Refuting a Flat Earth Claim about Moonlight

It is a mite distressing that some people believe the earth is flat, and some of them are professing Christians and even creationists. This is ironic because not only was the idea started to make the Bible look foolish, but it has been soundly refuted both scientifically and theologically. (The president of the Flat Earth Society is a Darwinist, by the way.) One of the strangest claims that some flat earthers make is that moonlight removes heat and cools things.

Sea View by Moonlight, Ivan Aivazovsky, 1878

This idea should be subject to verification or refutation scientifically. Some owlhoots have made a pretense at proving their claim, but their efforts are woefully inadequate. Like faulty evidence for evolution (including "junk" DNA), people doing what passes for research argue from their presuppositions, find a bit of data they think is confirmation, and think their work is done.


Experiments and research must be done as completely as possible. Neutral or negative results are often omitted from evolutionary and other areas of research, but these are important as well as the results that seem positive. I lack belief that flat earth research on the cooling effects of moonlight included negative results, or that they were even remotely thorough.

In the following article, Dr. Faulkner detailed his experiments. It is rather long and appears even more lengthy than it is because of the charts (I think most people would skim those), but it is useful in that we can learn to have healthy skepticism over unusual claims. It also puts the silliness about moonlight to rest.

Flat-earthers often claim that moonlight has a cooling property. I present the results of three independent experiments that test this claim. The results of all three experiments disprove the claim that moonlight cools objects exposed to it. Not only is this claim not supported by carefully conducted experiments, it defies all that we know about the nature of light and energy. Furthermore, this claim has nothing to do with flat-earth cosmology, and easily could be jettisoned by flat-earthers without jeopardizing their model.

To read the rest or download the PDF, click on "Testing a Flat-Earth Prediction: Is the Moon’s Light Cooling?"

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