ADVENTIST HISTORY
Gleason was from western New York, where he conducted
some of his experiments on the apparently flat waters of Lake Erie. Whether or not he was a church member, he was certainly a dedicated student of Seventh-day Adventist teachings. In Is the Bible from Heaven? Is the Earth a Globe? he defends both the Adventist message and the “doctrine” of a flat Earth. While we don’t know that the man White mentioned in Gospel
Workers was Alexander Gleason, his account of an encounter with Adventist leaders seems similar to her account of meeting an advocate for the flat-world theory. Gleason wrote: “Tere is a people scattered abroad throughout the earth, with whom I have had an acquaintance for over thirty-years.... Further, this people claim to be giving that everlasting Gospel, styled the ‘Tird Angel’s Message’ of Rev. 14:6-12. Some prominent ones among
Christian scholars struggled for centuries to reconcile scientific evidence of a moving, spherical Earth with the Bible, which they insisted must be the ultimate authority on the shape, construction, and location of our world.
this people have taught that this subject of the shape of the earth was no part of the ‘Tird Angel’s Message’ and, therefore, no part of the truth for them to receive; consequently, they are to have nothing to do with it.”3
Zetetic Philosophy Modern “flat earthism” began in England in 1849 with the publication of a little book with a comically long name: Zetetic Astronomy: A Description of Several Experiments Which Prove Tat the Surface of the Sea Is a Perfect Plane and Tat the Earth Is Not a Globe. Writing under the pen name Parallax, Samuel Birley Rowbotham devoted his life to attacking the idea of a spherical
32 AD VENTIS T T OD A Y
Earth. Most subsequent proponents of flat-earth theory, including Gleason, based their arguments on Rowbotham’s book and, like him, called themselves “zetetic philosophers.”4 According to zetetic theory, our world is a circular plane with
the North Pole at the center. Insurmountable walls of ice stretch around the outside of the plane; the ice, should you try to traverse it, continues to infinity. Te Equator is a circle halfway between the ice walls and the pole. Te land masses actually float on the oceans, which are infinitely deep. Te entire planet is covered with a ceiling, within which the heavenly bodies hang. Te Sun, Moon, and other planets circle in irregular paths above Earth at a height of about 1,750 miles. Te apparent rising and setting of these bodies is an optical illusion having to do with the behavior of light in the atmosphere and with a misunderstood law of perspective that explains why ships only seem to disappear as they sail over the horizon. Te Moon’s light is self-generated and occasionally eclipsed by an unidentified dark body, possibly a comet, passing in front of it. Gleason explains these ideas with the aid of complex circular
maps, calendars of past events, long astronomical charts, and diagrams about visual perspective, most of which serve to confuse more than to convince. He includes reports by explorers of the heavens and the seas, which buttressed zetetic claims about unusual tricks of perspective in the upper atmosphere and the unusual height and length of the Antarctic ice walls. Gleason appeals to the reader’s common sense: “Another
striking absurdity of the globular theory is the course of the River Nile, whose mouth is 2,000 miles higher than its starting point. ... By looking at any map of Africa you will see that this river is over 2,000 miles high, vertical, and standing on its small end at that! ... How is this for gravitation?”5 In the context of her remarks about flat-earth theory, White
counseled the Adventist brethren: “When questions arise upon which we are uncertain, let us ask, ‘What saith the Scripture?’ And if the Scripture is silent upon the question at issue, let it not be made the subject of discussion.”6 If Alexander Gleason had agreed that the Bible was silent on cosmology, he would have given his book a different title. Because his “scientific” explanations of a flat Earth in a geocentric universe seem silly to modern readers, we might miss that this book represents a sincere desire for biblical harmony. Of the shape of our planet, he writes: “Has inspiration used a medium through which to communicate to mortals, that would use other words than His, and words calculated to deceive? I cannot believe it!”7 Te greatest portion of Gleason’s book is devoted not to the shape of Earth, but to a Bible study about major Adventist
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