Originally Posted by John A. Broussard

I hate to side with the fundies on anything, but I have to admit that a 100% support of the bible by the findings of reputable archeologist would go a long way in my estimation to indicate that god exists.

That would be especially true if Chinese, Indian, Egyptian records showed that the sun stood still for forty-eight hours right up there in the middle of the sky on that fateful day when Joshua and his nomads were scuffling with their neighbors.

Wouldn't you be persuaded?

Originally Posted by dRider

Either we realize that this story is just an impossible fable from the past, or we have to start worrying about every impossible fable from the past. So if we could just close Pandora's box.... :devil3:

Originally Posted by Chuck Rightmire

No I wouldn't. The historicity of any event is one thing. That it is interpreted in a certain way is not. The event is not the after-the-fact understanding of it or the mythology of it. And I would ask how, if the sun wasn't moving, the chroniclers could tell that the sun stood still 48 hours. After all, time is relative when you're having fun. And time pieces were not that spectacular back in 700 BCE. (Incidentally, Velikovsky suggests that Chinese myth does say something about a day without a night.)

Originally Posted by John A. Broussard

This is my third attempt to get an answer to this question. What happens each time is that the discussion goes off into incomprehensibility. Maybe that's where it belongs, but I'm going to try once more. Here are the biblical statements:

12 Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel,<b> "O sun, stand still at Gibeon, And O moon in the valley of Aijalon." </b>

13 So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, Until the nation avenged themselves of their enemies. Is it not written in the book of Jashar? And the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.

14 There was no day like that before it or after it, when the LORD listened to the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel.


Here's the question:

So "the sun stood still." Now, did it? If not, how do those who believe in the inerrancy of the bible explain what happened?

Originally Posted by intel2000

I once read that Gibeon and Aijalon were so close that it would be nonsense to say that the sun was "over" one but not the other.

Imagine: "The sun stood still over Philadelphia and the Moon over Washington D.C." Well, when the sun is out in one place, isnt it also out in the other?????

Originally Posted by aikido7

It's not that the biblical writers wrote beautiful, metaphoric stories and aren't we so smart now to realize that. It's that since the Enlightenment we got dumb and took them literally.

Originally Posted by ConsequentAtheist

Oy vey ... Reframing the absurd as metaphor is more convenient than compelling. Characterizing the Joshua story as "beautiful" metaphor impresses me as laughable.

As for the topic at hand, it seems to me that the theist need do little other than sit back and chuckle. After all, the atheist complaint is reducible to something like: "Talk of stopping the sun is absurd. Only a God could do something like that!" IMO, it's better to ridicule the act as silly than denigrate it as miraculous.

Originally Posted by B.S. Lewis

Didn't you get the email? There was an email that went all around the internet a few years ago about how NASA had found a "missing day" in time that could only be accounted for by the Joshua story.