The Misappliance Of Science

Previous legend || The Misappliance Of Science || Next legend

God is on Day Saving Time

Debunked: There was a "missing day" that was discovered by a NASA scientist.

This is another in a long line of science inadvertently proves the truth of The Word, ha ha legends. The story goes that NASA, calculating the positions of various celestial bodies, runs the calculations forwards and backwards through time, but after going back a couple thousand years, the program stopped and put up a red signal. The data doesn't come out right and it is determined, after some undescribed cogitating, that there is a missing day.

One scientist present is also a Sunday School graduate and recalls Joshua 10:12-14, where God stopped the sun for about a full day. To find the rest of this "full day", which they somehow (miraculously?) determined to be precisely 23 hours and 20 minutes, they go to 2nd Kings and apparently God caused the Sun to move back "ten degrees", which equals forty minutes! The Bible is just so true!

The text of the story as passed on the Internet, along with a nice debunking, can be found here, but the original is a text written by a Harold Hill of Maryland, printed in the Evening Star of Spencer, IN, Feb 22 1970.

One could say quite a lot if one wanted to assault the logic of the story. Suffice to say that it is ludicrous, involves willful misreading and distortion of the Bible, has been denied and debunked by NASA, and is nothing more than widely-spread anti-science propoganda. It is featured in Brunvand's The Choking Doberman and his more recent The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story.

Attacking a legend like this logically is difficult in much the same way that patching leaks in a wire mesh canoe is difficult: the whole thing is one giant leak, so attacking any one feature does little more than assign that particular detail a seeming importance that it does not actually possess, and patching the whole thing isn't worth the effort. Leaving aside faith for the moment, no aspect of the story makes any sense whatsoever.

References:

• AFU's "Missing Day" posting
• NASA's denial and excellent debunking