by Glenn Branch

Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

William Trollinger’s recent post “Answers in Genesis: The Bible Is to Be Read Literally, Except When It’s Not” mentioned how young-earth creationists, such as the folks at Answers in Genesis, are outflanked by biblical geocentrists like Gerardus Bouw. “[I]n fundamentalism,” Trollinger explained, “the advantage goes to the rhetor who, when it comes to the Bible, can argue that ‘I am more literal than thou.’” In a comment, I noted, “The Institute for Creation Research’s Duane Gish once complained that a scientist with whom he debated had hit below the belt by comparing the Creation Research Society with the Flat Earth Society. ‘Not a single member’ of the former was a member of the latter, he protested.” I added, “A letter subsequently published in Flat Earth News set him straight.”

Having alluded to the episode, I may as well tell the whole story. Duane Gish (1921–2013) was the most avid debater associated with the Institute for Creation Research. His tendency to try to overwhelm his opponent with a flood of arguments was so famous it won the enduring sobriquet from Eugenie C. Scott of the Gish Gallop. But he wasn’t invulnerable as a debater. And when the paleontologist Michael Voorhies, in a debate with Gish, charged that the Creation Research Society resembled the Flat Earth Society, the accusation apparently stung. Gish took umbrage. Writing in the May 1979 issue of the ICR’s periodical Acts & Facts (no longer on-line), he protested, “Not a single member” of the Creation Research Society was a member of the Flat Earth Society.

Subsequently, a letter was published in the September 9, 1979, issue of Flat Earth News, the periodical of the International Flat Earth Research Society of America, operated by Charles K. Johnson (1924–2001) in Lancaster, California. The author, identified only by his initials “G. J. D.,” complained of Gish that “[h]e doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as I belong to both [the Creation Research Society and the Flat Earth Society], and I am writing to him to let him know that he is wrong.” A few years later, Robert Schadewald — a science writer with a strong interest in flat-earthery — explained in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer that “Gish may have created a fact. To protest this attack on the flat-earthers, ‘G. J. D.’ dropped his membership in the Creation Research Society.”

I was reminded of the episode in 2019, when I was preparing a talk on the flat-earth movement. Robert Schadewald died in 2000, but I knew that his sister Lois Schadewald prepared his book on flat-earthery, The Plane Truth (2015), for publication, so I asked her to look through his notes for G. J. D.’s identity. Lo and behold: G. J. D. was Gerald J. Dodelin (1905–1988) of Philadelphia. Amusingly, Dodelin, according to Schadewald’s notes, “was thrown out of the Flat Earth Society in about 1981 for the crime of talking to me!” Schadewald too had been expelled from the society, although not before Johnson asked him to take over running it, “an offer he declined” — as Christine Garwood nicely puts it in her Flat Earth (2007) — “due to his globular convictions.”

Schadewald’s notes revealed little further about Dodelin, except that his involvement with flat-earthery was of long standing. In 1969, he wrote to Samuel Shenton (1903–1971), the sign-writer who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society in Dover, England, in 1956, expressing interest in joining. (Johnson’s society was in effect the continuation of Shenton’s.) I wasn’t able to add significantly, although I found a 1956 letter from Dodelin in a Catholic magazine called the Liguorian in which he complained about a previous article that described certain chapters of the Bible (e.g., Esther) as largely fictional. (The editors replied that the fact that those chapters are fictional doesn’t mean that they’re not inspired.) Dodelin’s complaint tends to confirm that he accepted Biblical inerrantism.

When Johnson died in 2001, his society boasted about 100 members, down from (what Johnson claimed was) its mid-1990s peak of 3500 members, according to the obituary for Johnson in The New York Times. The young-earth creationists at the Institute of Creation Research and Answers in Genesis might have assumed that their flank would be generally safe from the flat-earthers. But flat-earthery came roaring back, evidently enabled by the internet. In a 2025 on-line survey conducted by Lawrence Hamilton of the University of New Hampshire among a nationally representative sample, 10 percent of respondents agreed with “The Earth is flat, not shaped like a globe.” It was not a fluke: Hamilton reported the same result from a 2021 survey conducted by telephone.

Apparently Answers in Genesis is especially perturbed by the threat to its flank. Danny R. Faulkner, who is listed on its website as a researcher, author, and speaker from 2013 to 2025, not only regularly inveighed against flat-earthery online but also published a book — Falling Flat: A Refutation of Flat-Earth Claims (2019) — devoted to doing so. As I noted in my review for Skeptical Inquirer, about half of his book offers a competent discussion of the science. But Faulkner’s historical treatment is tendentious. In particular, I wrote, “he neglects the fact that for a century and a half, the leading figures of flat-earthery not only identified themselves as Bible-believing Christians but also cited verses from the Bible in the service of their flat-earth belief.”

Concluding my review, I acknowledged that today’s flat-earthers, though still invoking the arguments of their precursors, are not so visibly committed to the inerrancy of the Bible. But, I added, “the diminished emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible among flat-earthers ought to be of no comfort to Faulkner, because biblical inerrantism is on the decline anyway.” As evidence of the decline, I cited a 2017 poll from Gallup that found that 24 percent of respondents — fewer than one in four — agreed that “the Bible is the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word” comes closest to describing their views about the Bible. The decline continues: according to a 2022 poll from Gallup, only 20 percent of respondents — one in five — favored the inerrantist option.