(May 3, 2015 at 8:18 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Actually, if you rotate the rest of the solar system around the earth's axis of rotation, it could be made to appear as if the sun stood still without stopping the rotation of the earth.
Very clever. But I do wonder about what it would do to the climate if just one portion of the earth faced the sun for more than a day. Could get pretty damn hot and pretty damn cold depending on where you were standing. And the resulting weather if you heated up one side but not the other might be catastrophic pretty quickly.
Also the sun and the solar system would have to travel awful fast to make the trip. The sun is 92,960,000 miles from earth so the circumference of a circle made by it around the earth would be 5.84×108 (584,000,000). Divided by 24 that would be
24,333,333 miles per hour. The speed of light is only 670,616,629 mph. So that would have the sun traveling at a little over 3% of the speed of light.
And then there's the gravitational problem. The only reason the earth isn't falling into the sun is that it's traveling faster than it's falling, which is to say we are in orbit. Should the sun travel around us, we'd fall in.
Setting all of that aside, you don't think the people who got a full day of night would notice? People paid close attention to the stars and they would certainly look like dawn should come but it wouldn't. And don't you think the people living in the perpetual sunset or perpetual sunrise portions of the world would notice time appearing to stand still? But no one did.
So no, I don't think the bible saying the sun stopped is sufficient evidence to consider the idea that it might have.
If there is a god, I want to believe that there is a god. If there is not a god, I want to believe that there is no god.