I've yet to determine what I believe the shape of the Earth to be. It would probably take personal experience for me to ever know 100% sure, without a doubt. Even if it's a video or a photo that is believed to be 99.9% proof, there's still that .1% chance. It's the arrogance of the lot of you, who go off second hand information, that really gets under my skin. None of you are cartographers, none of you are astrophysicists, none of you are meteorologists or evolutionary biologists... Apologies if any of you do have those credentials, but most of you are just google and wikipedia.
You say, probably quite correctly that "None of you are cartographers, none of you are astrophysicists, none of you are meteorologists or evolutionary biologists." and since I presume that you are not either,
how ever do you hope to gather this information!There is not the slightest chance that any one person in their lifetime could gather all the information you seem to want.
That is why the current theories have been built up and refined one the centuries (actually over millenia).
Sure, we "go off second hand information", but even where we had first hand information, by the time it got to you
it would be second hand.
Famous historical scientists had theories that simply "did not stand the test of time". For example, Galileo had a "sloshing theory" about the cause of tides
Defeated by the tides
The Copernican worldview has prevailed - not, however, Galileo’s theory of the tides. Clearly inspired by the behaviour of water when boats come to a halt, Galileo Galilei concluded that the ebb and flow of the tides resulted, similarly, from the acceleration and deceleration of the oceans.
Not all that silly, but he did not factor in the importance of the moon's gravitation.
And even when we say that "The Copernican worldview has prevailed", that is not strictly correct. True, he suggested that the Sun was the "centre" of the solar system, but he hypothesised that all the planets moved in circular orbits. It took the detailed data gathered of Tycho Brae (who, by the way, believed in Geocentrism) and the work of Johannes Kepler to show that they actually moved in (very nearly) elliptical orbits. And then finally the work of Newton to show why they moved in this way.
I find it amazing how these early astronomers recorded so much detail simply in notebooks. The planet Neptune was not "officially discovered" until the mid-1800s, but there is evidence that in 1613 Galileo actually recorded this object moving through the "fixed stars", never identified. It seems now accepted that this "object" was the planet Neptune.
No, there is not a chance that any one person can gather all this evidence on their own!
But, my main point is that we can gather corroborating evidence that supports one theory of the the other, but on our own we simply cannot hope to get convincing evidence to prove the matter one way or the other.
To my mind this is the weakness of many who claim to believe in "Zetetic Cosmology".
So many seem to see obvious things (such as: the earth/horizon looks flat), then when this does not fit other observations they come up with other ideas, purely from their imagination, to explain these, without any supporting evidence.
By the way: In my previous post I was never trying to imply that you may have been a "religious" atheist or agnostic. I was just using that as an example when you claimed you were an "earth shape agnostic", yet seeming to always argue against the globe.