waynespencer | AnswersBlog

In Joshua chapter 10 in the Old Testament is an amazing story. It is about an important battle in the conquest of Canaan by the ancient Israelites. This story is well known not so much for the battle but for something that happened during the battle, the Long Day of Joshua. People have debated how to interpret this story. Even many Christians do not take it literally. The idea of “taking the Bible literally” is a misunderstood concept. The correct way to look at the Bible is to take it as an imperfect translation of copies of inerrant documents. To say it is not a perfect translation is not to question inerrancy. Inerrancy is about the original manuscripts, not about translations. The way to interpret it is to interpret it according to it’s literary genre. That basically means to treat it like any other document or ancient book. There is a lot of historical and cultural background to be aware of. But the Bible is actually true to history.

I can understand people struggling with believing miracles described in the Old Testament. When I became a Christian I had trouble believing in miracles. But there’s no explaining much of anything about our existence without miracles. The Bible doesn’t make sense without miracles either. If you try to treat a miracle in the Bible as symbolic or allegorical, then the story no longer makes sense. So if the passage is a historical narrative and it just happens to describe a miracle, we should not dismiss the miracle. If God is all-powerful, miracles can happen. I know the things that physicists or scientists may bring up about miracles in the Old Testament. But science cannot disprove a miracle from a one-time event that happened in the past that cannot be repeated. Scripture has more authority than science, and more certainty. But Scripture does not describe things in scientific detail. When the Bible describes something about nature it is describing from the perspective of an eyewitness who is just describing what they saw and experienced. It is not giving a complete scientific description. This means Scripture gives an accurate account of what happened, but it does not give a scientific description of what happened. The hermeneutical term for this is that the Bible uses phenomenological language. So you have to understand this about the purpose and limits of how the Bible is written. This means science can neither prove or disprove a miracle from the past described in the Bible.

A story has gone around that NASA once did orbital calculations that showed there was a “missing day” and that this proves the long day of Joshua happened. This is nonsense. No one should believe this. NASA is good but they couldn’t possibly do this. God hardly needs NASA’s help to give evidence to believe the Bible, God has done enough himself to give reason to believe it. Christians should not believe nonsensical ideas that go around. Believing this story about NASA or scientists proving the long day of Joshua is being too gullible. But believing the Bible is not being gullible, it is being wise.

In Joshua chapters 9 and 10 it tells about the people of the city of Gibeon. They tricked Joshua into thinking they lived far away, so that they could get the Israelites to agree to make a defensive pact with them and not destroy them. Then the other Amorite city-states considered the Gibeonites to be traitors essentially. They must not have wanted the Israelites to take control of the lands around Gibeon. So five Amorite kings pooled their armies to attack Gibeon. The people of Gibeon then sent to Joshua for help.

It says Joshua sent the entire Israelite army (which was over 600,000 men) to this battle at Gibeon. This is why I like to call this Israel’s D-Day. There was a large battle at Gibeon and the Israelites were winning, so the Amorites start to flee. The Amorites scatter in all directions and the Israelites start to chase them down. Then it says God sent a large hailstorm and hail killed many Amorites as they tried to flee. Then as the Israelites were trying to run them down, Joshua prays for the Sun to stand still and the Moon to stop, so they could have more time in the day to complete their victory. It says the Sun stopped in the middle of the sky and didn’t go down for about a day, and that the Moon also stopped. Now, should we take this as a real long day?

The trouble with saying it was not an actual miraculous long day is explaining how the Israelites could do so much in one day! If you read through chapter 10 and pay attention to the details, in verse 28 it refers to “That day” so it was still the same day in verse 28. This means that after the big battle at the city of Gibeon, the Israelites travelled about 30 or 35 miles in that one day, and they stopped in multiple towns along the way to take them also. Then in verse 32 it says they attacked the city of Lachish and they “took it on the second day.” If it was not a truly long day, they could not have done so much in one day. In fact, they had to march all night uphill through the mountains to get to Gibeon to start with. So it is amazing all they did in that day. Israel took control of a large swath of territory that day.

Certain ideas have been suggested to explain the miracle of this away. But when you think about these alternative ideas, they don’t make sense. Like the suggestion it was just psychological, so it wasn’t really a long day, it just seemed like it. If that were all, then how was it such an extraordinary answer to prayer as it says (see verse 14)? It describes in two different ways clearly that the Sun stopped in the sky. It was not psychological.

I say we should believe this as a great miracle that really happened. It means God can do incredible things helping his people sometimes when it is his purpose to do so. We do tend to underestimate God. Even when we have asked him for something, it can be surprising when he does it!

Now if I were thinking as a physicist, based on my knowledge of planetary science, I could guess at how this happened. But this is only a guess. We don’t know how God did this. But I would guess the spin of the Earth was slowed down so that Earth was temporarily put into synchronous rotation. This would make Earth’s spin work like the Moon does now, it keeps the same side facing the Earth because the time for one spin on the Moon’s axis is the same as the time for the Moon to orbit the Earth. If Earth’s spin totally stopped the Sun would not actually stop in the sky, it would slowly move backwards as Earth moved along its orbit. So synchronous rotation would be the logical thing apparently. Now, understand that for God to drastically slow Earth’s spin would be a major catastrophy that might destroy most life on Earth if he did not protect the Earth. He would have to prevent the ocean from washing over the continents, and keep the atmosphere from spinning rapidly around the planet. He’d probably need to restrain the motion of the core of the Earth also. But God is big enough to handle these things.

The significant thing is that the Creator-God intervened into history to help his people. It makes me think of Ephesians 3:20-21 (NIV) “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen!”

Since the early 1960’s creationists with a science background, and a few others from other disciplines, have done research. What is research? I don’t mean the kind of research you do when you want to find out where a certain shop or restaurant is. I don’t mean the kind of research done by a college freshman to get a research paper done for a class, though that is getting closer. Since science has been misguided and off track regarding origins because of evolutionary and naturalistic thinking, the science of origins has been in need of being rethought and reworked from first principles. So the kind of research I’m talking about is original scholarly research on a technical level to deal with many challenging questions about origins from a truly Christian perspective. The answers that are based on unbelief in God’s word are not satisfying. But sometimes it takes a lot of work to find an alternative to the naturalistic approach that assumes the Bible is wrong or outdated. Doing original research can take different forms but it is often a slow difficult and sometimes tedious process and it usually gets no recognition. It is something you can’t expect most people to understand, most of the time. But it is necessary and creationist research has paid off, though it has not been perfect.

This summer in Pittsburgh, PA at the International Conference on Creationism (ICC) the Creation Research Society celebrated it’s 50th Anniversary. The ICC conference was well attended, over 400 people there. The evenings are open for anyone to attend and there are four full days of meetings with lecture followed by question and answers. This year it was also broadcasted over the internet via live Webinars. So questions came in from the internet during the Q and A time, which was great.

The Creation Research Society Quarterly has been publishing a peer-reviewed journal on creation research for 50 years! The CRS Quarterly is a great resource. Before new findings on creation can be communicated to the public they need to be published on a technical level by the author and scrutinized on a scholarly level. This is how there is some accountability and refinement of new ideas before they are more widely disseminated on a more popular nontechnical level. If ideas presented on a nontechnical level have not gone through this kind of peer-review scrutiny, it may not have much impact or may be a disappointment. I have often observed that the sensational new ideas are usually not important and the important new ideas are not sensational. So to find the really important research you have to learn where to look. Sometimes there are well-meaning efforts that turn out to be misguided or mistaken.

I have presented at four of the ICC conferences in the past, but this time I just attended without presenting. I did review one paper. I have been on both sides of the peer-review process, as author and as reviewer. Being a reviewer is a quiet thankless job but very important. The ICC is perhaps the best venue for creationists to share and critique each other’s research. There are always important new findings. It’s not that all the papers presented are totally right all the time, or in total agreement with each other. But over time there is progress in understanding from the efforts.

I was encouraged by new important findings such as the soft tissue found by creationist scientists in a Triceratops horn. There is a project called iDino that is researching this tissue. There are absolutely amazing microscope images and results from it. It severely challenges evolution and old age thinking. Then there was the research from Timothy Clary, now a geologist at ICR, about overthrusts and superfaults. This is some of the best evidence of a really catastrophic global Flood I’ve ever heard. Really great work. In genetics there is now important research being done by creationists on the differences between human and chimpanzee DNA. It has always been misleading to say Chimp DNA is 98% like human DNA. Now it is just so far wrong as to be absurd. Such a number may still be quoted but is very out of date and was always misleading. There has also been progress in creation biology on identifying the Biblical “kinds” or “baramins” as they have been called. The research clarifies what has happened to life in Noah’s Flood and since the Flood. I think it also underscores that God intervened into Earth history to carry out his purposes.

At the ICC Russ Humphreys presented a great paper about the problems with Earth magnetic dynamo theories. This is an important area that I’ve studied. It serves as the basis of understanding planetary magnetic fields also, even though it hasn’t been very successful in planetary science. Humphreys young age creationist approach is much more realistic in my opinion. There were other papers relating to Egyptian history, biology, geology, and cosmology. Some very interesting new ideas sometimes. The Creation Science Fellowship of Pittsburgh will produce discs that that have the proceedings papers and another disc of the presentations.

There was a panel discussion on impacts from space and Noah’s Flood at the ICC this year. Such a panel discussion, done for all the attenders during the day, had not been done before. This was very significant to me since I have done some ICC papers on the subject. I was not part of the panel up front. The discussion showed that there were different views on when impacts from space could happen in a young age view of Earth history. There was a lot of discussion of whether to have impacts occurring in the Creation week or not. There seems to be an acknowledgement of the possibility of impacts during Noah’s Flood but there’s a wide range of opinions on how many impacts and their significance. Some ideas on impacts and the Flood presented at the ICC confirms certain things in my papers but there are still a number of puzzling questions. There is radioactive decay data, impact crater data, and magnetic data and creationists have not come to a consensus on how to reconcile all these types of data. We need God’s help to figure out these puzzles.

Young age creationist scientists have a lot more good solid research than the evolutionists know. There are many exciting evidences from creation research that confirm the truth of the Bible. There are also many questions raised by new findings that show we are finite creatures who don’t have all the answers.

Christianity and Reasons for Faith – by Wayne R. Spencer