The flat earth society still has members.
We once depended on religion and laws of the spirit to determine how we put science and technology to use. That's difficult today when secularism has been elevated to the status of religion, reality has become virtual, and technology drives our sensibilities about what it means to be human.
We once thought the sun revolved around the earth, leprosy was contagious, the planet was 6K years old and that babies came from storks.