It can be tricky to argue with them (Picture: Shutterstock)

Arguing with Flat Earthers is near-impossible – if you don’t believe me, look at the rabid comments underneath just about any Flat Earth article in the ‘MSM’.

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These people are the elite warriors of ‘fake news’ – confident enough to dismiss several millennia of scientific knowledge, and rely instead on maniacs with weird YouTube channels.

That makes them very, very hard to argue with.

But there might be a way to deal with them, according to philosopher Nikk Effingham, and it’s all to do with context.


Effingham says in an essay for The Conversation that what Flat Earthers do is similar to how Phoebe argues with Ross in Friends about Evolution.



After a while, Phoebe snaps and asks Ross if there isn’t a slight chance he might be wrong – and he agrees.

Flat Earthers use the same tactics, Effingham says – saying that they try to shift the argument to a context where nothing makes sense.

Effingham says, ‘Flat earthers are pulling the same trick. They’re right: you don’t know the earth is round.

‘But they’re only right in a context where testimonies of hundreds are disregarded, where widely accepted facts among the scientific community don’t count, where photographic evidence is inadmissible, and so on.

‘The flat earther’s argument is framed in a context where you can’t set aside the possibility that there’s a pervading global conspiracy.’

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But if the Flat Earthers are right, you basically can’t know or trust anything – and you couldn’t get treated in hospitals either, says Effingham.

‘We we are correct to rely on these things,’ he says. ‘If it was incorrect, we’d never get treated at hospitals – for in a context where we can’t trust the established laws of physics, how could we trust the judgements of medical science?’

Flat Earthers are often quite self-aware about why they believe the Earth is flat – and it’s to do with comfort, one expert has said.

Hmmm Getty

It’s far less scary to believe that we’re on a snow globe created by God than to believe, as Douglas Adams put it, that, ‘we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal.’

Michael Wood, a psychology lecturer at the University of Winchester told Metro.co.uk, ‘Flat Earth believers list all the usual Flat Earth arguments about fish eye lenses, fake satellites, various measurements, celestial “gears” creating illusions of poles, phantom southern hemisphere flights, and so on.

‘When they do mention the worldview thing it’s usually kind of an afterthought, or it’s used as justification for the conspiracy element (i.e., the real purpose of the conspiracy is to make us feel like we’re insignificant when we’re really created specially by God).’

In an interview with LiveScience, Wood said, ‘One thing I’ve found interesting in my own adventures on the flat-Earth side of YouTube is, people are often pretty upfront about their motives.



‘They’ll say that they find it more appalling to believe in the universe as a huge, uncaring place, and that it seems more reasonable to imagine Earth was made for humans like a perfect snow globe.’

Flat Earthers themselves have said almost exactly this – with one contributor to this year’s Flat Earth conference saying that NASA is trying to hide the existence of God.

One speaker, Rob Skiba, revealed something crucial – exactly why NASA is lying to us about the Earth being a globe.

ABC

Skiba – a documentary maker behind such classic films as Archon Invasion: The Rise, Fall and Return of the Nephilim – says, ‘The bigger picture many of us have come to believe is hiding God.

‘To me, that would be the ultimate motivation.

Like many Flat Earthers, Skiba believes the Earth is exactly like it is in the Bible – and NASA and their co-conspirators are trying to conceal this fact.

Skiba says on YouTube that the Bible is, ‘describing a snow globe basically. When you break down the text of what it represents, there’s no way you can get a spinning heliocentric globe out of anything in the Bible.

‘I have become skeptical of everything. And I think rightfully so.’

Andrew Flintoff (Photo by Andrew Benge/Redferns)

Former England cricketer ‘Freddie’ Flintoff revealed late last year that he was obsessed with a podcast called the Flat Earthers – and coming round to their ideas.

Flintoff said, ‘If you’re in a helicopter and you hover why does the Earth not come to you if it’s round?


‘Why, if we’re hurtling through space, why would water stay still? Why is it not wobbling? Also if you fire a laser about 16 miles, if the world was curved, you shouldn’t be able to see it but you can.’

He even claims to be warming to the idea of a global conspiracy to conceal the truth (something that Flat Earthers are naturally very fond of).

He said, ‘The middle is the North Pole, around the outside is the South Pole which is like a big wall of ice. This is why all governments now have bases on the South Pole.’

10 reasons Flat Earthers say prove the Earth is flat The horizon always appears perfectly flat – except in NASA and other government pictures, which are obviously faked (as part of the global conspiracy) Picture Source: atlanteanconspiracy You never have to look down to see the horizon, no matter how hard you rise. If Earth were a real globe you’d have to look down Picture Source: atlanteanconspiracy If Earth really was a sphere hurtling through space, the water would be wobbling all over the place, instead of staying flat. See? It’s flat

Getty If Earth really was a globe, rivers such as the Mississipi would have to flow uphill to reach the sea – flowing uphill 11 miles in its 3,000-mile length. If Earth really was spherical, helicopters would be able to hover in place and wait for their destinations to come to them. (Picture: Wenn) The railway from London to Liverpool is 180 miles long. If Earth really was a globe, it should be 5,400 feet high over Birmingham. Picture Credit: Alamy If Earth really was a globe, airline pilots would constantly have to adjust their controls so as not to fly off into space. Credit: Getty If there actually were billions of stars in the night sky (Flat Earthers think there aren’t), the entire sky would be full of light. If Earth was constantly spinning, aeroplanes would never be able to reach their destinations due to the 500mph headwind. If Earth really is spinning, bullets fired upwards would land hundreds of feet Westwards. They don’t.