The anti-theistic activist who calls himself “Aron Ra” has responded to my critique of some of his historical claims. The resulting self-indulgent exercise in dodging, distraction, subject-changing, whining, tone policing, sophistry and pomposity only serves to further illustrate this polemicist’s profound ignorance of history.

In August 2019 I wrote a detailed analysis of a series of claims about history made by the atheist activist who calls himself “Aron Ra”, all of which were completely wrong. As a result, I entitled my article “’Aron Ra’ Gets Everything Wrong” and, over 6,000+ words, detailed exactly what he gets wrong and what the actual historical information is. That is, after all, the focus of this blog: atheist activists who mangle history and repeat errors and myths without checking their facts. “Aron Ra” is a classic example, and one worth tackling because (i) the myths he presents as fact are ones commonly parroted by other atheists, (ii) he has something of a platform thanks to his anti-Creationist work, with 35,600 Twitter followers and 246,000 YouTube subscribers and (iii) he delivers his pronouncements on history with vast self-assurance and more than a little pomposity.

Since my critique “Aron” has maintained that he did not “get everything wrong” and defended his claims by insisting that he only got two things wrong and that only one of them was relevant. So, stung by some comments by me on Twitter recently, he has stirred himself to write a ponderous defence of his claims – “One or Two Things is Not EVERYTHING” – which is a remarkable exercise in dodging, distraction, subject-changing, whining, tone policing, sophistry and, again, pomposity. Tucked away in it are two grudging and highly reluctant admissions he was wrong, but they are hedged around with excuses, caveats and general hand-waving. And he refuses to admit the same on the other claims he made. The full transcript of his original claims can be found in my original article, but in summary he asserted:

1. That Augustine and Procopius of Caesarea believed the earth was flat
2. That this is shown by their statements about “the Antipodes”
3. That the depiction of the earth on the outer panels of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights is evidence that “Christianity was still promoting belief in a flat earth” as late as c. 1490
4. That Copernicus was in danger of being “caught and killed” and avoided this by his timely death
5. That Galileo’s heliocentrism was something he could “show to be true” and the Church forced him to “lie” about this
6. That Giordano Bruno being executed for his claims about multiple worlds was evidence of Church opposition to science.

He made other errors in passing, such as claiming Bosch was a “monk” or that the Catholic Church stuck to its ruling on heliocentrism in the Galileo case “until 1992”. These are all the claims he made in his original pronouncements. And they are all wrong. Every single one of them. So for “Aron” to claim at the conclusion of his defence of them “I don’t ‘pretend’ to have integrity. I have it” is more of his characteristic pomposity. Being dragged, screaming and kicking, to grudgingly admit two errors out of about eight is not displaying “integrity”. At best, it is realising that his brand will be damaged if he does not respond to my critiques and finding no way to wriggle away from those two particular errors. But when it comes to the others, he does some world-class wriggling.

There is a lot of extraneous matter in his response, most of which is trivia, online psycho-drama or changes of the subject. For example, he begins with some complaints about the fact I did not use his assumed name “Aron Ra”. I did this because I genuinely thought this name was one of those online handles used by people like “Thunderf00t” or “ShoeOnHead” and did not for a moment think a grown adult would legally change his name to something so silly. I then had some of his fans insist that I “had to” call him by his ridiculous name “because it is his legal name”, which is total nonsense – I do not “have to” do any such thing. In my experience, these eccentrics who give themselves silly names get highly exercised if everyone does not take their weird pretensions as seriously as they do.

“Aron” then has a stab at my motivations and gets them wrong, despite me making them pretty clear for all via a link at the top of every page of my site. He says “it seems [O’Neill] is an atheist whose game is back-biting other atheists” missing the key point that is not “other atheists” but the much smaller and specific category of “atheist activists who get history wrong” – i.e. people like him. He then thinks I have put him in my “cross-hairs” because he “doubt[s] whether there was ever one and only one actual living individual inspiring each and every legend that is now associated with the Christ character”, rather than a series of historical errors and myths he has perpetuated over the years, including on that topic. He declares:

[T]here have been too many times, I’ve heard Christians claim the wrong guy, as if Jesus of Damneus [sic] or Jesus bin Ananias [sic] was their Messiah, when those were different people who didn’t even live at the same time. Much of Jesus’ alleged biography reads like a compilation of stories that were originally about other people, and the contradictions between those stories imply that too. My position is not like that of other “mythicists”, though O’Neill doesn’t know anything about that. Nor would he care.

Not only do I know quite a bit “about that”, I also “care” enough to address all these claims and their several errors (e.g. there was no such person as “Jesus of Damneus”) in a detailed article, citing and quoting … none other than “Aron Ra” and showing how confused his ideas on this topic are.

He also seems to think that the fact others who I have criticised in detail on this blog and elsewhere have presented some feisty but ultimately weak responses says something or other. So he links to this one by amateur Jesus Myther David Fitzgerald, without noting I have replied to it in detail here, showing its many flaws. Or this one by the ubiquitous Dr. Richard Carrier PhD, which I easily dispatched, point-by-point here. This whole initial part of his response is little more than weak tone-policing, though the pearl-clutchers he cites as evidence of my nastiness do not seem to have the same conniptions when it is atheists using a similar scornful tone about Christians. Or, as it happens, about me. Hypocrisy is never a good look. Perhaps he should look at the tone of the stuff by Fitzgerald and Carrier that I was responding to and ask himself why he is not similarly dismayed by their “hateful disdain”.

When “Aron” finally turns to my actual critique, we get some very odd comments. First of all, he admits his original responses about my piece and even some of his later responses to me were made without his having actually read my article. Weirdly, he outsourced this to some other people and then took their word for it when they assured him that I had not made many substantial points. This is pretty lazy stuff. And he makes other comments that make me wonder if he has still done anything other than skim read my article even now. He claims, for example, that “[O’Neill admits] up front that I got all the science right” so concludes from this that “his title is misleading, because I didn’t get EVERYTHING wrong”. But there is no “science” in the claims I address and therefore I did not “admit” he got it right. He seems to have misread a passing comment in my piece where I note his work countering Creationism and say that, from this, I gather “on matters scientific, [he] seems pretty solid”. But there are no “matters scientific” and no anti-Creationist arguments in the material of his I tackle in my article, so this acknowledgement that he knows about science, if not about history, does not refer to anything pertinent to my critique. Again, “Aron” is decidedly sloppy.

Grudging Error Admission One – Bosch the “Monk”

He then grudgingly admits he got one small thing wrong. In his original claims he refers to “the Christian monk and famous artist Hieronymus Bosch”. It was a minor detail rather than a substantial point, but it was completely wrong. So I noted the error in passing – mostly as evidence that he had a poor understanding of the subjects he was lecturing people on, but also noting that by claiming Bosch was a “monk” he links him more closely to “the Church” and so to his “Church versus science” narrative. Of course, Bosch was a layman, not a “monk” and even a quick glance at his Wikipedia biography would show he was a married man, not a celibate ascetic in a monastic house. But “Aron’s” admission about his error here is less than gracious and hedged about with excuses:

“In the debate, I referred to the 15th century painter, Hieronymus Bosch as a monk. I had read something once upon a time a long time ago that described him as such; probably because he belonged to the Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady, an arch-conservative religious group whose sworn members were principally clerics. The brotherhood had been founded a century earlier, and originally did limit membership only to priests and monks. But when Bosch joined, it was no longer monastic. They had begun allowing laymen in by then. Thus I was misinformed, and Bosch was not actually a monk. OK. So what?”

“So what”? So he was not a monk and this is another small piece of evidence that “Aron” is not well-informed on historical matters and is a sloppy researcher. And his excuses above further prove that point. The organisation Bosch belonged to was the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady, a religious confraternity based in St John’s Cathedral in ‘s-Hertogenbosch which actually still exists today. It began in the early fourteenth century as an informal devotional group focused on a statue of the Virgin in the cathedral which was thought to have miraculous powers, and it formalised itself via a charter in 1318. Contrary to some vague recollection “once upon a long time ago”, its membership was not originally limited “only to priests and monks”. Its founding charter states that it was open to “clerici et scolares”, which means “secular clerics and scholars”. A “secular cleric” was a member of the clergy who did not live under a “rule” in a monastery, priory or convent. In other words, a clergyman who was explicitly not a monk. As Julia Barrow puts it in The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, their Families and Careers in North-Western Europe, c.800–c.1200 (Cambridge, 2015)

Clerics are often confused with monks …., but the two are not synonymous. Clergy are those members of the Church who perform sacraments, or assist in their performance.

(p. 3)

There were seven grades of secular clerics, from postulants all the way up to bishop, with deacons, doorkeepers, readers and others in between. There were a lot of them in any diocese and they are the people most likely to be interested in a confraternity focused on a particular devotion in their local cathedral. Like the “scholars”, who were students at the local schools but not actually clergy, they were distinct from laymen in that they had taken some level of religious vow. But they were not monks. The very definition of them was that they were not monks. So the Brotherhood did not include any monks and was most certainly not “monastic” in any way – if it were it would have had its own house and not be focused on a small chapel in a cathedral. “Aron” may think all these terms can be thrown around in any way he likes, but they cannot. They have defined meanings and those meanings exclude the basis for his excuse. Not only was Bosch not a “monk” but the confraternity he joined as a layman (lay members were first admitted c. 1344) was never “monastic”. It was the precise opposite – a secular devotional fraternity.

He also calls the Brotherhood “an arch-conservative religious group”, though it is hard to tell what exactly he thinks this means. “Arch-conservative” in what sense? Obviously a fifteenth century devotional group associated with a cathedral is going to be doctrinally orthodox, but the fact it was not heretical does not make it “arch-conservative” in the context of late Medieval society. On the contrary, these devotional lay fraternities were actually a relatively new and rather radical development in the Medieval Church and not “arch-conservative” at all. Again, “Aron” simply has no idea what he is talking about.

Grudging Error Admission Two – Augustine the Flat Earther

The second error that he admits to was rather more substantive and was actually directly relevant to his argument – he claimed Augustine and Procopius of Caesarea believed the earth was flat. Again, while he grudgingly admits this was incorrect, he still engages in a lengthy attempt at justification for this claim. He quotes the passage from Augustine that confused him (De civitatae dei, XVI.9) and tries to justify his misunderstanding of it:

“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.”

He then argues:

“Notice, this is dichotomous. There is no allowance for those who walk with their feet perpendicular to ours or diagonal to ours. There are only podes and antipodes; people on our side of the world, and speculation about the possibility of people on the [one] other side of the world, the people with feet opposite ours. That does seem to imply a perspective that all the land of Europe, Asia and Africa were on the one side, the same side he is on, and that no one knew whether there were other people in other imagined lands on what seems to be the flip side of this coin.”

It only “seems to imply” this if someone is like “Aron Ra”: i.e. they have no detailed knowledge of ancient and medieval cosmology and geography and no understanding of the long debate about the existence of any Antipodes and the debate about whether they were inhabited. What Augustine says refers to “only podes and antipodes” because that was the point at issue. It does not give any indication about the shape of the earth, because that was not under discussion. As I detail in my critique of his claims, we know he saw the earth as round from other discussions and from the context of the Antipodes debate, which assumes a spherical earth. If the quote above did not “imply” this for “Aron” that is purely because of his ignorance of the subject, the texts and the context.

He quotes Augustine’s reference to “the earth … suspended within the concavity of the heavens” and still tries to argue this somehow implies a flat earth:

Here again, Augustine is NOT describing a world divided into the many gradations required for a sphere, but into only two equal halves clearly-divided in the middle, with everyone on every continent that is currently known being on the land above, and Augustine is speculating about another equal half apportioned for the hypothetical opposite side of the world, being “the land beneath”, where their feet are opposite ours. All of this sounds exactly like Augustine is describing a two-sided coin. What else could it be?

What else could it be? It could be (and, in fact, was) what everyone in the Antipodes debate assumed – a spherical earth with the known continents on one side and unknown antipodean land masses “balancing” them on the other. Again, if “Aron” had any real understanding of the texts and their context he would know this.

“Aron” also claimed Procopius of Caesarea was a flat earther on the basis of a similar argument about the Antipodes – one with “Aron” also totally misunderstood. On this he writes in his defence:

Similarly, my (admittedly) secondary point regarding Father Procopius of Cesaria is that he actually said, “If there be men on the other side of the earth, Christ must have gone there and suffered a second time to save them; and therefore there must have been, as necessary preliminaries to his coming, a duplicate Adam, Eden, serpent, and Deluge!” That’s ridiculous regardless what shape you think the world is.

However “ridiculous” the religious beliefs of a sixth century Christian may be to us, the fact remains that what he said about the Antipodes does not indicate that he thought the earth is flat, so long as you understand the cultural context of his statements. Again, the problem here is that “Aron” simply did not know enough to understand these quotes and so completely bungled their interpretation. And then stood up in public and on YouTube presenting his bungled and ignorant errors as though he was some great and learned authority on these matters. THAT is the problem.

The weird excuse making then continued:

At this point, [O’Neill] said “This claim is startling to anyone who has actually read Augustine’s works, given that it is completely contradicted by what Augustine actually says about the shape of the earth.” He then quoted (A Literal Commentary on Genesis) speculating about what Augustine “seems to be referring to”, but there’s nothing in the text to indicate that. Therein the 5th century cleric said that believers should have some understanding of about whatever matters they’re talking about with unbelievers, so as not to reveal their own ignorance and embarrass the faithful. But that quote has no relevance to the point my critic was trying to make, as it did not in any sense address the shape of the world, nor whether there were—or could be—people on the other side of it.

Again, I have to wonder about this person’s reading skills. Yes, I did begin by noting Augustine’s cautions about Christians opining on matters of science (De genesi ad litteram, I.19), but this was merely as a preface to the key texts that show Augustine was not a flat earther. Here they are again:

[D]uring the time when it is night with us the presence of light is illuminating those parts of the world past which the sun is returning from its setting to its rising, and … thus during the entire twenty-four hours, while it circles through its whole round, there is always day-time somewhere, night-time somewhere else

(De genesi ad litteram, I.10.21)

And from later in the same work:

Although water still covered all the earth, there was nothing to prevent the massive watery sphere from having day on one side by the presence of light, and on the other side, night by the absence of light. Thus, in the evening, darkness would pass to that side from which light would be turning to the other.

(De genesi ad litteram, XXX.33)

These are the texts that make a nonsense of any claim Augustine thought the earth was flat, not the caution about Christians making fools of themselves by saying stupid things about “the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world”. I used that latter quote to preface the evidence that he knew the earth was round and to show he was scornful of other Christians who rejected the science of the day. Then I gave the quotes that show he was not like them and accepted the consensus on the shape of the earth. So why did “Aron Ra” choose to ignore those here? Did he really not understand the point of the prefacing quote?

Later he makes a passing reference to me giving him “two other quotes from A Literal Interpretation of Genesis, in which Augustine fully accepts the sphericity of the earth that he questioned in City of God”, so it seems he did not miss these key pieces of evidence. Which makes his grudging admission that he was wrong about Augustine, when it finally comes, even more strange:

However, after further research on my own, I am satisfied that O’Neill is right and I am wrong on that one point, that Augustine and Procopius both subscribed to an alternate concept of antipodes, in which the earth is still depicted incorrectly, but is probably spherical none the less. Though Augustine was still unsure of that. It was a model of the earth I had never heard of despite all my studies, and I’m quite embarrassed about that.

“After further research of my own”? I gave him two clear quotes from Augustine that cannot be read any other way – Augustine clearly understood the earth to be round. What “further research” was necessary? And in what way was Procopius and Augustine’s conception of the Antipodes an “alternative concept”? An “alternative” to what, exactly? It was the only concept that existed in the ancient world: a potentially inhabited land mass on the other side of the spherical earth from the known lands of the northern hemisphere. If “Aron Ra” thought there was some other conception of the Antipodes – presumably under a disc-shaped flat earth – then we will just have to add that to the list of things he is wrong about. Yet again, the only problem here is his profound ignorance.

Then we get this bizarre set of pronouncements:

[O’Neill] cites two other quotes from A Literal Interpretation of Genesis, in which Augustine fully accepts the sphericity of the earth that he questioned in City of God. But then others have noted that “In City of God”, Augustine rejected both the contemporary ideas of ages (such as those of certain Greeks and Egyptians) that differed from the Church’s sacred writings”. Even if Augustine always accepted as fact that the earth was round—which I now accept that he probably did—that would be a fair point, but one that still misses the point, because several of the Bible’s references to a flat earth (like in Daniel 4:10-11, Matthew 4:8 and Revelation 1:7) were written several centuries after Eratosthenes showed that the world was round AND gauged it’s circumference; which logically should have disproved both of Augustine’s arguments.

I have to admit to being somewhat at a loss to understand what the hell “Aron Ra” is trying to say here. He (finally, grudgingly) accepts that Augustine was not a flat earther. But then he cites three Biblical verses which, if interpreted with absolute literalism, could be said to indicate a flat earth. So these “should have” somehow “disproved” Augustine? Why? Augustine, like pretty much all Christians in his time and all of them afterwards, did not interpret these passages literally. “Aron Ra” does not seem to understand that, while Augustine and others in his time could and often did interpret texts literally, they did not have to. They used what was to become known as the four levels of exegesis, a concept that went at least as far back as Origen. Here is Augustine himself on what they are:

Four ways of expounding the law have been laid down by some scripture commentators, which can be named in words derived from the Greek, while they need further definition and explanation in plain Latin; they are the way of history, the way of allegory, the way of analogy, the way of aetiology. History is when things done by God or man are recounted; allegory when they are understood as being said figuratively; analogy, when the harmony of the old and new covenants is being demonstrated; aetiology, when the causes of the things that have been said and done are presented.

(Unfinished Commentary on Genesis, II.5)

So Augustine and other Christians did not read Matthew 4:8 as saying Satan literally showed Jesus all the earth as seen from “a high mountain”. This was interpreted figuratively. It is genuinely hard to make out what “Aron Ra” is saying in the confused paragraph above, but he does not seem to understand there was no problem with reading the passages he refers to in a non-literal manner. Augustine clearly did so.

This means that while we do get a kind of admission on two points he made, it is hedged about with all kinds of strange commentary and endless excuses; all of which highlight that the problem was simple: “Aron Ra” just did not understand the material he was expounding on, did not have any grasp of its context and does not understand the ancient world or the world of early Christianity in sufficient detail to know what he is talking about. The problem lies purely and solely with one thing: his profound ignorance.

Returning to my list of his claims, the details above deal with the first two of them: “Aron Ra” reluctantly admits that he was wrong about Augustine and Procopius thinking the earth was flat and, in doing so, admits he did not understand what they were saying about the Antipodes. And he admits he was wrong about Bosch being a monk, though that is a minor side point. So we should now turn to the remaining claims he made, because he has steadfastly refused to admit his errors there. Even though he is wrong on every single one of them.

That the depiction of the earth on the outer panels of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights is evidence that “Christianity was still promoting belief in a flat earth” as late as c. 1490

He is what “Aron” said originally:

A few more centuries later the Christian monk and famous artist Hieronymus Bosch was still painting the earth as a flat disc within a transparent crystal ball even when Columbus was sailing to the new world proving the scriptural depiction wrong again. So Christianity was still promoting belief in a flat earth eighteen hundred years after science had already repeatedly shown that the earth is a sphere.

This is nonsense. As I noted in my critique, anyone can see the painting on the outer panels of the triptych in question is a stylised depiction of the earth and designed to mirror the scenes on the inside panels. To claim this as evidence of “Christianity … promoting belief in a flat earth” is totally absurd. In his defence “Aron Ra” declares that:

The only reason I mentioned Bosch at all was to point to his fanciful depiction of the world as a flat plane within a giant spherical dome or transparent crystal ball, which is how some religious people still view the world even now, because that is how the Bible describes it.

But this is not even close to what he originally said. He quite clearly and explicitly says Bosch’s stylised depiction was evidence of “Christianity … still promoting belief in a flat earth”. Except – it is nothing of the sort. It is just a stylised painting made in a period when acceptance of a round earth was common knowledge and Biblical descriptions of the earth was seen as purely figurative, not literal. “Aron” then makes another bizarre claim:

O’Neill himself admitted that there were other flat earthers at that time that he could name, proving what I said in my debate correct.

I did? This is pure fantasy. I make no such “admission”, because there were no such people at that time. Why he claims I could “name” these imaginary people in some imagined “admission” I have no idea. Anyone can read my critique of his claims and see I do not “admit” this at all or anything remotely like it.  A charitable interpretation is, perhaps, this is due to more of his sloppy reading. Or an over-excited imagination. A less kindly person would suspect he did not expect his readers to actually check my piece and see if I had “admitted” what he claimed. Who knows which of these scenarios is correct – none of them make him look good.

So he tries to insist “I made no comment on what Bosch believed”, but his claims about what he was doing by referring to Bosch at all make no sense. However much he tries to wriggle, Bosch’s stylised painting in the context of a religious culture that read any “scriptural depiction” of the earth figuratively and fully accepted the earth was round does not support his claim that “Christianity was still promoting belief in a flat earth”. What he claimed was wrong, end of story.

That Copernicus was in danger of being “caught and killed” and avoided this by his timely death.

His attempt at wriggling away from this one is even worse. Here is his original claim:

In the early 1500s Copernicus proposed the idea that the earth was not the centre of the universe as the Bible implied. The church condemned his theory as heretical, holding to the literal interpretation that the Sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the centre of the world. Copernicus had already died in the same year that his theory was published before the church could catch him and kill him for contradicting them.

This is total garbage. Copernicus was never in any danger of being “caught” or “killed” by the Church because his thesis had already been in wide circulation for a whole 31 years before the publication of his book. The Church was well aware of it, thanks to the sponsorship of his work by Bishop Tiedemann Giese of Culm, the active interest in it by Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg and a lecture on the topic in the Vatican gardens in 1533 before a highly interested and appreciative Pope Clement VII. If the Church was keen to “catch” Copernicus and “kill” him, it is very strange these leading churchmen (including the Pope!) did not get the memo.

So how does “Aron Ra” wriggle away from this one?

I pointed out that the church caught and killed Giordano Bruno for another heretical hypothesis; the implication being that *if* the church would have done the same with Copernicus, they couldn’t, because he died about the time his heresy was published.

“If” they “would” have? What? They “would” not have, because they did not even want to. They were actually quite interested in his hypothesis and genuinely encouraging of his theory’s publication. So what is “Aron” claiming he is “pointing out”, exactly”? Nothing. This is just more desperate wriggling to try and pretend he did not say what he clearly said – that Copernicus was in some kind of danger of being “caught” and “killed” over this hypothesis that the Church actually regarded with great interest. Again, what “Aron” claimed was wrong, end of story.

That Galileo’s heliocentrism was something he could “show to be true” and the Church forced him to “lie” about this

The defence “Aron Ra” puts up about this is even more pathetic and is actually mendacious. Here is his original claim:

[T]his didn’t stop his contemporary Galileo, the father of modern science, from further promoting heliocentrism with his astronomical observations. The church tried him for heresy too and forced him to recant – they forced him to lie about what he could show to be true and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

The problem here is that they did not “[force] him to lie about what he could show to be true” because he could not “show” that heliocentrism was true. That was the very issue – Galileo was presenting a fringe theory that had major scientific problems and he could not actually demonstrate its superiority over several of the other cosmological systems being argued for at the time, particularly the Tychonian System. He was not forced to “lie” about this, he was forced to admit it.

So what wriggling do we get this time? We get this:

Note what I said about his astronomical “observations”. He could “show” those.

So it was his “observations” that he could show? Okay. Big deal. The other cosmological models used exactly the same observations. Galileo was not made to “lie” about his observations because the observations were not in dispute. Everyone agreed on those, because everyone was working from the same data. The issue was him insisting that his interpretation of them was demonstrable fact when it was not – it had major problems, which is why most astronomers of the time disagreed with him. And it is also why the Inquisition’s judgement of him (the real one, not the made up one “Aron Ra” quoted) said his theories were “absurd in philosophy”. That is because almost all scientists of the time disagreed with him for scientific reasons. And “Aron’s” pretence that it was the observations that he was referring to in his claims above is transparently bogus. What “Aron Ra” actually said was wrong, end of story.

That Giordano Bruno being executed for his claims about multiple worlds was evidence of Church opposition to science

It should be kept in mind that in his original claims “Aron Ra” was defending the position that “Christianity has historically been in conflict with science”. So he made this claim:

[A] Dominican monk named Giordano Bruno proposed another heretical hypothesis called “cosmic pluralism” – the idea that the stars were suns like our own, albeit much further away and that they might have their own planets and perhaps even life on them. So the church burned him at the stake.

At least this time he has managed to get the basic facts right. This is actually true: Bruno did propose multiple worlds and this was one of the (several) reasons the Church condemned him as a heretic and burned him at the stake in 1599. The problem here is that this had nothing to do with science and tells us nothing about any “conflict with science”. Bruno was not a scientist, even by the standards of 1599. Other scientists of the time did not regard him as one of them and he in turn rejected their methods as too limiting, preferring his New Age-style mystical “insights”. More importantly, Bruno did not come up with the idea of multiple worlds, telling us in his own writings that he got this from Nicolas of Cusa. And Cusa did not arrive at it via any kind of scientific reasoning either, since it was little more than a metaphysical hunch. So how is this somehow evidence of Christianity being “in conflict with science”? It simply … is not. There is no “science” to be found anywhere in this story. So, on to the wriggling:

I never said that Bruno was a scientist, nor that he practiced science or died for it. Sure Bruno almost certainly adopted these ideas from somewhere else, but he still proposed them, and that’s why they killed him. The point is that whether he was a scientist or not, any dissension from scripture could have gotten one killed by the Inquisition.

The first problem for “Aron Ra” here is that, as I noted, Bruno got his ideas on this point from Nicholas of Cusa. And that was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, esteemed prelate of the Church, Papal Legate and second only to the pope in the Catholic hierarchy. Yet, despite him proposing the very idea that Bruno championed, Cusa died in his bed at the age of 63 and not in the flames of a pyre at the hands of the Holy Office. Similarly, theologian William of Vorilong had not only presented similar ideas but even hypothesised about the soteriology of hypothetical aliens from those other worlds – all long before Bruno was born. He too died unburned and unbothered by inquisitors. So if the point he was trying to make that any deviation from scripture resulted in death, he is clearly wrong. The fact is there was a degree of leeway even on theological speculations, since “scripture” was not always clear. That is precisely why theologians existed. Though crackpot mystics who also denied the divinity of Jesus and the virginity of Mary tended not to be given much of this leeway – Bruno was not executed simply for his multiple worlds speculations, but for a whole mystical personal theology of which that was just one element. On its own, it would not have been a major issue.

The second and more important problem is that this example of a mystical kook being executed for a whole range of eccentric theological ideas tells us precisely nothing about the Church’s attitude to science or even about how likely it was scientific ideas might stray into “dissension from scripture”. Medieval thought accepted the Two Books Doctrine, that saw the world as being informed by both “the Book of Nature” (rational observations and deductions about the world – including what we would call “science”) and “the Book of God” (the Bible, Patristic writings, concilar canons and theological interpretations). Both “Books” were considered to reflect the mind of God and so it was thought they could not be in conflict. This meant that if one seemed to contradict the other, it was assumed one or the other had been misread and needed to be reinterpreted. This is exactly what we see regarding the shape of the earth: some scriptures seem to imply a flat earth but observation and reason indicate a round one, so the Biblical texts were interpreted figuratively, not literally.

This meant that conflicts between science and scripture were rare to almost non-existent. That is why I have been challenging people for 35 years now to show me examples of any such conflicts from the Middle Ages and they can never produce any. This is why when people try to substantiate the myth that the Church crushed and suppressed science over any such conflicts the only examples they can ever produce reach all the way to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a garbled and bungled version of the Galileo story or … good old Giordano Bruno. Just as “Aron Ra” tried to do.

The Bruno story tells us nothing at all about Church attitudes to science or any supposed theological suppression of scientific ideas. What “Aron Ra” said was wrong, end of story.

Aron Ra Gets Everything Wrong

This means he was wrong on all of these points. And on Augustine’s shape of the earth and the Antipodes. And on Bosch as a “monk”. And even on the Catholic Church sticking to its ruling on heliocentrism in the Galileo case “until 1992”. He is wrong, therefore, on every single claim he made. Which is why I called my criticism of his claims “’Aron Ra” Gets Everything Wrong”. Because … he did.

As already noted repeatedly above, the tangles he got himself into were solely due to his profound ignorance of history. He simply does not understand the material, the sources, the scholarship and the contexts in which all these episodes took place. His pompous hubris means that he thinks he can work from his garbled children’s picture book level grasp of history, gleaned from outdated, biased and third-hand popular sources, and present this in support of his polemical claims with the same bombast and self-assurance as he exhibits on topics he knows something about. Then, when he is caught out by people who know far more more than he does about history, he thinks he can bluster and fake his way out of trouble with a combination of pathetic waffle and sophistry.

It is not as though “Aron Ra” has not been schooled on this stuff before. I have been contacted by people who saw him present claims about Augustine as a flat earther on the Usenet group talk.origins a full 20 years ago and get corrected by people who knew better. A Christian who debated him on this and related topics even tried to give him a copy of Ronald Numbers’ classic essay collection Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard, 2009), but he left the book behind after the event. And Tyler Vella, the person he was debating when he made his original claims, responded saying more or less what I said in my critique. “Aron” completely ignored him.

This is why it is amusing to see him roundly congratulate himself on his wise and noble capacity for admitting he is wrong. Or crown himself with laurels over his vast “integrity”. There is no fool like a fatuous fool.

But at least by backing him into a corner on his pile of ahistorical nonsense he has, finally, admitted to being wrong on Augustine as a flat earther. It has only taken 20+ years, but hopefully we will not see that utter garbage from him again. At least, we hope. Mission accomplished on that front.

If he is smart he will learn his lesson and avoid any more bombastic opining on history. After all, I will be keeping a close and careful eye on “Aron Ra”.