Creationists

[daws101]

Anyone who has ever weed whacked through the landscape of christian creationist lies has come upon the sleazy tactics of the creationist ministries and their falsified, alterd and parsed "quotes".

The talkorigins website has a huge collection of these creationist lies.

The following is another, typical example of creationist lies.

Quote Mine Project: "Sudden Appearance and Stasis"

"Paleontologists have paid an enormous price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study. ...The history of most fossil species includes tow [sic] features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change I [sic] usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed.'" (Gould, Stephen J. The Panda's Thumb, 1980, p. 181-182)


Snipped in the ellipsis is:

"We believe that Huxley was right in his warning. The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. In fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism we should reject, not Darwinism."

Following this passage is:


"Evolution proceeds in two major modes. In the first, phyletic transformation, an entire population changes from one state to another. .... The second mode, speciation, replenishes the earth. New species branch off from a persisting parental stock.

"Darwin, to be sure, acknowledged and discussed the process of speciation. But he cast his discussion of evolutionary change almost totally in the mold of phyletic transformation. In this context, the phenomenon of stasis and sudden appearance could hardly be attributed to anything but imperfection of the record; for if new species arise by transformation of entire ancestral populations, and if we almost never see the transformation (because species are essentially static through their range), then our record must be hopelessly incomplete.

"Eldredge and I believe that speciation is responsible for almost all evolutionary change. Moreover, the way in which it occurs virtually guarantees that sudden appearance and stasis shall dominate the fossil record." to p183.

- John Wilkins

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A more complete citation would be: Gould, Stephen Jay 1980. "The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change" The Panda's Thumb. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., p. 181-182.

Hollie pound sand,these quotes are all documented.your Idelogoical site can't spin what was said.

he just did and the spin is yours the site is a creationist site it's bias precludes it's validly .

 

[daws101]

Daws we know that parents only have genetic information to reproduce what they are. Hell that should be obvious to your side as well. Cells reproduce what they are as well and every living organism reproduces what they are.

nice dodge .
stating the obvious is no proof that god did it .
no matter how hard you wish it did.

The bible is supported by the evidence this is not evidence that supports your theory.

for the millionth time NO IT'S NOT THERE IS NO EVIDENCE AT ALL CORROBERATING THE CREATION MYTH!
THE BIBLE IS NOT EVIDENCE IN IT'S SELF.
NOAHS ARK , JOSUHA STOPPING THE SUN, JESUS MIRICALING UP FISH AND LOAFS ETC..
HAVE NO NON BIBLICAL MENTIONS IN OTHER HISTISTORIES WRITTEN AT THAT TIME.

 

[pinqy]

Daws we know that parents only have genetic information to reproduce what they are. Hell that should be obvious to your side as well. Cells reproduce what they are as well and every living organism reproduces what they are.

No one argues otherwise. One species giving birth to another would DISPROVE Evolution.

But the fact remains that over time species do change...traits are gained, traits drop out, and different populations experience different changes. Enough small changes (so that no one generation is significantly different from the previous) build up over thousands of generations so that two different groups are no longer the same or that the present members of a group are no longer the same as those a million years ago.

 

[Hollie]

More dishonest creationist "quote mining"

"Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence for sustained trends in the evolution of most complex morphological adaptations." (Gould, Stephen J. and Eldredge, Niles, "Species Selection: Its Range and Power," 1988, p. 19)

OK, this is a one-page letter to Nature in July 1988 in response to a letter by Maynard Smith criticising Gould's and Eldredge's idea of species selection. Maynard Smith had, in G&E's words,

"...accused us of overextending the potential role of species selection by proposing it as a source for the origin of complex morphological adaptations. We agreed [ref] that species selection could not work in such a manner, and pointed out that all proponents of the idea had always so acknowledged."

Maynard Smith's letter is Nature 330:516 (1987). The referred letter is Nature 332:211-212 (1988)

Here is the quoted section in context:

"Maynard Smith's quotations simply illustrate a misunderstanding in the use of terms. The quotations all advocate species selection as a cause of paleontological 'trends' and Maynard Smith has equated trends with complex adaptations. Not so. In our original paper on punctuated equilibrium [ref8] we defined trends as 'biostratigraphic character gradients' -- the standards paleontological usage. Most empirical trends in fossils are chronological gradients in simple characters, the most famous being trends towards increased body size expressed as Cope's rule. [ref9] Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence for sustained trends in the evolution of most complex morphological adaptations -- the jaws and eyes of vertebrates, to cite two classic cases. Thus, paleontological trends, properly defined, are the very aspects of morphology that are most subject to potential explanation by species selection, because trends are simple, sustained changes that can arise by hitchhiking on a process of sorting among species."

[ref8] Eldredge, N. & Gould, S. J. in Models in Apleobiology (ed. Schopf T.J.M.) 82-115 (Freeman Cooper, San Francisco, 1972)

[ref9] Stanley, S. M. Evolution 27, 1-26 (1973).

This is not a case of misquotation, or taking it out of a qualifying context. However, it is a partial quotation, and in context it is discussing whether or not trends of complex morphological adaptations are explicable in terms of the Gould and Eldredge conception of species selection; they answer that they are not.

- John Wilkins

 

[LittleNipper]

for the millionth time NO IT'S NOT THERE IS NO EVIDENCE AT ALL CORROBERATING THE CREATION MYTH!
THE BIBLE IS NOT EVIDENCE IN IT'S SELF.
NOAHS ARK , JOSUHA STOPPING THE SUN, JESUS MIRICALING UP FISH AND LOAFS ETC..
HAVE NO NON BIBLICAL MENTIONS IN OTHER HISTISTORIES WRITTEN AT THAT TIME.

Joshua’s Long Day around the World?

Having concluded that Joshua’s long day is a miracle, we may ask whether or not it was restricted just to the area of Canaan or whether it was global in scope. Certainly a “missing day” would generate considerable consternation among the peoples of the world, provided it was a global event. Are there other accounts of a long day or even a long night? Indeed, we can find stories of a long night as well as a long day. We can even find tales where the sun hung near the horizon for a long time. All the accounts taken together allow us to ascertain the time of day when Joshua told the sun to stand still.

Some of the world’s recitations of Joshua’s long day are vague and unspecific while others are quite clear. Among the former are those which relate only that the people had knowledge of the concept that the sun, moon, and stars can reverse their motions. An example of one of these is the account referred to by Augustine in The City of God where he quotes the Æneid about a witch who:



...can reverse the wheeling of the planets, halt rivers in their flowing.22



Joshua’s Long Day in Africa

Toward the end of the last century, Charles Adiel Lewis Totten, then a retired Professor of Military Science from Yale University, published a controversial study on Joshua’s long day.23 The book dealt extensively with Joshua’s long day and Hezekiah’s sign. In recent times attempts to discredit it center more on the person of Totten than they do on the mathematics and science involved. Totten was the editor of Our Race, a publication devoted to the promotion of what today is called “British Israelitism,” although Totten’s stance is eminently more realistic and moderate than that taken by that faction today. Robert Olden24 says Totten obtained most of his material from J. B. Dimbleby of South Hackney, England, who was the premier chronologist of the British Chronological Society. Lest Totten be accused of plagiarism, Dimbleby is cited numerous times in Totten’s works. Totten has also been accused of worshipping the Great Pyramid of Giza, from which, it is claimed, he received his inspiration for his work on Joshua’s long day. Actually, the latter sounds more like Dimbleby, for a reading of Totten’s works on the Great Pyramid reveals none of the mysticism implied by the charge.

Anyhow, flawed though some of Totten’s works might be, in his book, he relates two independent and geographically distinct accounts of Joshua’s long day. One of Totten’s sources is a report by the Greek historian Herodotus who wrote that when he visited Egypt, the priests there showed him an ancient manuscript which told the story of a day which lasted about twice as long as a nor mal day. Now the Egyptians had water clocks at that time so that they could accurately measure the duration of the day, not being dependent on the motion of the sun, moon, and stars, as would other peoples around the world. Totten’s second account is from the Chinese which we shall present later.

For the Egyptian account, we find that the French classical scholar, Fernand Crombette, translated some Egyptian hieroglyphics which tell of Joshua’s long day.25 The text starts out with an edict from the king to exempt from taxation those who had been victims of a flood some two weeks earlier. Evidently the flood had been caused by an unusually high tide. The cause, according to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was:



The sun, thrown into confusion, had remained low on the horizon, and by not rising had spread terror amongst the great doctors. Two days had been rolled into one. The morning was lengthened to one-and-a-half times the normal period of effective daylight. A certain time after this divine phenomenon, the master had an image built to keep further misfortune from the country.

Hephaistos...grant protection to your worshipers. Prevent the words of these foreign travelers from having any effect. They are impostors. Let these enemies of the sacrifices to the images be destroyed in the temples of the great gods by the people of all classes. Make life harder for these cursed worshipers of the Eternal. Punish them. Increase the hardships of these shepherds. Reduce the size of their herds. Burn their dwellings.

Rameses, our celestial ancestral chief; you who forced these wretched people to work, who ill-treated them, who gave them no help when they were in need: cast them into the sea. They made the moon stop in a small angle at the edge of the horizon. In a small angle on the edge of the horizon, the sun itself, which had just risen at the spot where the moon was going, instead of crossing the sky stayed where it was. Whilst the moon, following a narrow path, reduced its speed and climbed slowly, the sun stopped moving and its intensity of light was reduced to the brightness at daybreak. The waves formed a wall of water against the boats that were in the harbor and those that had left it. Those fishermen that had ventured onto the deck to watch the waves were washed into the sea.

The tide, which had risen high, overflowed into the plains where the herds were grazing. The cattle drowned represented half the herds of Lower Egypt. The remains of abandoned boats broken against the sides of the canals were piled up in places. Their anchors, which should have protected them, had been ground into them. Quite out of control, the sea had penetrated deep into the country. The expanding waters reached the fortified walls constructed by Rameses, the celestial ancestral chief. The sea swept around both sides of the region behind, sterilizing the gar dens as it went and causing openings in the dikes. A great country had been turned into a wilderness and brought into poverty. All the crops that had been planted had been destroyed and heaps of cereal shoots lay scattered on the ground.



The Crombette account is significant for a number of reasons. For one, it tells that the moon “climbed slowly,” which would be correct if the moon kept its orbital speed but stopped its daily motion. This is allowed by Joshua 10:13’s weaker statement on the moon: “and the moon stayed,” instead of the stronger “stopped,” for “stay” may mean “to linger or wait to witness an event.” Likewise, Crombette’s interpretation that the moon was going to the spot where the sun had risen is thus explained by having the moon continue its orbital motion and its being located west of the sun, perhaps near last quarter.

Whether or not the tides mentioned in translation were really tides or a storm swell cannot be said. It is possible that the tidal bulge kept moving, but it is unlikely that the narrows of the Nile delta and the narrowness of the canals mentioned caused a bore wave, for then such should always have been the case under nor mal tidal conditions. It is possible, though unlikely, that the breakup for the tidal bulge may have caused waves which interfered with each other and that Egypt’s dikes might have broken at one or two points by constructive interference, thus the resulting flooding. But it seems more likely that the events mentioned in Egypt were the result of a severe storm swell in the Mediterranean caused by the very storm that formed the hailstones mentioned in Joshua 10



And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon, that the LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.



Although most commentators insist that Joshua’s long day started at noon or later, the sun is here mentioned low on the horizon. The Bible itself does not mention the time when Joshua spake. For comparison with the Egyptian account, and complementing it, there is a West African story of a long night.26 In that account, the night lasted way too long because the owl over slept and did not awaken the sun.



The Chinese Account of Joshua’s Long Day

The second secular source about Joshua’s long day, which was mentioned by Totten, is based on what seems to be a recently lost ancient Chinese manuscript. In 1810 Gill presents the account:



In the Chinese history27 it is reported, that in the time of their seventh emperor, Yao, the sun did not set for ten days, and that men were afraid the world would be burnt, and there were great fires at that time; and though the time of the sun’s standing still were enlarged beyond the bounds of truth, yet it seems to refer to this fact, and was manifestly about the same time; for this miracle was wrought in the year of the world 2554, which fell in the 75th, or, as some say, the 67th year of that emperor’s reign, who reigned 90 years.28



Now the year of the world 2554 is identical to Bouw’s independently derived biblical chronology for the date of Joshua’s long day.29 Incidentally, note that a 90-year reign (not Yao’s age) is thoroughly consistent with the 110 to 120 year ages achieved by Moses, Aaron, and Joshua who would have been contemporaries of Yao. The length of time mentioned by the Chinese, ten days, may be too long simply because the Chinese did not have clocks which ran independently of the sun’s motion so that the estimate would be purely subjective. Probably, the duration was exaggerated both by the trauma of the event and in the transmission of the story through time.

Despite the solid-sounding account by Gill, manuscripts which have survived to the twentieth century do not include the long day. The first mention of the long day associated with emperor Yao was by Hübner in 1733.30 Although Hübner was quoted during that century, no manuscript exists today. Those manuscripts which have survived to this day differ from Hübner’s in at least two ways: first, there is no mention of the 10-day long day, and second, the reign of Yao is reported to be 100 years, not 90.

Although there is no mention of the ten-day long day in current Chinese accounts, there is one in the “Brahman Yast,” one of the books of the Avesta. That reference is not, however, to a past event. Instead, it is a prophecy. The Avesta says that 1600 years from the date of the Persian culture (corresponding to about A.D. 1200), Hushedar will be born and, at age 30, he will command the sun to stand still for 10 days and nights. Obviously, the prophecy never came to pass, still it is strongly reminiscent of the Chinese account and may either have confused Hübner or else may reflect the actual Chinese account used by Hübner.



Joshua’s Long Day in North America

Tales relating to Joshua’s long day abound in North America. Almost all of the tales in North America tell of a long night. The only exceptions are those related in the chapter on Hezekiah’s sign. Olcott31 has collected five of particular interest.



The Ojibways tell of a long night without any light.32
The Wyandot Indians told missionary Paul Le Jeune of a long night.33
The Dogrib Indians of the North-West tell of a day when the sun was caught at noon and it instantly became dark.34
The Omahas say that once the sun was caught in a trap by a rabbit who checked his traps at the break of dawn, presumably before sunrise.35 (This may be Hezekiah’s sign, instead.) Finally,
the Bungee Indians from the Lake Winnipeg area of Canada also tell of a long night.36


The preponderance of long night tales in the Americas would rule out the theory that Joshua’s long day was a miracle which was local to Canaan. It also rules out the speculation that the story migrated around the world, for then it would everywhere be a long day (or a long night), but not a mixture of long days and long nights.



The Long Night in the Central and South Americas

Turning to the south, we find that Central and South America similarly experienced a long night. In the Annals of Chauhtitlan, the Mexican Indians tell of a long night. The Aztecs wrote of an extended period of time when the sun did not rise. According to their legend, there had been no sun for many years.



... So a conclave of the gods was called in Teotihuacan, and there it was decided that one of them should offer himself as a sacrifice that once again the world might have a sun ... The sacrificed gods had disappeared in the brazier’s flames, but as there was no sign of the sun, the remaining wonder when it would first appear. At long last, the sun burst forth ... But the sun, despite his brilliant light, did not move; he hung on the edge of the sky, apparently unwilling to begin his appointed task.37



Likewise, in their national book the Popol Vuh, (which translates into “Book of the Princes,&#8221 the Quiché Mayans of Guatemala wrote about the people’s reaction to a long night with these words:



They did not sleep; they remained standing and great was the anxiety of their hearts and their stomachs for the coming of the dawn and the day ... “Oh, ... if we only could see the rising of the sun! What shall we do now?” ... They talked, but they could not calm their hearts which were anxious for the coming of the dawn.38



Now in recent years it has become fashionable to assail the above translations on the grounds that they are biased towards the Judeo-Christian history of the world. For example, the Aztec god who sacrificed himself was to have the honor of becoming the sun. His condition for rising was that the gods kill themselves, which they ultimately were forced to do.39 It would seem that this is a creation myth rather than an account of Joshua’s long day, but the nature of Central American folk tales is very complex. For example, according to the myth there had been a sun before, and it had not risen for so long that people feared it dead. So how is it a creation account?

A similar situation exists with the Popol Vuh. According to some, that entire work is nothing more than one long creation myth. But the creation of man comes very late in the Popol Vuh, long after people have existed and had many adventures. The text quoted above from Goetz and Morley lies embedded in a lengthy section which starts with the longing and waiting for the sun, digresses into the origin of fire, and makes mention of the parting of the sea for the newly-arrived forefathers before resuming the story of the long wait for the dawn. If this is a creation account which occurred before the creation of man and which speaks of the creation of the sun, why are there many priests and tribes in existence? Why the reference to the forefathers who existed then if man had yet to be created? Such situations are typical in the literature of that region and time, and it may easily be understood in the light of the purpose of these tales: they exist to tie together salient pieces of history. So it is, too, with the Aztec tale. There was a long night, but the story has been expanded almost beyond recognition. Similarly with the Popol Vuh there is evidence of changes in the tale even over the last few centuries.

As for the charge that early translators were biased, are the anti-Christian translators not equally biased for their view? The fact remains, there is a reference here to a long night, exactly as would be expected if the various accounts around the world of Joshua’s long day were true.

Besides the accounts of a long night in North and Central America, there is also at least one story of a long night in Peru. According to Montesinos, the collector of the tale, the sun was hidden for nearly 20 hours in the third year of the reign of Titu Yupanqui Pachacuti II because of sin in the land.40 Titu Yupanqui Pachacuti II ruled about 1400 B.C.



The Long Sunset

Stories of a long day and stories of a long night: are there any stories of a long sunrise or a long sunset? There may be some uncollected stories of a long sunrise in Africa, but none have surfaced. There is, however, a story of a long sunset in the Fiji Is lands. J. G. Frazer tells of a tradition on the island of Lakomba in the eastern Fiji Islands where there is a hillside with a patch of weeds on it. The story goes that natives will tie the weeds together in order to keep the sun from going down. It is said that the sun did, indeed, stop from setting at one time.41

Although there are several other traditions of stopping the sun, most are remotely, if at all, connected to Joshua’s long day. In Australia, for example, if a native wanted to stop the sun he would place a piece of sod in the fork of a tree. Similar traditions exist in Africa and in Central America. A tradition of that nature in Japan meant nothing more than the belief that a man’s friends would wait dinner for him if he was going to arrive home late. Still, underlying all but the last of these traditions is the idea that the sun can, and by implication, did stop at least once upon a time.



The Extra-Long Night

A handful of long day and long night tales do not seem to fit. The Hawaiian tale of Maui’s capture of the sun is one, for it implies an arrest of the sun at sunrise. It is similar to the myths from other Polynesian Islands peoples, and those similarities serve to tie it to Peru’s Hezekiah’s sign accounts, not Joshua’s long day.

Three peoples have a tale of a night which lasted several months: the Japanese, an ancient tribe in Lithuania, and the Cherokee Indians of North America. The Cherokee and Japanese tales are virtually identical and seem to stem from the same source. Both have the sun hiding in a cave for a long time and being tricked out of the cave.42

The account from Lithuania was collected by Jerome of Prague when he visited the “heathen” of the area in the early 15th century. There he discovered a tribe which had migrated from the east and which also told tales of a night lasting several months.

There are two possible reasons for these accounts. All could be related to the Japanese account and could reflect either a volcanic eruption which darkened the sky over Japan and Siberia for months on end or else, it could be a tale of the long Arctic night, almost six months long at the pole. A two-month night is experienced about the latitude of Point Barrow, Alaska. Perhaps the accounts relate to these natural events. In any case, they stand in stark contrast with the other long day and long night tales from around the world.



Joshua’s Long Day and the Computers

In the late 1970s and early 1980s two stories appeared in print about a computer finding a missing day. The first is told by Harold Hill in his book, How to Live Like a King’s Kid.43 In Hill’s own words:



When NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center here at Greenbelt, Md. first went on the air, a horrendous technical boo-boo surfaced, causing a complete shutdown [of the computer] after less than an hour’s operation.

I was called in as an outside consultant and came up with a “quick-fix” that saved the day for them.

After things fired up I stayed around as an interested observer, to catch the very beginning of our Space Exploration activity. That was somewhere back in the sixties.

… A large team of IBM technicians was present to debug the system and get it running. No one really knew much except that it looked O.K. on paper. It was during that time that I heard about the aberration in the location of the Heavenly bodies that led to the Bible account of how the MISSING DAY incident came about.

I was not the one who came up with the Bible answer, nor do I know the names of those involved. I simply reported it as it came to me and used it in my lectures on the Bible and Science, which I frequently deliver in schools and Colleges in Science Seminars.

A Newspaper reporter in Spencer, Indiana [Mary Kathryn Bryan in 1970] came across a copy, and fed it into the major News Services. To date I have received over 10,000 letters from all parts of the world.44



Many have correctly pointed out that computers do not stop “and put up a red flag.”45 Some have reported that Hill has retracted his story, but that is not true. Hill still maintains its veracity even though NASA has disavowed any knowledge of him, and others have charged him with various degrees of fraud. It has also been suggested that Hill had based the story on Totten’s book,46 but Hill claims not to have known of the Totten book at the time.47 However, the main problem with Hill’s story is that it would require an independent date for some event such as an eclipse of the sun prior to Joshua’s long day. The most ancient of these observations does not go back as far as 1,000 B.C., let alone 1,500 B.C. Still, Hill’s story raised quite a bit of interest.

A second computer account of a missing day appeared in the Swedish Goteborgs Tidningen on March 15, 1981. According to that story, Stig Flodmark of the University of Stockholm had discovered that the earth’s axis had flipped on May 3, 1375 B.C. and associated that with Joshua’s long day. This proposal is the same as that of Rand who was mentioned earlier in this chapter. According to Flodmark, an Ugaritic astronomer described the event and gave the date. Flodmark refers to a book entitled Tidal Friction and the Earth’s Rotation.48 The comment by the author of the quoted paper, F. R. Stephenson, in summarizing the Ugaritic observation, is “Sun put to shame; went down in daytime.” This hardly describes a tippie top phenomenon, especially with Gibeon at the rotational north pole for the day, for the sun would have been circumpolar for the Ugaritic astronomer; it would not have gone “down in daytime.”



Related Verses

Joshua 10:13 does not stand alone in the Bible. There are several similar verses. One of those is found in Habakkuk 3:11 which states:



The sun and moon stood still in their habitation: at the light of thine arrows they went, and at the shining of thy glittering spear.



Now Habakkuk 3:11 is a double reference: in the first instance, it refers to a future event foreseen by Habakkuk; and in the second instance, it refers back to the taking of Canaan, back to Joshua’s long day. As such, we may consider it as a unit with Joshua 10.

An apparent prophetic reference to Joshua’s long day is found in Job 9:7 which seems to foretell the events described in Joshua 10. It is evident that Job was most likely a contemporary of Abraham or, at least, Job lived no later than Joseph or his sons.49 The verse reads as follows:



[God] commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars.



The Date of Joshua’s Long Day

We noted that the entry into the promised land was early April of 1448 B.C. Can we ascertain the month and day of Joshua’s long day with any degree of certainty? It turns out that we can come close.

When the Israelites entered the promised land, it was the tenth day of the first month (Joshua 4:19), shortly before the time of the Passover which is at the time of the full moon. Now in 1448 B.C. the new moon and the first day of spring closely coincided, the first day of spring being March 19.5 at the time;50 so we can date the very entry into the promised land as Thursday, March 29, give or take a day.

The events which are described between the Passover and the battle at Gibeon all took time. The Passover celebration itself took a week; the fall of Jericho took seven days; the fall of Ai took at least four days; the construction of the altar on mount Ebal and the copying of the law probably took a week or more; the trickery of the Gibeonites took still more time; the communication of that trickery to the Gibeonites’ neighbors and the subsequent formation of an alliance, not to mention their march to Gibeon, all took time. It is reasonable to assume that over a month passed between the celebration of the Passover and Joshua’s long day. This is entirely consistent with the geometry of sun and moon presented in Joshua 10 where the moon seems to be west of the sun and both visible in daylight. Given that the time for the event was 9:00 a.m., the moon was most likely near or after its last quarter. More specifically, then, it appears that Joshua’s long day happened somewhere between May 8 to May 15 of 1448 B.C.



The Commentators Concluded

It should be painfully clear by this time that not only was Joshua’s long day a real miracle, but also it presents man with a great problem: either God writes what he means and means what he writes, or he does not. Most Christian scholars over the centuries have been of the opinion that God needs them to make his truth known, that God is incapable of explaining certain matters to man without that help. This is why most churches hold tradition over the authority of the Bible. Joshua 10:12-14 strikes at the heart of this heresy.

In the twelfth verse it can be argued that when Joshua spoke, he was simply ignorant of the rotation of the earth and thus accused the sun and moon of moving. Hence he spoke geocentrically. This would not introduce an error in the Bible since this is a direct quote. All that inerrancy requires is that the quote must be an accurate quote. That’s fine and well for Joshua, but what of the thirteenth verse? Who is the writer who reports that the “sun stood still, and the moon stayed?” The Bible says that God is its author through the Holy Ghost (2 Timothy 3:16). Verses 13 and 14 of Joshua 10 present us with the point of view of the author, and the author is God himself. God cannot lie, so this point of view must be true. If the perspective is not true, then either God is lying or someone else inspired the wording. If the author is not God then who is he? And just what is that person doing putting words in God’s mouth? If this verse cannot be trusted, then how can we trust any other Bible passage? Could not the same shadow of doubt be cast onto any other particular passage of scripture? And what, then, becomes of the Bible’s witness of itself in such passages as 2Timothy 3:16-17? Or if the commentator is God him self, is he speaking phenomenologically or anthropocentrically? Or is that impossible?

For the moment, let us assume that God is speaking either anthropocentrically or phenomenologically. Let us further sup pose that this is not the only place in the Bible where God does so but that, in particular, he does so in all geocentric passages. Then what does that mean? Just what does it mean to speak anthropocentrically or phenomenologically?

Anthropocentrism literally means “man-centeredness.” In this view, God puts himself in man’s place and speaks from a human perspective. Given that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, this is not at all far-fetched, but does this really excuse the God of Truth, who is the Truth, from writing the whole truth and nothing but the truth? God forbid! Note how simply God could have avoided the contradiction between heliocentrism and geocentricity if instead he had started the thirteenth verse with: “And the earth stopped its turning ....” God does not go out of his way to avoid difficult wording just for the sake of simplicity (Proverbs 1:22). Nor does He express the science of the Bible in simple terms. Take Job chapter 38, for example, where two or three “puzzling” and “poetic” passages have in, recent years, been found to be literally true; yet most of the chapter is completely above man’s comprehension. Simply put, God does not speak anthropocentrically because God is not a man.

Phenomenology is a science which deals with appearances rather than with actual existence (the study of the latter is called ontology). Phenomenology is based on the observation that appearances can be deceiving. Thus when one claims that Joshua 10:13 is phenomenological, one effectively claims that God is not presenting the situation as it actually is but only presents it as it appears to be. If the appearance is not the same as actual fact, then in the final analysis God is not relaying accurate information about the situation. For the sake of “convenience,” God wrote an untruth. God presented the appearance of the situation as the truth rather than presenting the truth as the truth: this is what one means when one says that the Bible speaks phenomenologically.

Phenomenological or anthropocentric: either the sun stood still or the earth stood still; either God inerrantly inspired the wording or He did not; either the Bible is trustworthy or it is not. There is no middle ground. There is no room for compromise. After all, both the anthropocentric theory of inspiration and the phenomenological-language theory are forms of accommodation where God is said to accommodate his wording to the understanding of the common man. Good though that may sound on the surface, accommodation still maintains that God goes along with the accepted story even though he really does not believe it.

The whole issue would be moot if, as the liberals and infidels claim, the Bible was written by men and not God. Belief in the human authorship of Bible earmarked the Sadducees in Christ’s day and still earmarks their spiritual descendants, the liberals, today. The Pharisees recognized the truth about the authorship of the Bible but failed to live up to that fact. When confronted by the truth of their hypocrisy they became enraged rather than repentant. Today’s Pharisee is no different, reacting with violent rage when confronted by these matters. Still, let God be true and every man a liar.



Putting it all Together

When it is all put together, we know more about Joshua’s long day than we know of most other events recorded in the Bible. The best date seems to be within four or five days either side of May 12, 1448 B.C., sometime between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. This we may conclude from plotting all of the long day, long night, and the long sunset accounts on a globe. Such extensive observations preclude the conclusion that the event was an optical illusion restricted to the land of Israel. It also disallows the notion that Joshua’s long day is fictitious, for the testimony of the peoples around the world is entirely consistent with its reality. That some peoples have tales of a long night while others tell of a long day while none have both a long day and a long night tale signifies that Joshua’s long day is not one account, originating in the mid-East, which has migrated all over the world; for if such were the case, then all nations would tell of a long day and none would tell of a long night, let alone a perfectly-placed long sunset. So we must conclude that Joshua’s long day was a real, historical event and not some fiction.

Why, despite the testimonies of various peoples around the globe to the reality of an extremely long day or night, and despite the geographic consistency of the data in terms of day and night, why should the majority of scholars dismiss this wealth of evidence as mere superstition? How could there be more substantial evidence? On the other hand, we shall have occasion to document examples where modern science has accepted the testimony of one individual of dubious integrity. Actually, the heliocentric/geocentric debate is not new, nor is it secret, but the stakes are high and rarely mentioned; for authority is itself at stake. Just who is authoritative and in what? If doubt can be cast on the Bible as an authority in the area of science, then that leaves scientists as the final authority in that area. All too often science is merely another form of politics with little regard for truth if the truth be not expedient. Thus it can be said quite literally that today’s science is tomorrow’s superstition. That was as true in the sixth century B.C. as it is true today.

Witness Galileo Galilei, an early and vocal proponent of heliocentrism and regarded by many as the first true physicist. In 1613 he wrote in a letter to Castelli why Joshua’s long day should not be believed:



And first I ask the adversary if he knows by what motions the sun is moved? If he does know, he must reply that it is moved with two motions, that is, an annual motion from west to east and an opposite diurnal motion from east to west. Hence, in the second place, I ask if these two movements, so diverse and almost contrary to one another, both belong to the sun and are equally its own? They are forced to answer no; that one alone is its own and particular motion, which is the annual, while the other is not the sun’s at all, but that of the highest sky, called the Prime Mobile, which sweeps along with itself the sun and the other planets and also the starry sphere, constraining them to make one revolution around the earth in 24 hours, with a motion (as I said) almost contrary to their natural and proper motions.

So I come to the third question, and ask them by which of these two motions the sun produces day and night, that is, by its own or from the Prime Mobile? It is necessary to respond that day and night are the effects of motion of the Prime Mobile, while from the proper motion of the sun not day and night, but the different seasons, and the year itself are produced.

Now if the day depends not on the sun’s motion, but on that of the Prime Mobile, who can fail to see that in order to prolong the day it is necessary to stop the Prime Mobile, and not the sun? ... It being therefore absolutely impossible, in the arrangement of Ptolemy and Aristotle, to stop the motion of the sun and to lengthen the day, as the Scripture affirms to have happened.51



In his challenge, Galileo sets up a straw man and thus exemplifies the ignorance of the Bible which is so characteristic of humanity. True, if one ascribes the annual motion to the sun and the diurnal (daily) motion to the stars, then Galileo’s argument is correct; but the Bible does not fall into such simple traps. The Bible clearly indicates that the sun is to rule the day. This means that the daily motion is unique to the sun and has nothing to do with the annual motion. The sun’s period is exactly 24 hours. The stars’ daily motion nearly matches the sun’s period, being about 3 minutes 56 seconds less than the sun’s period. Over the course of one year this amounts to one extra revolution about the earth, namely, the annual effect. (The north-south annual motion of the sun can be shown to be due to the difference between the sun’s period of revolution and the rotation rate of the rest of the universe.) When viewed from that perspective, Galileo’s argument falls flat on its face. Both motions are from east to west, but the sun’s motion is roughly 1/365th slower than that of the cosmos. Thus the motions are not “almost contrary” but are almost identical. Yet no theologian has ever come up with a better argument against Joshua’s long day than has Galileo at this one point.



Conclusion

The upshot is that there appears to be solid evidence from the Bible and from folklore around the world that there was one day which, depending upon geographical location, presented the inhabitants of the earth with an unusually long span of daylight or night. Attempts to explain this phenomenon by naturalistic means have all failed because no mechanism known to physics can absorb the earth’s spin energy and momentum (or the universe’s from a geocentric point of view) in such a short period of time without causing great upheavals such as the oceans spilling over the continents. Agnostic or atheistic scholars choose not to deal with the ancient witnesses. Such a phenomenon as Joshua’s long day can only happen with divine intervention. But then science does not claim to have all the answers: its authority is found wanting. Is the Bible, then, the final authority after all? Not if God said that the sun stopped when it was actually the earth which ceased to rotate. And that brings us to the heart of the matter.

Attempts to phenomenalize Joshua’s long day or to make it allegorical thus fail. Christians and Jewish people are presented with a real historical event in Joshua 10:12-14. The central issue from their perspective is that of inerrancy of the Bible. God wrote in verse 13 that the “sun stood still and the moon stayed.” God either meant what he wrote, or he did not. There is no excuse for God because he is the God of truth; therefore all things he says and does must reflect that fact. So God cannot utter an untruth and we must conclude that the Bible teaches, in Joshua 10:13 and else where, that the universe rotates around the earth once per day, carrying the sun, moon and stars with it, regardless of what introductory astronomy texts may say.

 

[CrackedSkull]

And all this was before it was discovered that the Sun is the center of the universe and not the other way around as bible writers thought.

 

[AsheedMidrarwz]

And all this was before it was discovered that the Sun is the center of the universe and not the other way around as bible writers thought.

You have some unfinished business. Show the post to back up your claim that I'm a racist.

 

[LittleNipper]

And all this was before it was discovered that the Sun is the center of the universe and not the other way around as bible writers thought.

God holds the Universe together. The Universe was made for the earth, The earth was not made for the Universe...

 

[CrackedSkull]

And all this was before it was discovered that the Sun is the center of the universe and not the other way around as bible writers thought.

God holds the Universe together. The Universe was made for the earth, The earth was not made for the Universe...

You know how ridiculous that sounds? For starters its all an Argument from Perfection. No proof a god did any of it.

 

[ima]

And all this was before it was discovered that the Sun is the center of the universe and not the other way around as bible writers thought.

God holds the Universe together. The Universe was made for the earth, The earth was not made for the Universe...

You know how ridiculous that sounds? For starters its all an Argument from Perfection. No proof a god did any of it.

Didn't you know? When it rains, that's god taking a leak.

 

[LittleNipper]

And all this was before it was discovered that the Sun is the center of the universe and not the other way around as bible writers thought.

God holds the Universe together. The Universe was made for the earth, The earth was not made for the Universe...

You know how ridiculous that sounds? For starters its all an Argument from Perfection. No proof a god did any of it.

There is even far less proof that everything happened of its own accord.

 

[ima]

God holds the Universe together. The Universe was made for the earth, The earth was not made for the Universe...

You know how ridiculous that sounds? For starters its all an Argument from Perfection. No proof a god did any of it.

There is even far less proof that everything happened of its own accord.

So you agree that there's not much proof to what you claim. So what is your proof that god holds the universe together? And do you mean like in a big man hug?

 

[daws101]

for the millionth time NO IT'S NOT THERE IS NO EVIDENCE AT ALL CORROBERATING THE CREATION MYTH!
THE BIBLE IS NOT EVIDENCE IN IT'S SELF.
NOAHS ARK , JOSUHA STOPPING THE SUN, JESUS MIRICALING UP FISH AND LOAFS ETC..
HAVE NO NON BIBLICAL MENTIONS IN OTHER HISTISTORIES WRITTEN AT THAT TIME.

Joshua’s Long Day around the World?

EDITED FOR WALL OF TEXT VIOLATION AND UTTER Nonsense!
next time you want to post a long ass piece use a link.
you might want to try actual science..
btw shit for brains, where's the link for that is post? you did not write that yourself.





best answer!

 

[daws101]

God holds the Universe together. The Universe was made for the earth, The earth was not made for the Universe...

You know how ridiculous that sounds? For starters its all an Argument from Perfection. No proof a god did any of it.

There is even far less proof that everything happened of its own accord.

false declarative ..no corroborating evidence.

 

[LittleNipper]

You know how ridiculous that sounds? For starters its all an Argument from Perfection. No proof a god did any of it.

There is even far less proof that everything happened of its own accord.

So you agree that there's not much proof to what you claim. So what is your proof that god holds the universe together? And do you mean like in a big man hug?

I know that there is a God the very same way you know that you have an earthly dad.

 

[LittleNipper]

You know how ridiculous that sounds? For starters its all an Argument from Perfection. No proof a god did any of it.

There is even far less proof that everything happened of its own accord.

false declarative ..no corroborating evidence.

Carl Sagon is dead and will soon be forgotten, but the nation of Israel lives on and on... Exactly as God ordained. Such could not happen if God didn't exist.

 

[LittleNipper]

for the millionth time NO IT'S NOT THERE IS NO EVIDENCE AT ALL CORROBERATING THE CREATION MYTH!
THE BIBLE IS NOT EVIDENCE IN IT'S SELF.
NOAHS ARK , JOSUHA STOPPING THE SUN, JESUS MIRICALING UP FISH AND LOAFS ETC..
HAVE NO NON BIBLICAL MENTIONS IN OTHER HISTISTORIES WRITTEN AT THAT TIME.

Joshua’s Long Day around the World?

EDITED FOR WALL OF TEXT VIOLATION AND UTTER Nonsense!
next time you want to post a long ass piece use a link.
you might want to try actual science..
btw shit for brains, where's the link for that is post? you did not write that yourself.



[ame=http://youtu.be/kf0DYaMjhZc]Scopes Monkey Trial, Part 1 - YouTube[/ame]

best answer!

[ame=http://youtu.be/58xCWUibDGU]Scopes Monkey Trial, Part 2 - YouTube[/ame]

Your foul mouth hangs a big sign around your neck. You certainly do not sound like a child of God, and obviously according to you, one cannot be since (according to you) God doesn't exist. So why are you like you are and I am like I am?

 

[Hollie]

There is even far less proof that everything happened of its own accord.

So you agree that there's not much proof to what you claim. So what is your proof that god holds the universe together? And do you mean like in a big man hug?

I know that there is a God the very same way you know that you have an earthly dad.

Actually, you know that there are gawds in the same way that people know Bigfoot exists, that space aliens have visited this planet and that Dorothy and Toto visited the Emerald city.

 

[ima]

It's what's at the heart of most, if not all religions.

 

[CrackedSkull]

There is even far less proof that everything happened of its own accord.

false declarative ..no corroborating evidence.

Carl Sagon is dead and will soon be forgotten, but the nation of Israel lives on and on... Exactly as God ordained. Such could not happen if God didn't exist.

No. Israel was going to become a nation anyway it had nothing to do with some 2000 year old prophecy 2000 years later.