Yesterday I wrote about how Joshua became the only person in the bible who commanded god to do something that god actually did. It wasn’t a prayer, a plea for help; it was a demand. Basically, in order to win a battle, Joshua ordered god to stop the sun in the high sky for 24 hours. God abided. This got me thinking. It’s been a number of years since I’ve taken any physics classes, but I still remember enough to understand how catastrophically disastrous this would be to every living thing and structure on the face of the planet.

We now understand that the sun isn’t actually revolving around the earth, but instead the earth is rotating, giving us the illusion of the sun traveling around the earth in roughly 24 hour periods. The earth rotates at approximately 1,675 km/h (1,040 mph). We don’t feel this movement for the same reason that we don’t feel a jet moving unless it slows down, speeds up, changes directions, or crashes. In the case of the earth suddenly stopping its rotation, it would be much more like a plane crash, only much, much worse.

If the earth stopped suddenly, everything not sufficiently anchored to the earth would suddenly fly sideways at 1,675 km/h. You and all humans across the globe would be flung into mountains, trees, or anything else standing in the way, and you would hit these objects at breakneck speeds. If there is nothing in your way, you will drag along the ground until all the skin and limbs were torn from your body. Buildings would twist, crumble, and collapse as the loose foundations beneath them shifted violently.

If you happen to survive being thrown into dense objects or dragged across the earth, you’d still have to contend all kinds of objects slamming into you. Boulders, debris from destroyed buildings, and other people would be piling on top of you with crushing force.

If you live relatively close to a body of water (most of the earth’s population), the oceans and lakes of the earth would suddenly slosh, creating a series of massive and freakishly fast tsunamis as the waters rock back and forth across the globe. This would likely utterly destroy the planet as we know it.

To make matters worse, each point on earth absorbs energy (heat) from the sun for half the day and radiates energy into space for half the day (on average–this depends on distance from the equator). If the earth stopped spinning for even one day, as is done in the Joshua passage, suddenly half the earth would be absorbing energy for 24 hours, while the opposite side of the earth would radiate energy for 24 hours, causing one side to be intensely hot and the other side to be intensely frigid. This might also create very warm oceans, leading to deadly and sustained tropical storms. The atmosphere might not get too warm to sustain life on the illuminated side of the earth, but it would be unpleasant, to say the least.

Now that you can imagine a very hot illuminated side of the earth, whereon every living thing has been soaked by numerous massive tsunamis and slammed into the sides of mountains, and finally bombarded with a blanket of other people and debris… now imagine after 24 hours and Joshua has claimed victory in battle god flips the switch back to the on position, causing the earth to begin revolving at 1675 km/h again, throwing everything in the opposite direction at 1,675 km/h.

I wasn’t a physics major in college, so there might be a few mistakes. But generally I think I have a sound hypothesis going here.

If god really stopped the rotation of the earth, then he really put into play a lot of other suspensions on the laws of physics, explanations that should’ve been included in the bible (y’know, if god was actually real). But for reasons no one can explain (unless he’s not real), he chose to not reveal anything to his followers.

No, this just goes back to man’s inability to understand that the earth rotates and revolves around the sun. The bible clearly doesn’t understand physics.