Faked Space: Danny Faulkner Thought of It First

A short treatise on epistemology and hubris

“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:11).

That we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ.

Ephesians 4:14-15

“Now concerning things offered to idols: We know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies” (1 Corinthians 8:1).

And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will.

“Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).

But He gives more grace. Therefore He says:

“God resists the proud,
But gives grace to the humble.”

James 4:6

I preface this post with the above verses to keep MY heart in check. Exposing the unfruitful works of darkness must be done with gentleness and humility, looking first at the log in my eye. It requires speaking the truth in love with the goal of repentance and restoration. The heart is always drawn to pride, which must be feverishly guarded against. Once hubris sets in, one can only expect a fall.

The evidence I’ll present below shows that Faulkner may have already been taken captive by his ego. Perhaps God will be gracious to Faulkner and show him the error of his way before he stumbles beyond remedy.

This installment is number seven in my review of Danny Faulkner’s Falling Flat.

If you have not read the first six installments, you can access them here:

1. “Falling Flat” by Danny Faulkner: A Cover-to-Cover Review

2. Top Twelve Flat Earth Claims to Hold Faulkner's Feet to the Fire

3. Does Danny Faulkner Rewrite Flat Earth History from Page One?

4. Danny Faulkner Accidentally Admits Flat Earth Requires a Creator

5. Danny Faulkner’s Contrived Flat Earth

6. Danny Faulkner’s Malicious Flat Earth God and Reified Moon

Let’s look into a concept Faulkner introduces on Page 11 of Falling Flat: Epistemology.

How Can We Know What We Know?

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and tries to answer, “How do we know what we know?”

Faulkner rightly wants to apply this principle to the shape of the earth. He writes, “While most people believe the earth is a sphere, how do we know this?” Faulkner admits, “Most people have not given this question any thought because they have been taught their entire lives that the earth is spherical, so why worry about it?”

This lack of knowledge causes a problem, according to Faulkner. “Most people long ago entered a complacent state of taking someone else’s word for the matter.”

Indeed, complacency and accepting someone else’s word on a matter is problematic. Yet, are these merely empty words on Faulkner’s part? Will he apply this rule to his rhetoric — or will he have us take his word for much of Falling Flat?

Flat earthers are the first to admit they once regurgitated globe facts as taught in school since childhood, that is, until they broke free from the spell and started to question the narrative. They each decidedly wanted to know why they believed we lived on a globe. As it turns out, they could not support the reasoning. Trusting the globe always requires trusting someone else’s opinion, as Faulkner insinuated.

Faulkner’s Epistemological Exercise

Faulkner talks about an exercise he did with his beginning Astronomy students at the University of South Carolina, where he taught from August 1986 to December 2012.

He challenged his students with the question above. How do you know the earth is a sphere?

Faulkner writes, “Almost none of my students could give me a good answer. Eventually, someone would suggest photos taken from space that show the earth is spherical.”

This following admission by Faulkner is priceless.

“However, I would ask my students whether such photos could be faked, and they all readily agreed.”

In a footnote, Faulkner tells his readers that he does not believe the photos are faked. Instead, he acknowledges that they COULD be faked, and we’d better have some finer proof than fake-able photos to prove the earth is a sphere.

Faulkner wants to assign a much earlier date to the discovery that earth is a sphere. He insists that we must have known the earth was spherical before the space age or the first satellite was launched in 1957.

But how will he do it?

He’ll appeal to history.

Is History A Reliable or Unreliable Witness?

According to Faulkner, history is both reliable and unreliable. It’s reliable when it carries forward Faulkner’s narrative. And it is unreliable when it does not.

For example, Faulkner seeks to set the record straight about the Christopher Columbus “myth” that 5 centuries ago, everyone thought the earth was flat. Faulkner bemoans that our teachers got that bit of history wrong — when, in FACT — says Faulkner, “The question of the earth’s true shape had been settled two millennia before Columbus.” ¹

I’m curious if Faulkner expects us to take his word for that? Even if he provided a source, could it be trusted? How would we know?

His rhetoric sounds a bit like vaccine and climate-change science to me: settled.

Either way, appealing to history as proof that the earth is a sphere — and that it was settled 2,500 years ago — is an appeal to history fallacy.

For one, it assumes that historical records are always accurate and unquestionable, ignoring the need for independent verification. Faulkner already demonstrated how the historians got Columbus wrong. Just because something has been widely accepted as fact does not make it true. Beliefs can persist even if they are based on faulty evidence or propaganda.

We will still need some evidence that the earth is a sphere. And if we were to appeal to history, Flat Earth has nearly twice as much history under its belt, something Faulkner practically ignores.

Beyond the Classroom

Faulkner takes the conversation out of the classroom and frames it in the context of the real world.

He writes,

When a modern flat-earther comes along and begins to raise what appear to be simple objections to the earth’s spherical shape, it doesn’t take much to fluster most people. When cornered in this manner, people generally respond with the observation that we have photos from space that clearly show a spherical earth. However, the flat-earther almost certainly will respond that such photos easily can be faked (but note that I thought of this first). ²

Here we will see Danny Faulkner rewriting modern-day Flat Earth history again. ³

Earlier in a footnote referring to his time teaching at the University of South Carolina, Faulkner writes, “Therefore, I was pointing this out long before the flat-earthers were, though it’s not as though I believed that the photos from space are faked.”

Yet, Faulkner admits that the space photos are unreliable witnesses. “Indeed, because we all know that it is very easy to fake such photos, perhaps those photos don’t prove much after all.”

And since, according to Faulkner, the “belief in a spherical earth goes back much earlier than the space age, so obviously there must be better responses.”

So Faulkner claims to have thought of faked photos from space before flat earthers? Let’s examine this claim.

It’s hard to know where to classify this kind of error. It could be an example of the

• Dunning-Kruger Effect — Does Faulkner overestimate his originality due to a lack of awareness of prior research or discoveries?

• An Overconfidence Bias — Does Faulkner overestimate his knowledge or abilities, resulting in flawed reasoning?

• A Strawman argument — Does Faulkner create a Strawman of modern Flat Earth History?

• Appeal to Authority — Does Faulkner falsely extend his authority as an expert to have us believe he thought of faking space photos before flat-earthers?

• Plain Hubris — Or does Faulkner engage in a bloated view of self, assigning something to himself that does not belong to him?

In Does Danny Faulkner Rewrite Flat Earth History from Page One, we saw Faulkner missed some pertinent details about the Modern Flat Earth movement. His misunderstanding of FE history becomes evident again.

Faulkner wants to take the title “First to think of Faked Space photos.” Yet, that title already belongs to someone else. Who owns the title? I cannot claim to know. Yet, I can document a Biblical Flat Earther who made the claim before Faulkner was teaching his beginning astronomy course.

In the 1976 edition of Flat Earth News, we find this quote:

No one has been to the moon. Mr Johnson states the “moon shots” and space cake walks” Rover Boy’s in space etc. etc. including the claimed “celestial marriage in Heaven between the US and the USSR space ships” were entirely fictional, simulated just as other science fiction movies are. He says the simulated space pictures, faked pictures of earth from the moon, faked pictures of rover bots and their jeep on the moon were concocted ‘as they thought it would be’ if the superstitions of modern science were true.”

Here’s a more extended quote taken as a screenshot:

Regardless if all the claims in this quote are valid, one thing remains certain. Faulkner didn’t think of it first. This quote predates Faulkner’s time at the University of South Carolina by ten years. And no doubt, those in the early rendition of the Flat Earth Society questioned the moon landing from day one.

By claiming that he thought of Faked Space first, Faulkner reveals that he is ignorant of Flat Earth history, disqualifying him from being a trusted expert on Flat Earth.

Do As I Do, Not As I Say

I fear Faulkner’s appeal to epistemology was nothing more than empty rhetoric. Though he has opened the door for discovering knowledge without parroting an expert, he treats his audience like sheep, expecting them to accept the feed from his hand, lulling them back to sleep.

Here are a few more examples of the kinds of claims Faulkner continues to make in this chapter without supplying evidence. He may cite one or two sources, but he doesn’t — no, he CAN’T prove these statements. They are conjecture at best — fantasy at worst.

• “To the contrary, at least in the West, for 2,000 years before Columbus nearly everyone had known the earth was spherical” (Page 13).
  
  [Really? Are you going to appeal to history? Nearly everyone? You can’t even possibly know what nearly everyone believed.]
  

• “Flat-earthers consistently conflate this mythology about Columbus with the Galileo affair a little more than a century later” (Page 14).
  
  [Faulkner makes this statement and then talks about Copernicus and Galileo, never supporting his claim that flat-earthers consistently conflate Columbus with Galileo.]
  

• “Why is there supposedly a conspiracy to conceal the earth’s true shape? The most common answer is that it is an attempt to control people, though it isn’t clear how promoting and maintaining a false belief about the earth’s shape accomplishes that” (Page 17).
  
  [Faulkner misunderstands the Biblical Cosmology Community if he thinks the most common answer for hiding the earth’s shape is to control people. The most cited reason is to hide God. Rob Skiba writes, “The bigger picture many of us have come to believe is hiding God. To me, that would be the ultimate motivation.”] ⁴
  

• “To the Christian believers that the earth is flat, the modern flat-earth movement means even more, for it represents a return to biblical Christianity. Though, as we shall soon see, the church never taught the earth is flat” (Page 17).
  
  [Never is a big word that Faulkner cannot support. Indeed, he misses 4,000 years of church history before Christ. Plus, he assumes that he knows what every congregation and every theologian taught on the subject since Christ. I will discuss this topic further in a future post.]
  

• “Much of Western science and philosophy traces back to the ancient Greeks. Therefore, if we want to know the history of cosmology, such as beliefs about the earth’s shape, we ought to start with them” (Page 17).
  
  [Ought we start with pagan philosophers to understand the earth's shape? Does Faulkner want us to take his word for this? Why should we start here? Wouldn’t starting with the Bible to see what the Creator says make more sense? Imagine discussing the idea of creation or the flood and appealing first to pagan culture!]

These types of claims riddle the first chapter of Falling Flat.

Reader beware: Danny Faulkner is a skillful rhetorician who will do anything he can to direct his reader in the way he wants him to go while ignoring and skewing the truth.

I suppose there is another option: Faulkner is wholly ignorant and unqualified to discuss the topic of Biblical Flat Earth.

May godly men and Christian leaders hold Faulkner accountable for his reprehensible rhetoric and call him to repentance. Perhaps God will have mercy on his soul.

You can access the next installment here: Danny Faulkner Straw Mans Augustine’s View on the Shape of the Earth.

Comments are behind a paywall, but I welcome feedback from all.

1. Page 12

2. Ibid.

3. For the first offense, see Does Danny Faulkner Rewrite Flat Earth History from Page One?

4. https://metro.co.uk/2018/01/29/flat-earther-reveals-real-reason-nasa-lying-us-earth-round-7269268/