Who exactly were those that believed in a 'flat' earth? I actually never heard of stars being affixed to anything, that is a new one to me. There is NOT one shred of 'objective' evidence for that mystical hot steaming pot of primordial scum. But it sure has gotten some mileage, even though in recent years it sorta, kinda gets set up and away on the altar of evolutionists. Every film made explaining the TOE always refers to that hot steaming pot. Well what happened to it? Who cooled it off?
You have yet to give any reason why one should believe the description of the earth and life found in a metaphorical moral lesson is literal truth, while the reality seen and described by countless people over the course of millenia should not be believed. Despite your claims of not caring about the physical world, your desperate clutching to a metaphor while fervently denying the nature of reality says that you care, a lot.
Obviously you have NO clue what the Genesis account literally says. There is not one phrase or hint or suggestion in the whole of the Bible that this earth is young. The Bible from Genesis to Revelation refers to that heaven/earth age that WAS, when dinos and other prehistoric creatures that roamed God's green earth. But there were NO flesh human beings. Our souls/spirits were here but there was no flesh human bodies. Peter states emphatically there are three different heaven/earth ages. We are presently nearing the end of the second heaven/earth age. When the last soul created back in Genesis 1:1 willingly takes this flesh journey then all flesh will be changed.
I have no power or authority to make you understand things which you have chosen to fence off into a mystical metaphorical moral lesson. You do have the God given right to make that choice. He says He in this flesh age, He is NOT going to force Himself upon anyone literally or metaphorically. BUT I will plant seeds of truth and IF they fall on fertile ground that will be between the fertile soil and the Creator.
What I surmise about a lot of literal creationists is that they actually believe that if the earth was not created exactly as described in Genesis, there can be no basis for faith. So the fact that there is no evidence of a sudden, recent creation is very upsetting. They'd be so much happier if they could learn a few lessons from the millions of Christians who are perfectly okay with the fact that Genesis is a metaphor.
Ah, since you have no clue what the Genesis account literally states you have no basis for claiming anything about the Creator. Those of salvation will live for eternity and they will not be in a flesh body. Evolution is a dead theory made up by a man ticked off at God because of the death of his child. I have no doubt old Darwin gets really 'red' in the face over what he started.
Hmm... so, apparently, even though you think it’s incredibly important to believe the physical description of the earth as given in a metaphorical morality tale, you aren’t actually aware of all of the details from that metaphor.
The flat earth is in the Bible. The firmament—the shell that holds all the stars—is in the Bible. The estimate of the age of the earth was calculated by Biblical scholars on the basis of the Biblical text, and most of those calculations place it at about 6,000 years.
As far as the nature of the earth goes, the geologists are the ones who figured out what it was like billions of years ago; life scientists like me really aren’t trained in that area. That stuff you call “scum” actually was a mixture of organic molecules of various sizes and shapes. The traces of those molecules can be found in old rocks. The earth cooled off the same way it cools now: through heat radiation into space. Its temperature is now kept in rough equilibrium by radioactive decay deep underground, and energy from the sun; the atmosphere also acts to stabilize the temperature.
I could go on about the measurable physical properties of the earth, which have been determined by direct observation and experimentation—but I’d probably be wasting my time.
And I’m still waiting on you to explain why you feel it is so important to believe both that the physical world is exactly the way it is described in Genesis (flat, relatively new, solid shell sky), and that the physical world is unimportant. Those beliefs are kind of opposite of each other. Furthermore, if you genuinely believe the physical world is unimportant, then it shouldn’t matter a whit to you that scientists such as myself are driven to describe the physical world (including life upon the world) as accurately as possible.