When flat earthers and creationists find common ground

It was hyped as “The Final Experiment.” Led by pastor Will Duffy of Agape Kingdom Fellowship in Wheat Ridge, Colo., a group of people who believed in a flat earth and others who believed in a global earth traveled to Union Glacier, Antarctica, together on Dec. 14 with the desire “to end the debate over the shape of the earth.”

According to flat earthers, the North Pole is at the center of their map, with Antarctica being an ice wall around the outside of the map that holds the ocean water in. Because the sun rises and sets toward the middle of the plain, it would have to rise and set in Antarctica as well. But according to globe earthers, there is a period of time where the sun doesn’t set in Antarctica.

Jeran Campanella, who runs the flat earth YouTube Channel Jeranism and attended the experiment, said ahead of time: “If it’s me down there, it is technically the final experiment as long as there’s not cloud cover the whole time.”

Lisbeth Acosta, another flat earther who attended, admitted: “If the sun stays up for a full 24 hours then it’s definitely something that I’m going to have to reconsider because as of right now, the current model that is given doesn’t account for that.”

Other flat earthers such as “Flat Earth Dave” Weiss and Eric Dubay were invited to an all-expenses-paid trip, given their influence and their claims over the years that a 24-hour sun in Antarctica would cause problems for the flat earth model. But according to Duffy, both men declined when given the opportunity.

With the transition happening in January toward the new Trump administration, we’re going to be living in a world that is extremely polarized about some of the most fundamental questions regarding science, truth and who to trust. Trump’s nomination of people like Dr. Oz to oversee Medicare and Medicaid as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services will ostracize us from one another even further.

And this isn’t even getting into concerns about climate change. Additionally, 2025 is the 100-year anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial during which a high school science teacher in Tennessee was arrested, charged and found guilty of teaching evolution at school until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction. And we all know conservatives have plans to use the courts to reshape education.

So while The Final Experiment may be an entertaining story to consider, it also gives us a chance to name some challenges we’ll be facing throughout 2025.

Overcoming conspiracy theories in real time

One of the challenges Duffy faced, beyond simply the obstacles of organizing a trip of this magnitude, was the constant skepticism of the flat earth community.

“I was told that no flat earthers would go and we got two of the biggest flat earthers — Jeran and Austin — to join us,” Duffy said. “Once they agreed to go, I was told that anybody who’s a big name in flat earth is just a shill and they’re not real and you’d have to get somebody that nobody knows is a flat earther if you really want this to be the real deal. And then we got Lisbeth to join us and not a lot of people knew about her.”

Another challenge was the possibility of weather. “I was also told that if we somehow did make it here that NASA would make fake clouds to cover the sky so that we couldn’t see the sun,” Duffy recalled. But thankfully, on the day of the experiment, the sky was almost perfectly blue.

But even that wasn’t enough. Duffy said, “Some people tried to say whatever we were going to do in December was already filmed somewhere else in the world and this will just be a recording.” So he brought the Starlink equipment necessary to broadcast live and then interacted with comments as they came in during the livestream.

Still, the flat earthers had more conspiracies. One person told Duffy, “They’ve manipulated the time zones in Antarctica to make people think that the sun is out at midnight when it really isn’t.” So they performed a live experiment at midnight for Ushuaia, Argentina time. And then they measured the location of the sun spots in order to make sure they were both looking at the same thing and that NASA hadn’t created an illusion in Antarctica in order to trick them.

The globe earthers also conducted at least 17 experiments, made predictions on what they would find, and confirmed their predictions with sun dials, cameras and cameras recording the cameras.

But even that wasn’t enough for some flat earthers in the comments section who claimed it was all CGI and they should pick up snow and throw it to prove they were actually there.

‘Sometimes you are wrong in life’

As the globe earthers predicted, the sun never set. So Duffy invited the flat earthers on camera to hear what they were thinking.

“Sometimes you are wrong in life,” Campanella admitted. “And I thought that there was no 24-hour sun. In fact, I was pretty sure of it. … At least you should be able to accept that the sun does exactly what these guys said as far as circles the southern continent.” Then he concluded, “I honestly believed there was no 24-hour sun. I honestly now believe there is. That’s it.”

“I was one of the people that said I definitely didn’t think that there was a 24-hour sun,” added Austin Whitsitt of the YouTube channel Whitsit Gets It. We obviously haven’t actually seen the sun for 24 hours. But it is doing what they said it would do very clearly. And it is still dancing around high in the sky.”

And for those who claimed the flat earthers were drugged or tricked into thinking they were in Antarctica, Whitsitt said, “We are in Antarctica, I can assure you. We tracked it with multiple compasses the entire way. We were going south or just off of South for four consecutive hours.”

Lisbeth also seemed unsure of her previous certainties, suggesting: “I think what matters the most is putting our egos aside. I’ve seen a lot of vitriol, a lot of crashing out on both sides, and it’s just like are we here for truth or are we here to hold on to a narrative and to ego?”

Needing more info

To be sure, the humility of admitting they were wrong is commendable. But they also weren’t quite ready to scrap the flat earth model altogether.

“The sun does circle you in the south. So what does that mean?” Campanella asked. “You guys are going to have to figure that out yourself. Don’t listen to my beliefs or my opinion. It shouldn’t matter to you.”

He continued: “What does it mean? You have to figure it out. You know, to me it means that the AE map no longer works. But that doesn’t mean that I’m right. It means that it could work. You’ll have to figure out how because I’ve tried and I struggle with it. The other thing is a 24-hour moon. If that happens, you got another thing we’ve got to worry about. So it seems like the moon does circle here as well. So start thinking about that as well. It doesn’t mean that AE map is over, flat earth is over. Maybe somebody’s got the answer. I don’t have that answer right now.”

“There’s still definitely things that you know are in question.”

Then he concluded: “I realize that I’ll be called a shill for just saying that. And you know what, if you’re a shill for being honest, so be it.”

Lisbeth agreed. Despite acknowledging the existence of a 24-hour sun, she said, “That’s not saying like a 24-hour sun proves a globe model. There’s still definitely things that you know are in question.”

According to Austin, “People need to be honest and humble and be like, ‘Whoa, we were wrong. I mean, if something doesn’t just pop out of the blue and all of the sudden the sun sets or something when we claimed that there was no sun or 24-hour sun.”

But Austin held out hope they could rework their flat earth model to take into account a 24-hour sun.

“I have seen a physical demonstration that could show this working,” he claimed. “But I do think that some of the data we’re going to have from this trip may help to clarify if that is actually what’s happening. … The point of this trip is to see if there’s a 24-hour sun. There clearly is. I won’t go on like a big rant about what I think that means. I don’t think it falsifies a plain earth. I don’t think it proves a globe. I think it’s a singular data point.”

The conspiracy theorists promoting ‘The Final Experiment’

Of course, the easy response here would be to get a good laugh out of flat earthers grappling with their model being proved wrong and then feel thankful for Duffy and whoever has been promoting him putting on the event. But a closer look at who is promoting the experiment provides a much more complex set of concerns.

One of the talking points that appears repeatedly during Duffy’s comments is that Mark Herman, director for rightwing influencer Candace Owens, was present. Owens has come under considerable fire, and has even been banned from traveling to certain countries, due to antisemitic denials of “Nazi medical experimentation on Jews in concentration camps during World War II,” according to the Associated Press. According to the Anti-Defamation League, she has accused French President Emanuel Macron of being gay “and married to a trans man who molested him as a child.” She claimed Judaism is a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons … and child sacrifice.”

But when she started spreading conspiracy theories about NASA, Duffy noticed and tried to influence her. Duffy told the young earth creationist organization Answers in Genesis: “Candace Owens had people contacting her about flat earth, people contacting her about NASA having Satanic origins, and the moon landings being faked. And so I noticed that she was starting to talk about this on her show. And so I reached out and I encouraged her, I didn’t know where she stood on the debate, but I just encouraged her, ‘Hey, if you’re going to make a decision or you’re considering which side of this debate — flat vs. globe — to fall on, I am conducting something called ‘The Final Experiment’ in December of 2024. And you may want to wait until we conduct the experiment because the experiment will be definitive evidence of the shape of the earth.”

According to Duffy, Owens loved the idea, sent her director, and was involved with promoting the experiment on her show.

Additionally, you may have noticed I quoted Duffy speaking with Answers in Genesis about her. He appeared on an interview with Answers in Genesis hosts Danny Faulkner and “Rocket Rob” Webb to promote his event, which turned out to be quite an ironic conversation.

Making ‘Answers in Genesis’ appear scientific

Faulkner and “Rocket Rob” sat back in their leather chairs, smirking and laughing at the flat earthers as they interviewed Duffy. They accused flat earthers of being all over the map in their theories, of taking the Bible too literally, and of not having a scientific model for their proposals.

If all you knew about Faulkner and “Rocket Rob” were from this video, you might actually be interested in learning more from them. But we’re talking about Answers in Genesis, a young earth creationist organization that teaches the universe is around 6,000 years old, that teaches a literal global flood and says the animals we see today came about from a process of hyper evolution that happened at warp speed after the ark, without any human noticing enough to write about it.

In fact, Answers in Genesis’ Nathaniel Jeanson went so far as to tell students at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary cattle and sheep could have evolved from a single animal on the ark. But that single animal would have had to evolve into cattle and sheep extremely rapidly in order to make it into the stories of Genesis. Later in the conversation, he told SBTS T-Rex could have had sharp teeth in order to eat pineapples and coconuts since young earth creationism believes there was no animal death before the fall of Adam and Eve.

Faulkner and “Rocket Rob” were the two men involved with the livestream of NASA’s first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Despite being an astronomer, Faulkner said he didn’t know if new stars were being born in the universe today and admitted, “We don’t really have a well-developed creation model of cosmology. … We just need a paradigm to interpret those things.”

And “Rocket Rob” resorted to claiming NASA “turned to the religion of materialistic atheism (and secular humanism) to answer the fundamental questions posed by the JWST program, thus further reducing themselves to absurdity and foolishness.”

In other words, by criticizing flat earthers, they make themselves appear to be scientific. But in reality, their young earth creationism is just as much a conspiracy as the flat earth movement.

Being present with one another

In this holiday season, many of us are gathering with family members who have drastically different scientific, political or theological views than us. Those differences cannot be ignored, nor the consequences minimized.

But despite the fact I personally think everyone involved in this “Final Experiment” has significant scientific, political and theological problems, there was something deeply human in their togetherness that is worth noting.

“Who would’ve thought two groups of four people who are so opposed in belief and ideology to the point where there’s ridicule and there’s shame, there’s all kinds of horrible things, but when they come together, especially in this environment, I’ve seen so much camaraderie and teamwork,” observed Mark Herman.

“I just want to say thanks to Will,” Campanella said. “Through everything, you’ve been at least kind to me.”

Duffy added: “We’re really bonding out here. There’s just magic when you get people together in person, face to face. You get to really have meaningful conversations, look each other in the eyes.”

And Austin added: “We have some strong personalities that get really intense on the camera. And it has been interesting to kind of be all around each other. I think it’s been relatively chill. I think it’s been pretty cool. I think it’s more a testament to the idea that we’re all just humans.”

So as I gather with my conspiracy theorist family members, I’m going to be annoyed at times, perhaps frustrated, hopefully not too angry that I miss a meal. I’m not going to back down from how problematic and awful their beliefs are, especially when I’m aware of how they are hurting my neighbors. And at the same time, I’ll try to take a breath, be relatively chill, and remember we’re all just humans. We may not be able to accept one another’s perspectives. But hopefully we can begin by recognizing one another’s humanity.

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.