From: Ted Davis (TDavis@messiah.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 10 2002 - 13:50:30 EST
Sheila, welcome to our forum.
You wrote:
I do have some interesting questions about Joshua 10, when God made the
sun
and the moon stand still in the sky for an entire day.
We've all seen the scam emails about the man who worked for NASA and
"proved"
this was true. I have personally contacted people who worked with the man
and
he did not work for NASA or prove anything about the story. He was a
salesman.
My questions are:
Can we prove this to be true?
What evidence could we look for or expect to find?
How could we prove it?
MY REPLY:
Since the early 1970s, the modern form of the missing day story has been
associated with Harold Hill, who did not (apparently) write about the story,
but is reported to have stated it verbally on certain occasions.
Hill did write a little antievolution book with a really wonderful title,
"From Goo to You by Way of the Zoo," (1976). Werhner von Braun wrote the
preface in my paperback copy. He does not identify himself as a NASA
engineer, which is what many accounts say, but that is certainly possible.
He does say this about himself:
"My business is science. Scientists who do it for money are called
engineers." He goes on to say that he was inspired to write this little
book by reading Harry Rimmer's "The Harmony of Science and Scripture," about
which I've written quite a bit elsewhere. Rimmer does have a version of the
missing day story in that book.
Several people have written in detail about this history of this false
story (that either NASA computers or a Yale astronomer have confirmed the
missing day of Joshua). I list some of these sources in the bibliography to
my whale story, which you can read online at the main asa website
(asa3.org).
To "confirm" such a story, we would need reasonably complete sky records
(positions of planets, the sun & moon, relative to background stars) from
before the battle of Ajalon and after it. Although the Babylonians had a
continuous set of observations going back to about 750 BC, that's as far as
we can go to the best of my knowledge. And everyone agrees that Joshua was
long dead by 750 BC. So, we're out of luck.
Like the whale story, this is just a fish story.
Ted Davis
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