Why God stopping the sun in the sky is utterly stupid.

Post Reply New Topic

That simply isn't true. Written accounts can be radically altered. Ancient books and manuscripts were often plagiarized, rewritten, and had extra writings added to them. Keep in mind that there were no copyright laws then and no ownership of intellectual property. How many times have Mormons revised their Book of Mormon? Why not? The Book of Mormon copied parts of the Bible and the rest is sheer fantasy. Christians over the centuries have added to the Bible and have constantly reinterpreted it. Writing today is far more accurate because of strict copyright laws. Of course infallible holy books are exempt and people can interpret them at will.

Well, another way of looking at it is the Bible does record events as seen from a land-based perspective. If you interpret it that way, then the sun appeared to slow or stop its movement across the sky.

If this is not the case, i.e. the earth did not STOP moving (because the earth does not appear to move from an earth-bound perspective), what are some hypotheticals that might explain what was observed?

Suppose there was some kind of space-time anomaly, like a bubble or a fold, that could just simply have slowed the relative motion of the earth and/or the sun. That would explain how the longer day avoided causing global catastrophic effects. The only thing that's confusing, though, is a space-time bubble/bobble/whatever should affect everything on the planet, including the "clock" in our brains (how fast we process sensory input) and our own physical rate of movement. In other words, even if it happened right now, we wouldn't even know it. How could something like that pass through the earth, pass through the sun, or both, is such a way that large bodies like the sun and the earth line up so that one stops in relation to the other and human sense of time remain unaffected?

Or could it have been a massive object passing directly behind the earth exerting counterbalancing tidal forces on the oceans while slowing and momentarily stopping the earth's rotation? The main problem with global catastrophe ensuing is if the earth came to a dead stop virtually instantaneously. There would have been the obvious tsunamis even with a gentle braking effect, but conceivably nowhere near Noah's flood proportions much less actually worse.

What bothers me about the whole line of questioning is the OP is simply assuming there's no possible way it could happen. A heavily localized time-space warp, perhaps, or an as-yet unknown massive object passing near the earth might conceivable produce those effects. We're so busy explaining the impossibility of it we don't even consider how it might really have happened.

I have no problem with supernatural attribution. I mean, if you argue an actual physical possibility, then it merely holds that the event just happened to coincide with a battle. God doesn't require human beings to understand something to make that something happen. But it isn't impossible to produce a hypothetical scenario to begin understanding the physical science behind such an event.