At this point, Garwood's narrative becomes a study of how knowledge is produced and disseminated in a complex modern society. The flat Earth idea is proposed and promulgated in Victorian England by a colourful cast of con artists and eccentrics, the leader of whom is a quack doctor and snake oil salesman who calls himself "Parallax." He is a smooth debater and a clever self-promoter who leaves audiences dazzled; the real scientists who take him on have reason on their side, but no sense of how to communicate to a popular audience. Parallax plays the anti-elitist, inviting his audience to use their common sense and focus on the "facts" they all know, while leaving the speculative "theories" of establishment science in the dust. The round Earth, he declares, is merely a "theory" for which no actual proof has ever been found, and is a central part of a sinister conspiracy to undermine piety and true faith by a troop of atheistic scientists and their liberal, pseudo-Christian allies in the established mainline churches. And he's getting famous and making quite a lot of money with this stunt.

Is this all sounding familiar?

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From a book review, on The Vanity Press website, of Flat Earth: the History of an Infamous Idea, by Christine Garwood. She states, "Every educated person in the Middle Ages knew that the Earth was a sphere..."

Until the charlatans and con-men cribbed from the bibble - and so began "biblical literalism"!

It is not a coincidence that, simultaneously, Lamarckians and Darwinians were "shaking the foundation of religion" with critical examinations of "creation in just six days"...

Had we known about this before, we could be rolling our eyes and saying, "Here we go again!"