The Space Program and The Bible
(Yellville, AR, Mountain Echo, 26 Mar 70) |
Did you know that the space
program is busy proving that what has been called "myth" in the
Bible is true? Mr. Harold Hill, president of the Curtis Engine Company in
Baltimore, MD, and a consultant in the space program related the following
development:
"I think one of the most
amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts
checking the position of sun, moon and planets out in space where they would
be 100 years and 1000 years from now. We have to know this so we don't send a
satellite up and have it bump into something later on in its orbits. We have
to lay out the orbit in terms of the life of the satellite, and where the
planets will be so the whole thing will not bog down! They ran the computer
measurement back and forth over the centuries and it came to a halt. The
computer stopped and put up a red signal, which meant that there was
something wrong, either in the 'info' fed into it, or with the results as
compared to the standards. They called in the service department to check it
out and they said "It's perfect.' The IBM head of operations said
'What's wrong?' 'Well, we have found that there is a day missing in space in
elapsed time.' They scratched their heads and tore their hair. There was no
answer.
"One religious fellow in the
team said, 'You know, one time I was in Sunday School and they talked about
the sun standing still.' They didn't believe him, but they didn't have any
other answer so they said 'Show us'. So he got a Bible and went back to the
book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anybody who
has 'common sense.' There they found the Lord saying to Joshua, 'Fear them
not; I have delivered them into your hand; there shall not a man of them
stand before thee.' Joshua was concerned because he was surrounded by the
enemy and, if darkness fell, they would overpower him. So Joshua asked the
Lord to make the sun stand still! That's right! 'The sun stood still and the
moon stayed ... and hasted not to go down a whole day!' Well, they checked
the computers, going back into the time it was written and found it was close
but not close enough. The elapsed time that was missing back in Joshua's day
was 23 hours and 20 minutes -- not a whole day. They read the Bible and there
it said 'about (approximately) a day.'
"These little words in the
Bible are important. But they were still in trouble because, if you cannot
account for 40 minutes, you'll be in big trouble 1000 years from now. Forty
minutes had to be found because it can be multiplied many times over in
orbits. Well, this religious fellow also remembered somewhere in the Bible it
said the sun went backwards. The spacemen told him he was out of his mind.
But they got out the Book and they read these words in 2 Kings 20: Hezekiah,
on his death-bed, was visited by the prophet Isaiah, who told him that he was
going to die. Hezekiah did not believe him and asked for a sign as proof.
Isaiah said, 'Do you want the sun to go ahead ten degrees?' Hezekiah said 'It
is nothing for the sun to go ahead ten degrees, but let the shadow return
backwards ten degrees.' Isaiah spoke to the Lord and the Lord brought the
shadow ten degrees backward! Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes! 23 hours and
20 minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in 2 Kings make the missing day in the
universe."
Isn't that amazing! Our God is
rubbing their noses in his TRUTH. That's right.
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Naturally, many
Christians are excited about the story, but others are asking, "Is it
really true?" Such a question may sound like lack of faith to some, but
without rejecting the biblical accounts, an attempt to investigate this story
is just obedience to the apostle's commands "Prove all things; hold fast
to that which is good" (1 Thess 5:21) and "Whatsoever things are true
... think on these things" (Php 4?9). So let us ask, "Is the story
true?"
William Willoughby, the
religion editor of the Washington, DC Evening Star and an
evangelical who is seeking to have creation taught in the public schools, wrote
an article on the NASA computer story in his "Washington Perspective"
column of August 8, 1970. He had contacted NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
at Greenbelt, MD and was told that no one there knew of any such event having
occurred. So many people have written NASA about the story that they have
printed up a special form-letter to answer them.
Willoughby also
contacted Harold Hill in Baltimore. Hill sticks to his story, which he claims
to have on good authority, but he says he cannot locate his documentation.
These facts by
themselves cast something of a shadow on the story, but the doubt increases
when certain details of the story itself are examined. Mention is made of
"a day missing in space in elapsed time," but nothing is said about
how this day was discovered, except that a computer found it. But computers
cannot do any calculations that humans cannot do, nor do they "know"
anything that we don't. Their real advantages are speed and accuracy.
To detect a day missing
in elapsed time, it would be necessary to have a known fixed-point in time
before the day that is missing. Moreover, the above story suggests that the
scientists found not only that exactly one day was missing,
but that 23 hours, 20 minutes of it was lost in the time of Joshua (not after
1250 BC; many conservative scholars put it back around 1400 BC), and the
remaining 40 minutes was lost in the time of Hezekiah (about 700 BC). So in
this case, we need two fixed-points: one before the time of Joshua and another
between the times of Joshua and Hezekiah. These fixed-points must be known with
an accuracy of a few minutes both by astronomical calculation and by
contemporary historical records in order to detect the discrepancy.
The only method I know
of which could produce such accuracy would be observations of eclipses of the
sun, since these are total only along narrow paths and only last for a few
minutes at any specific locality. But the earliest dateable eclipse
of the sun occurred in the year 1217 BC, after the time of Joshua (see the
article "Eclipse" in the 1970 edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica). In any case, ancient eclipse observations are not given with a
accuracy of a few minutes even by local time, so confirmation of Joshua's long
day by science seems to be impossible at present. This strongly suggests that
the computer story is a hoax.
In addition, the main
features of this story are older than either NASA or electronic computers! In
his Harmony of Science and Scripture, published in 1936, Harry
Rimmer recounts the following story (pp 281-282):
There is a book by Prof. C. A.
Totten of Yale, written in 1890, which establishes the case beyond the shadow
of a doubt. The condensed account of his book, briefly summarized, is as
follows:
Professor Totten wrote of a
fellow-professor, an accomplished astronomer, who made the strange discovery
that the earth was twenty-four hours out of schedule! That is to say, there
had been twenty-four hours lost out of time. In discussing this point with
his fellow-professor, Professor Totten challenged this man to investigate the
question of the inspiration of the Bible. He said, "You do not believe
the Bible to be the Word of God, and I do. Now here is a fine opportunity to
prove whether or not the Bible is inspired. You begin to read at the very
beginning and read as far as need be, and see if the Bible cannot account for
your missing time."
The astronomer accepted the
challenge and began to read. Some time later, when the two men chanced to
meet on the campus, Professor Totten asked his friend if he had proved the
question to his satisfaction. His colleague replied, "I believe I have
definitely proved that the Bible is not the Word of God. In the tenth chapter
of Joshua, I found the missing twenty-four hours accounted for. Then I went
back and checked up on my figures, and found that at the time of Joshua there
were only twenty-three hours and twenty minutes lost. If the Bible made a
mistake of forty minutes, it is not the Book of God!"
Professor Totten said, "You
are right, in part at least. But does the Bible say that a whole day was
lost at the time of Joshua?" So they looked and saw that the text said,
"about the space of a whole day."
The word "about" changed
the whole situation, and the astronomer took up his reading again. He read on
until he came to the thirty-eighth chapter of the prophet Isaiah. In this
chapter, Isaiah has left us the thrilling story of the king, Hezekiah, who
was sick unto death. In reponse to his prayer, God promised to add fifteen
more years to his life. To confirm the truth of His promise, God offered a
sign. He said, "Go out in the court and look at the sundial of Ahaz. I
will make the shadow on the sundial back up ten degrees!" Isaiah
recounts that that king looked, and while he looked, the shadow turned
backward ten degrees, by which ten degrees it had already gone down. This
settles the case, for ten degrees on the sundial is forty minutes on the face
of the clock! So the accuracy of the Book was established to the satisfaction
of this exacting critic.
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Comparing this account
with the NASA computer story, notice that both include the same three numbers:
a whole day missing overall; 23 hours and 20 minutes lost at the time of
Joshua; and 40 minutes at the time of Hezekiah. Here, too, we have a dramatic (but
rather different) story of how a skeptic is brought to see the truth of
Scripture. In addition, there is reference made to a book by a C. A. Totten,
which dates back to 1890.
Charles Adiel Lewis
Totten is listed in Who Was Who in America (1:1247). He was a
professor of military science at Yale from 1889 to 1892, when he resigned to
spend more time on his religious studies. He was a British-Israelist, believing
that the Anglo-Saxons were the lost tribes of Israel, and an Adventist, who
predicted the reign of Antichrist would occur in the seven-year period 1892-99.
Among his many writings is Joshua's Long Day and the Dial of Ahaz,
published in 1890. After some exertion and considerable frustration, I
succeeded in locating a copy of the third revised edition, published in 1891.
Since then, the work has been reprinted by Destiny Publishers of Merrimac,
Massachusetts.
Reading Totten's book
brought another shock -- the dramatic story of a skeptic convinced does not
appear! Instead, Totten himself, a non-skeptic all along, seeks to show that a
total of 24 hours are missing from past time, of which 23 hours, 20 minutes wre
lost in Joshua's day, and 40 minutes at the time of Hezekiah.
Totten does not actually
reproduce the calculations by which he seeks to prove his case, but merely
gives the results. On pages 39, 59 and 61 of the edition I consulted, the fact
emerges that Totten is using an assumed date of creation --
the autumnal equinox, September 22, 4000 BC (p 61) -- as the known fixed-point
before the long day of Joshua! Taking the first day of creation to be a Sunday
by his understanding of Scripture, and finding that by calculating back from
the present, September 22, 4000 BC would fall on a Monday, he concludes:
"...it can come so by no possible mathematics without the interpolation or
'intercalation' of exactly 24 hours" (p 59).
Totten's presentation
tends to obscure his method of discovery. It looks like he really started with
this 24 hours missing, then decided from the ten degrees mentioned in the
Hezekiah incident to assign 40 minutes to that event (since the sun moves about
10 degrees in 40 minutes), leaving 23 hours, 20 minutes to Joshua. But Totten
has mentioned no fixed-point between the times of Joshua and Hezekiah, and
therefore he has no way of showing, independent of the
biblical material, that just such a division of the total time is made.
Totten's work, then, does not give any independent support to the Scripture
accounts.
Totten does tell us
where he got his date of creation. It was calculated by the British
Chronological Association. This group, headed up by Premier Chronologist Jabez
Bunting Dimbleby, used to publish an almanac entitled All Past Time,
in which they claimed to be able to account for every day since creation.
Examining their almanac for 1885, it appears that they established their
chronology by adding up the numbers given in the received text of the Old
Testament, using a liberal supply of speculation regarding ancient methods of
keeping the lunar and solar calendars aligned. The whole work is rather
technical, but a few minutes reading convinced me that their method of
interpreting Scripture is often arbitrary. In the light of archeology, few
conservative Christians would now accept 4000 BC as the date of creation, even
among those who believe the earth is much younger than geologists are willing
to concede. But Totten's whole scheme depends entirely on knowing the exact day
of creation.
In summary, Totten's work
has no foundation independent of the Bible, and it is questionable whether he
has properly understood Scripture in regard to his fixed-point, the date of
creation. Sometime between Totten's work in 1890 and Rimmer's in 1936, the
results were put in the form of a dramatic story in which Totten becomes a
bystander and a skeptical astronomer the calculator. Since 1936, the story has
apparently been updated by the additions of "space age" features,
including NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center scientists to replace the lone
astronomer, and computers to speed up the tedious calculations.
Does this story have any
lessons for us as Christians? I think so. We would all like to see skeptics
turn to Christ, and it is sometimes a temptation for us to "bend" the
truth a little to make a stronger argument. After all, the end (eternal life
for someone) justifies the means (a little lie), doesn't it? No, it doesn't!
This is trying to do God's work using Satan's tactics!
In the long run, when
God allows the truth to come to light, such lies only give unbelievers modern
examples by which to claim that the Bible writers were guilty of the same
things. Our attempt to "help" God thus becomes an argument for
unbelief. Instead, Christians should gave such zeal for the truth that
unbelievers will come to see that we really have it.
We should rebuke the
Rimmers and the Hills and others who have passed on these stories. They (and
we) should be careful in checking sources, especially for materials which are
favorable to our position. And certainly we should not be inventing stories to
make Christianity look good! There are excellent evidences for the truth of
Christianity, so that those who choose to reject it will have no good answer in
the day of judgment. Let us be active helping people see this while they can
still turn to Jesus Christ.
obliged to forbidden knowledge
obliged to forbidden knowledge
