He had been fighting the virus since at least late August, when he began exhibiting symptoms after “Take On The World,” a biblical flat earth conference. It's so much more fun to wave a sword around and cry out, "Get the bad guys!" Usually it is too late when we realize that we are the bad guys.Rob Skiba, an influential figure in flat earth and Christian circles, has died of COVID-19, colleagues announced on Thursday. Searching for points of agreement and constructing common ground are not sexy they don't stir the senses or make the blood boil. They define us, give us purpose often, without them we are lost. Even more than friends, we humans need enemies. Sadly, dividing up into opposing factions is deeply engrained in our primate heritage. Whewell, Draper, and White let human nature intrude on good scholarship. The lesson in all of this is that both science and religion are human endeavors, and human nature imposes itself upon them. Claiming that science and religion have known only unrelenting warfare betrays one's ignorance of history and possibly one's social/political agenda. But there are infamous nadirs as well: the muzzling of Teilhard de Chardin and the Galileo affair. Furthermore, clergy have often been important contributors to scientific progress: Mendel in genetics and Lemaître in big-bang cosmology. The same reactionary Pope of the Syllabus of Errors also established the Pontifical Academy of the New Lincei (later the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) dedicated to the promotion of science. In reality, science and religion have had a complex history, one defying simple labels. They fabricated a false history highlighted by a non-existent dogma and used them to brand religion as unceasingly reactionary, dim-witted, and anti-science. Whewell, Draper, and White all made laudable contributions to science and society, but their involvement in the flat-earth error is a regrettable blot.
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