![]() ![]() Johnson became president of the International Flat Earth Society. The International Flat Earth Society was formally founded in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Geographic Society. Flat Earthism remained in Zion, gradually becoming less popular into the 1950s. Voliva died in 1942 and the church quickly disintegrated. After Rowbotham's death in 1884, followers of his Zetetic Astronomy founded the Universal Zetetic Society.įlat Earth theory spread to the United States, largely in the town of Zion, Illinois where Christian Catholic Apostolic Church founder John Alexander Dowie and later Wilbur Glenn Voliva promoted Flat Earth theory. His system, called Zetetic Astronomy, held that the earth is a flat disk centered at the North Pole and bounded along its 'southern' edge by a wall of ice, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars only a few hundred miles above the surface of the earth. ![]() Samuel Rowbotham's Flat Earth views were based largely on literal interpretation of Bible passages. If schools were better at teaching analytical thinking, that might reduce the appeal of conspiracy theories.The modern age of the Flat Earth Society dates back to the early 1800s, when it was founded by Samuel Birley Rowbotham, an English inventor. Some conspiracy theories are irrefutable-the American government cannot prove, for example, that it is not storing dead aliens in a secret underground laboratory. (If “they” are so keen to deny it, it must be true!) Absence of evidence is taken as evidence of a fiendishly effective cover-up. Simply rebutting conspiracy theories may make adherents even more entrenched in their views. They are extremely common in dictatorships, where people assume, often correctly, that the authorities are lying. ![]() They tend to be most popular among less-educated people who do not trust public institutions. One in ten say humans play no role in it.Ĭonspiracy theories are appealing because they offer simple explanations for complex phenomena, or because they let people believe they are in possession of secret knowledge that the powerful wish to suppress. A recent survey found that a third of American science teachers tell their students that climate change is driven in part by natural causes. Skepticism about climate change has infiltrated schools. ![]()
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