![]() So much for our modern smug superiority over the supposedly ignorant people of the past. Rarely could any of my students give a good reason why the earth is spherical. The question of the earth’s true shape had been settled two millennia before Columbus. Most of my students were surprised to learn that the facts of history are very different. Supposedly, with our sophistication and intelligence today, we know better than the ignorant people of the past. ![]() By raising the question, I challenged our cultural mythology that, until the time of Christopher Columbus five centuries ago, nearly everyone thought the earth was flat. ![]() ![]() In my years at the university, I always asked the same sort of question in my introductory astronomy classes to motivate my students into thinking more deeply. Rather, he finds the topic interesting and the discussion of it stimulating. Mind you, this young man does not actually believe that the earth is flat. Recently I had a conversation with some people about a Christian young man they know who frequently argues that the earth is flat. You see, the earth could be both round and flat, if it were disk shaped. Or, more specifically, an earth that is spherical. These laws include gravity-NBA players cannot will themselves to remain aloft once they leave the ground, the conservation of energy-you can’t lose weight unless you burn more calories than you consume, and learning theory-behavior is a function of history and reinforcement contingencies.Many people will probably wonder why it is necessary to write an article defending a round earth. But the big idea in psychology is that we behave as we do for reasons we are often unaware of, that we decide to do things for reasons that can be understood as a function of situations and history, and that, in short, we are not in charge of the organism we inhabit but are, instead, subject to natural laws. More specifically, our lived experience is that we do things because we decided to, and we cherish the idea of being deciders. The earth moves whether you can feel it or not, as does a car, train, or plane in which you lose your sense of motion when you close your eyes at a constant speed. One of the cornerstone ideas in psychology applies to all scientific inquiry (because scientists are only human), and that is that lived experience is a poor guide to reality. ![]()
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