I encountered a guy called @rampelflik.
They write poor quality posts about Christianity. Their only source of information about God is the Bible. They are not even able to write an essay, just some bullet points.
They go:
If you accept that god is all-knowing and all-powerful than you must accept that god knew, before he created all that is, that:
- The devil would fall from heaven to punish those of us who God deemed unworthy.
- Eve would eat from the apple.
- Humans would turn out sinful.
- The bible wouldn't give sufficient evidence for his existence
- To believe something without evidence is make-believe.
- Countless people would suffer enormously.
- He could've created people without sin in the first place.
- He could've created a universe that was hospitable to life. Instead most of the universe is dark and hostile to life.
- He could've created a world without cancer and other diseases.
- He could've made himself known, unambiguously, to everyone.
Point 10. is nonsense. Everybody already knows they are conscious. If you exist, why not God? What could God do more to make themselves more evident?
I asked the author who Eve was and what they had to do with apples. There is not only one Eve in the world who eats apples. They replied to me by saying something about the Bible, but the Bible is not an ultimate authority on God or on Apples, so I required further clarification, like: why did @rampelflik even mention this in a post about God?
Science
@rampelflik is a firm believer in roundness of the Earth.
I've been able to clarify with them whether they base it on something, or whether they just made it up.
They came back to me showing me this video.
Obviously, for any scientific experiment to matter, it needs to be reproducible. To my knowledge this experiment hasn't been reproduced by another team, in another place, so it is irrelevant.
I've seen two other videos using a similar technique to show that the Earth is flat. I am not aware of any study comparing their results, or explaining which one is valid, which is not, so: Results of all of these experiments are inconclusive. While each one of them is interesting, and worth noticing, not enough studies have been done on what constitutes a valid experiment, and why results of similar experiments seem to point to opposite conclusions.
Can both be correct?
The book 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' says that the Earth is once round, and once flat, depending on who is talking about it.
Accidentally, I've watched this video, that shows how different contradicting versions of geometry can simultaneously be true, or at least useful for explaining stuff.
It says at 7:24:
It means that it might be the wrong idea to think of mathematics as true or not true [emphasis added], rather it might be more useful to simply ask: 'is it well reasoned'?
The purpose
Flat Earth model serves its purpose. It allows predicting accurately positions of the planets millions of years into the future.
For me it is completely irrelevant where the Earth will be in relation to the Sun in a million years.
Round Earth model is not backed by anything, other than circumstantial evidence of a TV crew measuring the alleged curvature of the Earth with a laser beam - an experiment that nobody since has been able to reproduce with the same results, and even other people have conducted similar experiments producing an opposite effect.
According to flat Earth model the Sun could change its direction tomorrow, and it wouldn't break the model, since the model does not predict the position of the Sun above a particular location of the Earth anyway. It only says that the Sun moves in a strange course, without being interested in measuring and predicting it.
It answers more important questions, though. The Earth serves as a training ground for people and the easiest way of building it must have been a flat surface with a tiny Sun hovering above it.
Round Earth model raises more question than answers: Why was the Earth built round? Who built the Sun bigger than the Earth if a much smaller Sun would serve the same purpose if the Earth was flat? And so on...
Round Earth model serves no purpose other than predicting positions of planets, and (allegedly) launching people in small cabins into the orbit. It does excite some people, but not me.
Flat Earth model explains the simplest form of the Earth in which it would have to had been built to serve its intended purpose. In fact humans build the same habitats for themselves: flat enclosed spaces. Why would the Earth have been built any differently?