What the church says is not always the same thing as what the Bible says, unfortunately.
Magellan would have been referring to the Roman Catholic Church, which had drastically veered away from the Bible at this point. On the scientific front, they stubbornly held to Aristotle as gospel truth even when evidence suggested otherwise.
The adherence to Aristotle had to do with the geocentric view of the universe, not whether the Earth was flat. Gallileo argued for the heliocentric view, but there was no way to distinguish the two views, as they gave the same results. It took later work (measurement of stellar parallax) to determine the the Earth moved.
That may be the best we can do, but it would have required sub-arc-second accuracy to measure the parallax to the nearest stars, and the science of astronomy was nowhere near that capability in Galileo's day. Thus, the superiority of the heliocentric view was unprovable, since it was indistinguishable from the geocentric view.
What the church says is not always the same thing as what the Bible says, unfortunately.
Magellan would have been referring to the Roman Catholic Church, which had drastically veered away from the Bible at this point. On the scientific front, they stubbornly held to Aristotle as gospel truth even when evidence suggested otherwise.
The adherence to Aristotle had to do with the geocentric view of the universe, not whether the Earth was flat. Gallileo argued for the heliocentric view, but there was no way to distinguish the two views, as they gave the same results. It took later work (measurement of stellar parallax) to determine the the Earth moved.
It's more of a philosophical position than a scientific one.
As for the parallax, the extent that's been measured was in the range of 0.00000x degrees of a shift.
That may be the best we can do, but it would have required sub-arc-second accuracy to measure the parallax to the nearest stars, and the science of astronomy was nowhere near that capability in Galileo's day. Thus, the superiority of the heliocentric view was unprovable, since it was indistinguishable from the geocentric view.