A Former Atheist

[Hatshepsut]

First of all, the origins of science and education didn't get their start in the secular world, but rather in the religious.

Which I think is under-appreciated. Religious thought may have been a big part of what motivated human beings to ask questions about origins and causes for natural phenomena in the first place. Alongside financial accounting, it played a role in the development of literacy: Egypt had its sbAyt "room of instruction" and pr-anx "house of life" where scribes learnt to write, attached to the temple establishments of major state gods. The first European universities, modeled after cathedral and monastery schools, were founded by kings in cooperation with the religious orders that provided their staffs.

When claims of the supernatural are said to intervene with the natural world, science...is the ideal method by which to test such claims. Consider Joshua 10:13. We know these events did not happen.

Although there have been experiments on ESP card reading, little debunking on Earth science questions relies on direct tests, but on theoretical calculations instead. Of the Earth's angular momentum and consideration of how much external force would be needed to effect the braking. Of known sources of external forces, mainly the sun and the moon. And I'm not sure anyone has even bothered to do the calculations; for a physicist educated intuition is enough to say no. So, it's a confidence game. We're now sufficiently confident in science that supernatural claims are dismissed with no analysis since it's assumed such claims are bogus.

I can certainly understand this attitude, given the huge number of charlatans populating the paranormal. Yet if some phenomenon new to our science ever does occur, and doesn't announce itself too blatantly, I'd bet we could overlook it for decades in our smug unsuspecting state. The nature of light was considered settled for more than 100 years before things like X-rays and the photoelectric effect were discovered.

It is wrong in the story it tells, and it is wrong in its explanation of what would have happened if the story were true.  The Bible has layer upon layer of being wrong.

Or, what may be wrong is the way in which we read it. We're reading the damn thing like it was a newspaper cum history textbook and both sides in the so-called science/religion debate have fallen into the trap. The same arguments over creation, Noah's Ark, and Methuselah's lifespan are repeated endlessly, year after year, with no end in sight because each side is satisfied it is right. They are just shouting past each other to be heard by the curious young wallflowers on the sidelines.

Joshua 10:12-13 is actually a brief poem or song, rendered in NRSV English as

Sun, stand still at Gibeon,
   and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.
And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped,
   until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.

So we see that it isn't the factual report of a natural event like we would write up at Mt. St. Helens, but a piece of bombastic war propaganda designed to elevate the morale of Hebrew tribes in the midst of their conflicts with other Canaanites.