Psalm 65:5
By awesome deeds you answer us with righteousness, O God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas;
(Many other passages in Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Samuel, Nehemiah, etc. speak of the ends of the earth. The Hebrew word “ends” means “boundary” as well, and is often thus translated. http://biblehub.com/str/hebrew/7099.htm)
Daniel 4:10-11
The visions of my head as I lay in bed were these: I saw, and behold, a tree in the midst of the earth, and its height was great. The tree grew and became strong, and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth.
Matthew 4:8
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.
Revelation 1:7
Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.
Revelation 7:1
After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, that no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree.
The Early Church Fathers were indeed flat-earthers. Augustine’s own belief is a matter of debate (see below), but he did argue for not insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible, since it hindered the propagation of the faith among educated pagans.
Lactantius (c. AD 250 – c. 325), Christian author and adviser to Emperor Constantine, who legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, ridiculed the notion of the Antipodes, inhabited by people “whose footsteps are higher than their heads”. After presenting some arguments he attributes to advocates for a spherical heaven and Earth, he wrote in “The Divine Institutes”:
“But if you inquire from those who defend these marvelous fictions, why all things do not fall into that lower part of the heaven, they reply that such is the nature of things, that heavy bodies are borne to the middle, and that they are all joined together towards the middle, as we see spokes in a wheel; but that the bodies that are light, as mist, smoke, and fire, are borne away from the middle, so as to seek the heaven. I am at a loss what to say respecting those who, when they have once erred, consistently persevere in their folly, and defend one vain thing by another.”
Athanasius the Great (c. 296/298 – 373), Church Father and Patriarch of Alexandria, argued for a flat earth, based upon scripture, in “Against the Heathen”.
Bishop Diodorus of Tarsus (died c. 390), a leading figure in the School of Antioch and mentor of John Chrysostom, may have argued for a flat Earth; however, Diodorus’ opinion on the matter is known only from a later criticism.
In his “Homilies Concerning the Statues”, Chrysostom (c. 349 – 407), one of the four Great Church Fathers of the Eastern Church and Archbishop of Constantinople, explicitly espoused the idea, based on scripture, that the Earth floats miraculously on the water beneath the firmament.
Severian, Bishop of Gabala (d. 408), wrote that the Earth is flat and the sun does not pass under it in the night, but “travels through the northern parts as if hidden by a wall”. Basil of Caesarea (329–379) argued that the matter was theologically irrelevant.
The influential theologian and philosopher Saint Augustine (354 – 430), one of the four Great Church Fathers of the Western Church, similarly objected to the “fable” of an inhabited Antipodes in his “Of the City of God”:
“But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled. For Scripture, which proves the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, gives no false information; and it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.”
The view generally accepted by scholars of Augustine’s work is that he shared the pagan view that the Earth is spherical, in keeping with his general support for science in “On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis”. That consensus was challenged by noted Augustine scholar Leo Ferrari, who concluded in 2000 (“Rethinking Augustine’s Confessions, Thirty Years of Discoveries”) that:
“(Augustine) was familiar with the Greek theory of a spherical earth, nevertheless, (following in the footsteps of his fellow North African, Lactantius), he was firmly convinced that the earth was flat, was one of the two biggest bodies in existence and that it lay at the bottom of the universe. Apparently Augustine saw this picture as more useful for scriptural exegesis than the global earth at the centre of an immense universe.”
Ferrari’s interpretation was questioned by historian of science, Phillip Nothaft, who considers that in his scriptural commentaries Augustine was not endorsing any particular cosmological model.
“Christian Topography” (547) by Alexandrian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, who had traveled as far as Sri Lanka and the source of the Blue Nile, is now widely considered the most valuable geographical document of the early medieval age, although it received relatively little attention from contemporaries. In it, the author repeatedly expounds the doctrine that the universe consists of only two places, the Earth below the firmament and Heaven above it. Carefully drawing on arguments from scripture, he describes the Earth as a rectangle, 400 day’s journey long by 200 wide, surrounded by four oceans and enclosed by four massive walls which support the firmament. He contemptuously dismisses the spherical Earth theory as “pagan”.
But by the High Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church had adopted the pagan Ptolemaic system (modified from Aristotle) as its official cosmology. In it, Earth was spherical, but at rest at the center of the universe, with the moon, sun, planets and fixed stars circling it on nested, concentric (almost, as Earth was slightly offset from the center) spheres.

Dr. Strangelove July 29, 2017 at 9:43 pm
Yes, there was a flat earth consensus among early Christians, based upon the Bible. Before that, there was a flat earth consensus among ancient Near Eastern peoples, and elsewhere in the world.
At the time Greek science was beginning, Mesopotamians, Egyptians and the peoples of the Levant, like the Hebrews, all shared a similar cosmology, in which an immobile flat earth, supported by pillars, was covered by a solid dome of heaven. The stars hung from this “vault of heaven” or “firmament”, and it had openings through which the sun, moon and other bodies passed over the earth.
In Egyptian mythology, the sun went under the earth to return to the place of his rising, but in biblical myth, it’s unclear what route he took, but he surely hurries back there.
God walks on the firmament, personally operating the levers which control the storehouses of the rain, snow, sleet, etc. He Himself laid the foundations of the immobile earth. The Bible makes a big deal about how stable earth is, that it shall not be moved. Besides the precipitation (waters above), there are also waters below the earth, which is perhaps why the sun’s journey back to the place of his rising isn’t described in canonical books.
The sun’s route is however in the Book of Enoch, which didn’t make it into the post-Christian Jewish OT canon (Masoretic Text), because Enoch was, like Christ, lifted straight to Heaven. The Book of Enoch was however very popular with Jesus’ Essene sect. It’s the second most common book among the Dead Sea scrolls. Before their discovery, it was known only from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which did adopt it as canonical, and from snippets in NT books.

Groateus:
For crying out loud! The Bible is not a science textbook, rather a book about history and its implications.
Job and Psalms are poetry, therefore use poetic licence (even modern poets do that).
I know you believe that the sun orbits the earth. Every time you say “sun rise” and “sun set” you admit to that belief. Or are those just figures of speech that you use to be understood? And you say the Bible authors didn’t do the same?
Daniel 4 was a dream. All sorts of wierd stuff happens in dreams, like skinny cows eating fat cows, yet remaining skinny Genesis 41:19–21.
Revelations is a record of a vision, like a dream.
The last of the Old Testament books was written well before the Hellenistic age.
Luther himself was so busy dealing with the implications of the Reformation, that he didn’t look into science. But it was theologians around Luther who helped Copernicus get his book published.
One feature of post-Biblical teaching is how quickly heresy entered the church. One of the earliest was the use of Greek philosophical categories in theology. Greek philosophicl categories and Bible are oil and water—they don’t mix. That, along with mistranslations, led to medieval wierdness.
You won’t find flat earth in the Bible. All you have are dreams, visions, poetic pictures and figures of speech. None of those define theology.
After the Bible, you have a whole slew of heretics, misinterpreting the Bible according to Greek philosophical precepts.
You need to show the flat earth from the Bible in order to be credible. So far you haven’t done that.
Since the teaching of Aquinas, the teachings of Aristotle were central to Roman Catholic theology. So when the Reformation repudiated Roman Catholic theology, it repudiated Aristotle’s teachings not only in theology, but also in science. It was not a rejection of the Bible. And the codification of the scientific method that was still taught as late as when I studied at the university, came about with the rejection of Aristotle.

Gloateus:
That so-called “history” of the Bible that you cite is a myth invented by a bunch of anti-Semitic Germans starting in the early 19th century. They also believed in evolution. Their earliest publications were before some guy named Charles Darwin was born. There’s zero observational data to back it up.
Your claim that the Bible teaches that the earth is “covered by a solid dome” is an example of mistranslation, to which I previously alluded, as the original Hebrew language lacks any such statement.
The history of the devil tempting Jesus is so full of supernatural events, that the “showing all the kingdoms of the earth” is also a supernatural vision, impossible even if the earth were flat because of the distances involved. So let me add one more reason why your argument that the Bible teaches a flat earth is wrong, you take statements out of context.
Enoch is not part of the Bible, never was. If you want to say that your interpretation is found in the Bible, you can’t cite extra-Biblical sources.
The Bible claims to be accurate history, based on observation. That includes observing supernatural events and recognizing that they are supernatural. You need to evaluate it according to historical principles, not just reject it because it teaches a different religion than what you believe.
Oh, so you actually believe that the sun orbits the earth every 24 hours. Who knew? Applying the same logic you apply to Biblical figures of speech to your use of figures of speech, gives us this result. Wow, I didn’t think anyone actually believed what you believe.
Reasons why you are wrong:
You refuse to acknowledge that the ancient Hebrews thought and used language differently than did the Greek philosophers. That’s despite research that shows the reality of this difference. That includes the New Testament.
You take dreams and visions as being scientific descriptions.
You take statements out of context.
You insist that figures of speech reflect physical reality (which you refuse to apply to your own use of figures of speech).
You cite extra-Biblical sources, claiming that they accurately describe Biblical beliefs.
You take poetry with its fanciful language as descriptions of physical reality. So when a poet writes of his lover “Your eyes are deep pools that draw me in” — well? ……………
Luther was quite vocal in his rejection of Aristotle, in theology. He just didn’t recognize nor think through the implications of that rejection in science. But others around him did recognize those scientific implications.
If all scientists act as you do, or even a large percentage of scientists, no wonder science is in trouble. No wonder religious beliefs such as naturalism and the ancient myth of evolution are being touted as “science”. No wonder theories are touted as scientific facts, while observations that disprove those theories are suppressed or altered (e.g. AGW activists changing past observations to make it appear that climate warming is occurring). No wonder science is in trouble.