I just noticed this 2nd and shorter comment from you. It’s actually quite fine! I like the way you phrased it.
If I had seen it earlier, I’m sure it would have influenced my immediate prior posting.
I will step down a little lower down from the top level of my podium. I do not need to defend White’s GRAND version of the Conflict Thesis. There are exaggerations for sure.
But I think there is enough historical material, even when handled MOST SCRUPULOUSLY, to justify the Conflict Thesis in a lower voice.
I think EVERYONE should know about the “Bedford Level Experiment” conducted by amateurs (clever amateurs) in 1870!
"The Bedford Level experiment is a series of observations carried out along a six-mile (9.7 km) length of the Old Bedford River on the Bedford Level, Norfolk, England, UK, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to measure the curvature of the Earth. Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who conducted the first few observations in 1849, claimed he had proven the Earth to be flat. In 1870, Alfred Russel Wallace, by virtue of his surveyor’s training and knowledge of physics, avoided errors caused by the effects of atmospheric refraction and showed a curvature consistent with a spherical Earth. "
The whole point of the effort was for devoted amateur natural philosophers to prove that the Greeks, and everyone else after them, was wrong about the Earth being a sphere.
The deep mystery that was completely under-appreciated at the time was the lensing affects of denser layers of atmosphere close to the Earth’s surface, and how it could (entirely predictably) distort the findings of this grand test. The Flat Earth testing went on well into the 1900’s… again, without ever acknowledging the affects of atmosphere.
[There is a recent documentary that indicates one of the reasons the Titanic (during the same period as the last tests of the Level Experiment!) didn’t see the ice berg soon enough was that weather factors at the time exaggerated the tendency for what was called “Refraction” by sailors… the “illusion of the horizon” was forced higher into the sky … and so the lookout’s ability to see the BLACKNESS of the iceberg blot out stars low on the horizon was severely impaired! By the time the “nose” of the iceberg finally reared up against the star field (above the level of the refracted horizon) … the ice berg was just too close to avoid!!!]
But the idea that one test could dismantle all the interlocking pieces of science that existed even as early as the late 1800’s is the same lack of humility that surrounds supposed YEC proofs against Evolution (say, for example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics).