What constitutes evidence?

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Wait, you don't normally think about this, you quote stock answers?


Like I said, omnipotence is the answer to everything. That's what makes it useless.


Ah, no. Or do you want to argue that the bible is not literally true, but deals in metaphors even when it does not acknowledge the metaphor? There was nothing in that passage saying "it appeared to us that time passed slowly. It said the sun and the moon stood still. We know that the apparent movement of the sun comes from the rotation of the Earth, and so we know that if the Earth stopped spinning for between c. 12 - 24 hours (depending on whether "day" meant only daylight hours or the whole 24 hour period), people elsewhere would have noticed. That includes people who had been able to predict solar eclipses for some time. They paid attention.


Don't care. The question is whether Bible passages that present themselves as literal truth must be treated like they might be metaphors.

^

Don't normally have to…at this point I've pretty much seen/heard everything. I actually used to have to work at it. After a while, the questions quit changing, so I stopped having to come up with different answers. This particular question I've not seen before, so I'm having to take a little time with it. I think I have a better answer, though. Not the BEST answer, but a better one. If I have time to look at decent sources, that's one thing, but such isn't always the case.


Useless to who, and why?


No yourself. The author of the book of Joshua is commonly assumed to be Joshua. He wrote down what he saw/experienced as he saw/experienced it from an earthbound, human perspective. If you're saying Joshua should have written things he had no way to know anything about, don't you think that might be a little unreasonable? I've even mentioned a possibility (altered state of consciousness) that is extraordinarily unlikely as a shared experience unless divine intervention was directly responsible for it. If that's literally what he saw and had no way to explain it, then I take that to literally mean that's what he saw.

God is, of course, powerful enough to make the sun/moon stand still in the sky for 12+ hours if He wants to. I don't take issue with that. If we wanted to say LITERALLY the sun/moon stood still over the earth, then it could be the earth did NOT cease in rotation but rather God caused heavenly bodies to revolve around the earth for a short time. Or if the earth stopped rotating, God used some form of inertial damping ( ) to prevent catastrophic effects from occurring.

But that's not the question…

The problem is why isn't this recorded in other civilizations, since such a thing wouldn't go unnoticed. What I'm investigating at the moment is whether the assumption that it went unnoticed really is a correct assumption. My answers up to this point have assumed they didn't, and I'm pondering evidence to the contrary. I'm not prepared to give any kind of extensive answer, so what I'm searching for at the moment is a short answer that will do. If a long day is recorded in at least one other civilization at about the time we think Joshua lived, then you have your answer.



My approach is to assume literal truth until proven otherwise. The Bible often does the work for us. If Joshua saw the sun/moon stand still, he wrote it literally as he saw it or believed it to be. We don't assume Joshua is a liar. What's recorded is what was witnessed. Whether events as they were seen actually did happen in exactly that way, the earth ceased rotating or something else, is another matter. That doesn't make the Bible less literal.

I'm starting to doubt, however, that there aren't sources that indicate that SOMETHING happened that caused the sun/moon to stand still over Gibeon. I just want to read up on it a little more. Oh, and I'm already aware of the NASA urban legend, so don't even start.

Useless to absolutely everyone, as an explanation, because whatever can account for anything explains nothing. Why is gravity so much weaker than the electromagnetic force, why is grass green, why is water wet? God likes it that way and because He's omnipotent, He can do what he likes. Useless as an explanation for anything. It's just a different label for "I don't know", but a label that pretends to be an explanation.


I'm sorry. My theological understanding seems to have failed me. I thought biblical literalists believe the bible to be divinely inspired and therefore inerrant. If biblical literalism means that the words of the prophets are literally their subjective impressions, and their fallible memories after the fact, then I find literalism much more attractive.

That would need a lot more energy than this:
But an omnipotent deity might have done either. Useless as an explanation, see? It doesn't help you assign a higher probability to one omnipotently enabled action rather than another. Or perhaps omnipotence only means being able to do anything, but not that everything costs the same effort? If God were able but unmotivated, that could account for some other things. Is there any scriptural support for God lacking the motivation to make an effort?


Shall we take the Genesis creation story as one of the cases of proven otherwise?

Some believers may believe that Joshua is written at that time but scholars don't. A standard view is that the primary works date from somewhere between the 5th to the 10th century BCE, with further modification over the centuries. The story even says, "So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar.". It's quoting the book of Jashar. A lost book that is later quoted as discussing David who lived hundreds of years after the sun incident. What a strange thing for an eyewitness to do.

Can a literalist generate a complicated excuse for these and other problems with Joshua? Of course. But I doubt this stuff is pointed out for the benefit of literalists.

ABSOLUTELY everyone? I disagree. Believers find it useful.


You don't have much theological understanding at all, then.

There ARE literalists who are strictly letter-for-letter literalists. The Bible as a WHOLE is not a literal text. As a WHOLE it isn't symbolic, either. It's a bit of both depending on what you're reading. A proverb is literally a proverb. A psalm is literally a palm. Some experiences are visionary and are inherently symbolic. Apocalyptic and eschatological texts fall into that category.

I think the best interpretation of the Bible is a dynamic balance between what the Bible literally says and what the Bible actually means…the letter of the Bible versus the spirit of the Bible. When someone decrees everyone who urinates up a wall must be executed, it shouldn't be interpreted literally to mean that there was a law against urinating up a wall. It's a crude expression referring to men. You have to make allowances for euphemisms and other figures of speech. Semitic language made heavy use of hyperbole, and that's no more evident IMO than in Jesus' sayings.

So…if your issue is with literalism, you might want to rethink what is usually meant with regard to Biblical literalism.

Divinely inspired? Sure. God instructed witnesses to write down what they observed. God Himself gave Moses the Torah almost word-for-word.

Inerrant? Why not? I don't think it was in error that God instructed witnesses to write down what they saw and pass those events down to their successors. If the way they saw it was the way God wanted it transferred across the generations then there's no error.


Not really sure what you're getting at here. Sure, omnipotence only means having the ability to do anything, but the ability to do anything doesn't compel anyone to do everything.

Scriptural support for God lacking the motivation to…do WHAT exactly? I'd think that would be self-evident. Something doesn't get done, obviously God lacks the motivation to do it. Either that, or God possesses motivation to make the opposite happen.

As far as the amount of energy required to do something, if we're talking about an omnipotent God here the amount of energy required to do anything is pretty much irrelevant.

"Off-record" so far I'm tending to think the rotation of the earth ceased because a word in the original Hebrew is used that literally means the sun/moon stopped in the sky, literally "ceased." Personally, I'm open to the altered-state-of-consciousness hypothesis, but I'm also willing to throw that out if I can find an extra-Biblical reference. I THINK something was recorded during the reign of a Chinese emperor about an extended day and perhaps an extended night in an ancient American civilization. When would that have been…roughly 600-700 BC?


Not NECESSARILY. Depends on the flexibility you read Genesis with. I'm good either way. I don't assume creationism NOT to have happened any more than I don't assume evolution DOESN'T happen. I don't like taking anything for granted.

Useless as an explanation. See above. What can account for anything explains nothing because it fails to distinguish between different possibilities. The notion of omnipotence may be useful for other purposes, for example some people might find it comforting that everything is at least potentially under control. That doesn't make it useful as an explanation.


But didn't make sure that the witnesses would be accurate? For example in their perception of time?


You wrote this earlier:
So if God changes perceptions so that people only think the afternoon had 12 to 24 extra hours, but they didn't actually have more daylight to finish slaughtering their enemies, then the report of a longer day is no error?


Nothing to do with compulsion. I can wash up my dishes, and I always do. I also can tidy up the whole place to OCD standards, but I have never bothered. Not worth the effort for me. So does omnipotence mean everything is effortless, or does it only mean everything is possible, but some of those possible things might be so much effort that even a deity might not want to bother?


Then you assume equal effort for all actions. Is there a reason why? Equal effort is not strictly entailed by the ability to do anything.


Take your pick. Answer prayers? There are negative results in studies on the efficacy of prayer in healing the sick. Answering prayers would surely be possible for an omnipotent deity, and there could be ineffable reasons for not answering. But is there evidence for or against a lack of motivation? Something that can change our probability assessments for the two possibilities?

Ah no it is 'traditionally' assumed to be his work, that tradition coming from the Torah, not scholastic endeavor. Modern scholars are pretty much in agreeance that the work is by various authors and that it was written down from oral tradition some 600 years after the purported events. Once again you employ faith as your evidence and wantonly ignore the accepted evidence.

It gets even worse. In the case of the age of the Earth, for example, where the evidence is so overwhelming that it looks stupid to think otherwise, the apologist just move the goalpost to an alternative 'interpretation' (Christian even 200 years ago think the 6000 years old Earth is literal truth, some of them are still resisting now). At least the Teapot-ist is more honest.

Hmmm…looks like the assumption of other civilizations not experiencing a longer day or night is busted. Immanuel Velikovsky addressed that in Worlds in Collision. I'm not talking about his actual "theories," but rather his references to related events being recorded elsewhere in the world. Whether Velikovsky's science is good or not is irrelevant; other cultures most certainly did observe something that could be explained by Joshua's day. There's also the non-canonical Book of Jasher, but at least at one point in time there was a locally available extra-Biblical book.

I hesitate to bring up Velikovsky, just so you know. I only mention him as a quick way to get at ancient reports of Joshua's day.

AngelRho reading your stated beliefs is a reminder of the power of the mind to conquer reason.

Meaning what, exactly? Gromit wanted references to Joshua's long day in other civilizations. Velikovsky, like it or not, DOES refer to such reports. If you're wanting extra-Biblical evidence of that day, it's looking more plausible to me by the minute. Plausibility doesn't mean it DID happen in any absolute terms, but neither does it mean that it's an unreasonable conclusion, either.

Like I said you are a good example of faith over reason. Velikovsky had NO academic credibility, in fact he was derided by the community and yet you are positing his nonsense as a reason for plausibility, suggesting plausibility on this evidence is an unreasonable conclusion.

At least make an argument. Show the dates and how they compare. That some well known goof said something is not an argument.

The real problem is proving the Bible right, proving the Bible wrong is never the job of a skeptic at all, but we can say history, archeology, antropology and science cast enough doubt over the Bible.

As for supernatural events, things that violate laws of physics such as resurrections, we get empirical evidence that that doesn't happen in reality, and so on.

Has science falsified the Bible? well, for starters, evolution has proven the six days creation myth wrong. And the "reinterpretation of the Bible in the face of empirical evidence" or "allegorical interpretation of creation" seem like ad hoc attempts to avoid a belief to ever be falsified.

So can you prove the Bible wrong, or any other belief system for that matter? ad hoc explanations save the day.