Flat Earth

In 1828, American writer Washington Irving (author of Rip Van Winkle) published a book entitled The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. It was a mixture of fact and fiction, with Irving himself admitting he was “apt to indulge in the imagination.” Its theme was the victory of a lone believer in a spherical Earth over a united front of Bible-quoting, superstitious ignoramuses, convinced the Earth was flat. In fact, the well-known argument at the Council of Salamanca was about the dubious distance between Europe and Japan which Columbus presented—it had nothing to do with the shape of the Earth.

Then later authors repeated this error:

In 1834, the anti-Christian Letronne falsely claimed that most of the Church Fathers, including Augustine, Ambrose and Basil, held to a flat Earth. His work has been repeatedly cited as “reputable” ever since. In the late nineteenth century, the writings of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White were responsible for promoting the myth that the church taught a flat Earth. Both had Christian backgrounds, but rejected these early in life. Englishman Draper convinced himself that with the downfall of the Roman Empire the 'affairs of men fell into the hands of ignorant and infuriated ecclesiastics, parasites, eunuchs and slaves' these were the 'Dark Ages'. Draper's work, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), was directed particularly against the Roman Church, and was a best seller. Meanwhile White (who founded Cornell University as the first explicitly secular university in the United States), published the two-volume scholarly work History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, in 1896. Both men incorrectly portrayed a continuing battle through the Christian era between the defenders of ignorance and the enlightened rationalists. In fact, not only did the church not promote the flat Earth, it is clear from such passages as Isaiah 40:22 that the Bible implies it is spherical. (Non-literal figures of speech such as the “four corners of the Earth” are still used today.)

Encyclopedias Erase the Myth:

While many will have lost their faith through the writing of such men as Irving, Draper and White, it is gratifying to know that the following encyclopedias now present the correct account of the Columbus affair: The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1985), Colliers Encyclopaedia (1984), The Encyclopedia Americana (1987) and The World Book for Children (1989). There is still a long way to go before the average student will know that Christianity did not invent or promote the myth of the flat Earth.

Flat-Earth HeyDay Came with Darwin:

The idea that the earth is flat is a modern concoction that reached its peak only after Darwinists tried to discredit the Bible, an American history professor says. Jeffrey Burton Russell is a professor of history at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He says in his book Inventing the Flat Earth (written for the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's journey to America in 1492) that through antiquity and up to the time of Columbus, “nearly unanimous scholarly opinion pronounced the earth spherical.” Russell says there is nothing in the documents from the time of Columbus or in early accounts of his life that suggests any debate about the roundness of the earth. He believes a major source of the myth came from the creator of the Rip Van Winkle story-Washington Irving-who wrote a fictitious account of Columbus's defending a round earth against misinformed clerics and university professors. But Russell says the flat earth mythology flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution. He says the flat-earth myth was an ideal way to dismiss the ideas of a religious past in the name of modern science.

Reference: http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c034.html