..By your argument, in the late 1600s, surrounded by people who considered the Christian God to be "obvious", and with scholarly opinion united on the subject, any man who chose to reject that and become an atheist is "the definition of being stupid". ..
The modern day equivalent could be the Islamic hard line approach. Anyone not toeing the party line would not only be 'stupid', but very reckless.
But there is a major difference. Theology is always open for wooly answers as there are no solid facts to refer to. And in the old days a person could be tilted toward the Church's view by simply observing the heretic roasting on an open fire.
In the case of the flat Earth, we can now show beyond all (well, apparently not quite all) shadow of doubt, that the Earth is a globe.
People who honestly do not believe this must have some mental problem.
INT21.
No, we're approaching this from opposite sides.
I used Christian Europe only as an example that is likely to be familiar to most people in this forum. However, I will say that a person who refuses to toe the party line after careful consideration is not "reckless" but "brave".
For several hundred years in Europe, the paradigm for understanding an interpreting the physical world and events was that everything was caused by God. Theology was their equivalent of science: if they wished to understand or interpret something that existed or happened, they would look to the bible and to theologians. That was the accepted and respectable field for scholars, most of whom were intelligent and sought wisdom. They were not stupid or irrational or illogical. They used intelligence, rationality and logic, but in the context of a world view that they took for granted.
Now that we interpret the world primarily though science, we may regard them as misguided, mistaken, benighted, dogmatic, superstitious, or just plain wrong, but they were not stupid.
Meanwhile, the ordinary people generally accepted this world view as it was the only one that had ever been presented to them by their "betters" — just as I accept that scientists are on the right track with their views on cosmology, quantum theory, black holes and the like even though I have only a superficial understanding of those things. The ordinary people were no more stupid than we are: they just accepted what they were told because it seemed to reflect their reality and they had no reason to query it.
All of this is completely separate from matters of punishment and persecution. Even without those things, all or most scholars would have had a theological view of the cosmos, and all or most ordinary people would have accepted the religion of their time and culture.
So, imagine one free thinker from the 1500s who sat up all night and came up with reasons to reject the God paradigm. Was he really, "
the definition of stupid" for being unable to "
accept what [was] obvious to virtually everyone else and what [was] supported by hundreds of years of investigation"? No.
Similarly, Flat Earthers are not "stupid" for being unable to accept what is "obvious to virtually everyone else" (most of whom have never even thought about it) or what is "supported by hundreds of years of investigation."
No, what makes them "stupid" is not their
inability to accept, but their
determination to reject, and to replace what they reject with something that is in some ways more complex — and is certainly internally inconsistent, and which flies in the face of readily checkable evidence.
Perhaps you see the distinctions I am making as trivial, but to me:
- Accepting without question what you are told is stupid
- Questioning the accepted view and reaching your own conclusion is a sign of intelligence, but
- Wilfully rejecting the overwhelming weight of evidence and replacing it with a fantastic conspiracy theory is stupid