Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Bad Arguments

Creationists start from a faulty premise, but putting that aside, here are some arguments they should avoid:


"NASA computers, in calculating the positions of planets, found a missing day and 40 minutes, proving Joshua's "long day" and Hezekiah's sundial movement of Joshua 10 and 2 Kings 20." Not promoted by major creationist organizations, but an hoax in wide circulation, especially on the Internet.

Essentially the same story, now widely circulated on the Internet, appeared in the somewhat unreliable 1936 book The Harmony of Science and Scripture by Harry Rimmer. Evidently an unknown person embellished it with modern organization names and modern calculating devices.

Also, the whole story is mathematically impossible. It requires a fixed reference point before Joshua's long day. In fact we would need to cross-check between both astronomical and historical records to detect any missing day. And to detect a missing 40 minutes requires that these reference points be known to within an accuracy of a few minutes. It is certainly true that the timing of solar eclipses observable from a certain location can be known precisely. But the ancient records did not record time that precisely, so the required cross-check is simply not possible. Anyway, the earliest historically recorded eclipse occurred in 1217 BC, nearly two centuries after Joshua. So there is no way the missing day could be detected by any computer.

Note that discrediting this myth doesn't mean that the events of Joshua 10 didn't happen. Features in the account support its reliability, e.g. the moon was also slowed down. This was not necessary to prolong the day, but this would be observed from Earth's reference frame if God had accomplished this miracle by slowing Earth's rotation."


They do, however, still try to propagate other junk ideas:

"There are gaps in the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 so the Earth may be 10,000 years old or even more." This is not so. The language is clear that they are strict chronologies, especially because they give the age of the father at the birth of the next name in line. So the Earth is only about 6,000 years old.


AnswersinGenesis.org:
Arguments we think creationists should NOT use

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