“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.”
—Ferdinand Magellan
I am interested to see if anyone has a comment about this. I will table my mixed feelings and conflicting thoughts for the time being…
Okay, you asked for comment, so here goes. I must say up front that this quote is not actually from Magellan but rather is a fabrication of Robert Green Ingersoll. It is found in the fourth paragraph of his essay, “Individuality.” You can find it at http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/individuality.html
The mis-attribution of this statement to Magellan was first pointed out by Dr. Tom Gorski in his website “Knowing What Ain’t So” at http://www.churchoffreethought.org/cgi-bin/contray/contray.cgi?DATA=&ID=000011010&GROUP=048.If you want to see further discussion that debunks the myth (i.e., that Magellan actually said the quoted line), go to http://claustrophobic.blogspot.com/2007/05/in-short-magellan.html.
But let’s just put aside for the time being whether Magellan or Ingersoll actually said it. No matter who said it, it is a thought-provoking statement. The most logical interpretation is that the shadow represents or stands for PROOF.
Considered in toto, I read this quote as saying the author puts more stock in science than in religious belief - “prove it to me, and then I will believe it.” (You know, sort of like what they say about Missouri being the “show me” state.) I think he’s saying, “if you can’t show it to me and I can’t hold it in my hand, then I’m skeptical of it.”
By analyzing the language a little more carefully, I find two problems with it. First, it wasn’t just the institution of the church that said the earth was flat during the early 16th century. Most all of the established scientific community of that period opined likewise. So this unfairly and incorrectly attributes the flat-earth theory singularly to the church.
The second problem is a bigger, more fundamental one. To say that you have more “faith” in something tangible, something that is scientifically provable, something that you can see with your own eyes, is really oxymoronic.*
To me, to truly have faith in something implies that you trust or believe in it EVEN IN THE ABSENCE of concrete evidence of its existence or truth (Wickipedia defines faith as “the confident belief in the truth of or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing, that is characteristically held without proof.”). Thus, if you have absolute proof of something, then you don’t NEED faith. Now, that’s all well and good for the small percentage of things we can prove beyond doubt. But the vast majority of things are not 100% certain, so they depend upon some measure of trust, of faith. Example: if things go terribly wrong for me, I believe that my family (or friends) will be there for me. I don’t know it with absolute certainty. But I am willing to risk my life on it.
*Just for fun, go to this site for a sexy lesson on the meaning and origin of the word “oxymoron”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXp3gZ6rBoY. I’m going to try now to send it to you…hope this works.
