Is Earth a sphere (roughly speaking)?

Yes, of course it is. But think a little bit about how you know that.

In a thread below, William said this.

Some things don’t need deep research. For instance, in this information age, it only takes a few moments to verify the Earth is indeed round.

Does it?

It’s relatively easy to pull up pictures of Earth from space, and that should be enough, right? There is, in fact, tons of ready evidence that Earth is a big ball.

But what if there’s a conspiracy to fool us all, and those photos aren’t real? What if the astronauts lied? What if pilots don’t really know how their navigation systems work?

Most of us (rightly) recoil from that level of paranoia. To believe something like that would require a huge conspiracy — on the order of Lucifer being in charge. E.g., “The Bible says Earth is flat, so if I can convince people it’s a ball, that will undermine faith. Bwa ha ha ha.” (The Bible does not say the planet is flat. I’m just trying to illustrate what a conspiracy theorist might be thinking.)

If you believe that the human race is damned, deceived and under the thumb of the devil, that higher education is like Bracton College (see That Hideous Strength), and that people are engaged in “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness” most of the time — then a conspiracy of that order of magnitude might seem possible.

Some flat Earth folk do seem to believe something like that, and for every simple argument you have that the Earth is a ball, they have a counter argument.

So then, to have “justified belief” that the Earth is a sphere, do you have to counter each of their arguments? Some of them are fairly sophisticated.

In this case the answer would be no. They’re coming from a position of such extreme paranoia, there’s no need to take them seriously, and simple evidence and trust in ordinary authority is sufficient. Therefore, William is correct. It only takes a moment to see that the planet is not flat.

How widely does this reasoning apply? That’s where it gets tricky. Some things we can quickly look up and discover the truth. But lots of things are not that way. You cannot quickly discover the cause of the 2008 financial crisis.

The lack of “easy clarity” can come from different directions. In some cases, honest and intelligent people with little bias simply don’t know the truth. Believe it or not, when I was in college, we honestly weren’t sure where the moon came from. (Did it form along with the Earth, was it captured from outside, was it knocked off the Earth as the result of a big impact, etc.)

In other cases, “easy clarity” is difficult because of bias, and when enough people share that bias, it can morph into something like a conspiracy.

Consider mine, that the liberal media regularly lie to make Trump look bad. (And other media lie to make him look good, of course.)

Just last night I heard Rachel Maddow “fact check” the claim that Trump has brought back troops from Iraq and Afghanistan by saying that the total number of people deployed overseas has increased slightly. Maddow is not that stupid. She knows that’s as much of a “fact check” as saying that the planet is not warming because it gets cool at night at my house. That she would engage is such a bald lie says volumes. And, of course, this stuff happens all the time. (If you haven’t already, watch Stop making me defend Trump.)

In this case, the conspiracy theory is perfectly legitimate. There is no reasonable doubt that the media regularly lies about Trump. Consequently, I doubt any story about Trump that includes any sort of shade. If they’re reporting on how tall he is, or what town he was born in, I’ll believe that. But if there’s the slightest possibility that the story is supposed to make him look good or bad, I assume there’s bias and it’s untrustworthy.

And just to be clear, I understand that this cuts both ways — the liberals and the conservatives lie.