Scientific Plausibility

Scientific plausibility, as I define it, is the probability that an event claimed to have occurred in the natural world (that's earth) could have occurred. Being in the natural world, the event is thus constrained by natural laws (namely gravity, force, etc.). Furthermore, the implications of the modifier scientific necessarily indicates that the suggested system is also under the authority of science.

For the sake of simplicity, science will be defined strictly by the two following tenets:
1. Obedience of event to natural laws
2. The ability of the even to be reproduced (not to be confused with likelihood of event reoccurrence)

Naturally, the issues that arise from a single scenario give rise to numerous other topics. I will attempt to address the main topic extensively and save the other topics for another hour.

The story in question is found in the Old Testament book of Joshua. The verses in question are Joshua 10:12-14 reproduced here:

12 On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel:
"O sun, stand still over Gibeon,
O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon."

13 So the sun stood still,
and the moon stopped,
till the nation avenged itself on [b] its enemies,
as it is written in the Book of Jashar.
The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.
14 There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the LORD listened to a man. Surely the LORD was fighting for Israel!

To start, the version of Christianity that I have been raised with asserts the infallibility of the Bible. This does not however, in my opinion, assert the infallibility of the interpretation of the Bible. This leads to the ironic paradox where we strive to simultaneously look beyond the words of the Bible for a fair interpretation while struggling to take such verses at face value.

There is more breathing room for this interpretation in the New Testament. Verses that govern the permissibility of braided hair and jewelry can be contextualized to historical practice and cultural institutions. What can't be reconciled in this way are Old Testament stories (more or less).

The classic example is the dichotomy between what's popularly referred to as New Earth vs. Old Earth. Many "fundamentalists" (another loaded term) believe that as the Bible clearly indicates in Genesis 1 that God created the earth in 6 days, the earth cannot be older than a determined number of years (something like 3000 or whatever). I think this is a misreading of scripture. Fundamentalists can be many things. For this discussion, I'm referring to the group of people who believe their interpretation is the only interpretation because of the way that they approach the scripture. Many of this sort of Christian are very careful not to "exceed the word of God" and only say what the Bible says.

I think that this is wrong. Not that we should make up our own rules or try to put words into the Bible's mouth. We say we don't want to assume anything about what the Bible implies. We just "state the facts." But what assumptions underly the assertion of a six-day creation? Well, assuming the original language of the Bible were translated accurately through generation after generation, finally arriving at the incredibly imprecise, ambiguous language of English, we would have to assume that God meant day as in 24 hours. We'd have to assume that hour means 60 minutes and a minute equals 60 seconds. We'd have to assume that when God said "Let there be light," this is an oral commandment to the great unknown from the darkness comes light. We'd have to assume what is meant by light is photon particles that are accessible by the rods and cones in our eyes to generate images. You can see how this gets complicated.

What is "not exceeding the word" for one person could be terribly exceeding the word for another person given the latter had different definitions for any of the above assumptions. It's problematic. For me, the problem with Old Testament stories is that they promise that events happened that neither fulfill either necessary conditions of scientific plausibility. If I'm expected to believe that women are not to speak in Church because the historical culture in which this edict was delivered indicates a society where unrest and disorder would have occurred had women been given rein to speak freely, I can almost sort of accept that. But if I'm accepted to believe that the sun "stood still" (whatever that means), I think I need a little more convincing.

Back to the passage in Joshua. God steps in to help the Israelites beat the bad guys. He does this by stopping the sun and moon in its tracks until the good guys beat the crap out of the bad ones.

There are two issues that I have with God "intervening" in this manner:

1. How do the sun and moon "stand still"? As I have conceded previously, my interpretation is no better than anyone else's. However, what I'm pretty sure this means is that somehow the earth and moon stopped rotating and maintained orbit or the whole solar system came to a crashing halt while waiting for Joshua to go a-whacking. At least, this is what I'm supposed to believe actually happened. Back to the two criteria for scientific plausibility: does this event obey natural laws? Well, no. Can this event be reproduced? Well, no. So I'm just sort of expected to believe event took place while the system that I've been "gifted with" to figure out why things work suggests that the event's existence is impossible?

2. We generally agree that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-etc. Given this, why would he mess up his own system? If He put the planets in orbit just how he liked and kicked the whole planet off at just the right time, why would he throw a kink in the solar system by stopping planetary bodies? There are only two solutions: either He messed up or He intended this to happen. God messing up includes the possibility that God is stepping in as a result of Human Screwup because well, I think He should have seen that coming. God's a pretty good engineer. And if I know that you never design a system for the smartest user but the dumbest one, I'm pretty sure God would have made provisions in the universal planetary orbit for this one event.

So that leads us to our second solution: it's meant to happen. That "sun stopping" is one task on the Almighty's To-Do list that keeps the future cranking swimmingly. If this were true, though, why would he stop doing stuff like this mysteriously a few hundred years in the future? If we're supposed to be "wise as serpents, but gentle as doves," then a story of the halting of planetary bodies, of which we have no other recorded history, is SUPPOSED to sound fishy.

When I stack up all the evidence that I have, I just can't come to accept that something like sun stoppage could have really happened. It just doesn't compute for me.

Yes, yes. I'm supposed to have faith that it happened. But to close the day by opening another can of worms: can faith and knowledge coexist? Once Saul saw Jesus on the road to Damascus, was that really faith that Jesus was the Son of God? Or does he now know that that Jesus is who he says he is because he just got blasted by a big ball of light? If God spoke to me from a burning bush, I'm not sure I'm "sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see." If that bush is burning, I see it. That doesn't seem like faith anymore. Similarly, if I know for sure that God did or didn't stop the sun on that sad day for the Amorites, is it faith anymore?