ASM011 The Apocrypha, Death, and The Day The Sun Stood Still

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the apocrypha death and the day the sun stood still all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemike

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it's time for ask science mike a weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life listen this is absolutely your show and you really proved it this week there's so many wonderful ratings on itunes and people kicking in financially on patreon and more than anything there's lots of great questions this week and i can't wait to answer them let's get it started our first question this week comes in via the email inbox and it reads hey science mike the book of joshua talks about a day in which the sun stood still firstly if the earth actually did stop spinning what sort of global catastrophes would result and secondly is there any known scientific way that could explain this appearance of a day being unusually longer than normal thanks that is a really interesting question and probably some of the most fun science we're going to get to do on the program if by fun you mean destroying the earth so uh uh let's talk about the really basic thing first uh the sun rises and sets because the earth is rotating on its axis the earth orbits the sun itself uh orbiting around the center of the milky way galaxy but let's forget that frame and just in the reference of our solar system the earth spins around the sun and the earth spins on its axis okay and that gives you day and night so to get the sun to stay stationary in the sky you have to do one of two things the first thing you can do is stop the earth's rotation it still continues to orbit the sun it just stops rotating now technically if you want to keep the sun perfectly still on an ongoing basis you would want the earth to spin very slowly so that it was tidally locked with the sun so that the same side of the earth always faced the sun but if you're just talking about a day you know to someone on the ground if you just stop the earth rotation that'd be sufficient the other thing you could do would be to suddenly have the sun orbit the earth at an absolutely incredible velocity and it would have to be incredible because at the equator the earth's surface is spinning about a thousand miles per hour relative to its center that's pretty fast and if you imagine a line connecting the center of the earth to the sun it's a it's a very long distance it's a it's like eight light minutes you would have to have the earth uh basically if you could imagine a propeller as long as the distance uh eight light seconds long uh the sun would be on the end of it and as you know the end of a fan or the end of a propeller moves much faster than the center the sun would have to book it and uh in the process gosh i'd have to do the math it might i'm not even sure that's relativistically possible you might be accelerating the sun beyond light speed um i didn't do the math ahead of time and i certainly can't do it in my head that may not even be possible now that i think about it so either the sun would have to go a very high speed or an impossibly high speed so let's go with the simple one which is stopping the earth's rotation that would be a problem first of all um acceleration and deceleration are bad for humans bad for all sorts of other things so you would have you couldn't just stop the earth you would have to decelerate it um and you would have to decelerate everything evenly so basically you'd have god applying some sort of counter force to the earth rotation that slows it down but slows it down quickly enough that the sun stops in the sky that would be quite fast here's a problem the atmosphere is spinning just as fast as the earth so if the earth slowed down very quickly assuming you even mitigated for the the potential forces involved there will the suddenly have a thousand mile an hour winds and uh a thousand mile an hour that's pretty fast and at least at least toward the equator basically the the band of the earth around the middle but even towards northern latitudes uh you would have winds multiple times as fast as as the most dangerous hurricanes or tornadoes so in just a matter of moments you would you just wipe every human structure off the planet that's not like toward the poles so you know like if you were at a research station south pole or if you were lucky enough to be deep underground somewhere the winds would not destroy you but it'd be a bad scene and also according to randall monroe who does the web series uh what if where he answers science questions really well absurd science questions really well you would also have a very strange effect where these winds would destabilize the surface of the oceans into kind of a fog you'd have incredible storm surge it would be pretty much one of the greatest calamities you could imagine happening on this planet so there is no plausible scientific way to make the sun hang in the sky or to make a day longer than normal not without tremendous calamity now the story of joshua has a storytelling device that allows it that's god if you assume that there is an all powerful deity with will and consciousness and a specific plan well it would be absolutely no problem for such a deity to suspend the laws of physics and do pretty much whatever that deity wanted to do so you know the only way to take that story literally is to assume just god did it there's not a lot of science that will back you up there now obviously if you read the old testament like i do then you just view it as a as a story of a people uh understanding god and and something that god got amped up through oral tradition so do i personally believe that the sun stood still during joshua's battle i don't believe that others do that's fine if you believe that uh if if you're believing in an all-powerful deity that's actually not an unreasonable belief um that uh a day stood longer it's just to me where do you draw the line right because if if this all-powerful deity did everything that's reported in the old testament literally as it's recorded there's some ethical problems there's certainly some issues where the accounts there don't match the accounts we see in geology or astrophysics and then you have to wonder why god is telling us two different stories to me it is much more elegant and helps me practice faith to look at the old testament as a mixture of history yes but also mythology historical mythology but yeah be a lot of fun to stop the earth if you didn't mind destroying everything on the planet i'll have a link to an xkcd excerpt from randall monroe's book about what would happen and the math behind what happened if you suddenly stop the earth as well as a link to that book it is one of my favorites what if i wish i was that good at the math part of science i can roughly estimate some of the things that randall talks about but his great engineering background and science background really puts me to shame so if you like this program you're absolutely going to love what if [Music] hello science mike what exactly is the biblical apocrypha and as christians how much should we value it thank you this is one of the things that um really killed the bible for me when i stopped believing when the bible started to confuse me and i researched its origins with my evangelical upbringing i understood the bible to be god's holy inspired inerrant word that god wrote the bible through people and because of that assumption i believe that the bible was sort of issued a book at a time through different authors and then assembled all at once at some council that i didn't really know anything about but that i knew god was a part of and the books were all assembled and then we had the bible and it's a lot messier than that there is not any one bible that's the the first point you have to learn there are different bibles at different times in history and even today the catholic bible and most protestant bibles are different they have different books and one of the the things that makes those bibles different is the apocrypha the apocrypha are a collection of books which are frankly really awesome there's a book called belle and the dragon you had me at dragon i felt really left out that i never got to read bell and the dragon as a kid although it's kind of a kind of a flashy title for a book that's not really that exciting um but uh there's it's not like lord of the rings or anything there's no there's not talking dragons there's no smack um but the apocrypha are these collection of books uh that basically the catholic church and the orthodox church hold most of them as kennocal or as as a true part of inspired scripture and but that martin luther and his bible sort of set apart in a different section in the fifteen hundreds fifteen hundred years after christ that these books were separated and then later they were pulled from the bible completely in the what the 1600s i'm guessing uh i'm not a biblical history expert this is when uh you know we got peanut ends on the show and he'd he'd tear me to pieces but the the important thing i'm trying to get across here is what you should do with the apocrypha it depends on which apocrypha which of those books and which part of the christian tradition you're in if you're a catholic you're an orthodox then they're part of your tradition if you're most protestants they are not if you're an evangelical protestant they're you know interesting at most now i read the bible as a product of the church so if any part of the church is interested in any book i'm interested in it because i want to understand the role it's played in people's lives so i have certainly read the apocrypha in fact most bible apps it's really easy to just you know flip a little uh preference switch and then suddenly there's the books of the apocrypha you know the the amount of commentary and scholarship on them especially popular scholarship things you can read easily is not as deep as the rest of the bible but you know for me the purpose of the bible is so that i can understand the journey of faith that other people have encountered so i like those books i've read them i have not read them nearly as much as the rest of the bible i am not nearly as familiar with them i probably can't quote anything from the apocrypha i don't think i've read any book in the apocrypha more than twice and most of them only once uh they are nothing to be afraid of they are nothing to you know change your life over that you know they're just they're another source to understand the journey of the church and it helps when you read them to understand who likes them and why and who doesn't and that you know maybe we'll do a liturgist podcast on the apocrypha because i could see that being to really cover that topic well you know you'd need at least an hour because church history is crazy i mean there's a reason they get phds in this stuff there's just no agreement wikipedia actually has a pretty good overview on the apocryphal i'll have a link in the show notes on ask sciencemike.com if you'd like to get a sense for what bibles included it what bibles did not and why you can read in a few minutes and be a budding apocryphal expert [Music] and our next question again comes from the email inbox when thinking about how god created the world i tend to lean more towards theistic evolution than toward a literal six day creation the one thing i haven't been able to reconcile though is the concept of death in my limited understanding of evolution death seems like a natural and important part of the process while in my limited understanding of christianity death is something that couldn't have existed until after fully evolved humans sinned how can christian evolutionists account for death before the fall that's a great question and i think to answer it we first have to acknowledge something christian evolutionists aren't some uniform group of people like any other set of people they carry different beliefs some christian evolutionists do accept the doctrine of original sin and the fall of man while others hold those to be allegorical or mythical accounts i am in that ladder group so i don't spend a lot of time worrying specifically about when sin or death appeared because science leads me to believe that death has been around just as long as life has at least on planet earth we don't know what any other life may be like out there now death is part of life and science and you're right that it is essential natural selection works via death the genes you inherit either make you more or less likely to survive to breed and they make your offspring more or less likely to survive and this competition is just the way the stage is set in our universe there is a limited stock of energy and on earth pretty much all the energy comes from the sun there's a tiny fraction of bioenergy that we get from geothermal but most of the the food chain the web of life on this planet is powered by the sun plants are the base of that process and even plants viciously compete to find their spot in the sun there's a reason grass goes very quickly it's trying to out compete bushes which grow taller and but slower but once they do they have leaves and they cast shade which means they catch more sunlight and of course the titans of this planet trees their goal is to stretch above everybody else and get their branches out and create a canopy and just grab all of that delicious sunlight animals eat plants if animals don't eat plants they die at least those animals that don't eat other animals and this whole process of fighting for sunlight fighting for plant matter and then consuming animals is not sin there's nothing sinful about it but when we talk about the garden that humanity came from that's the one i understand humans emerged onto a field of intense competitors for energy but we're different our large brains give us the ability to weigh the consequences of actions because of our very advanced consciousness we can contemplate our own needs versus the needs of our tribe or group versus what is good for the whole species and even good for all life on earth and with this comes an ever-growing ethic and an ever-growing obligation to transcend those parts of us that are selfish or self-destructive and when genesis talks about a sin nature i think it's talking about something real it's talking about all the ways that we have a tendency to do things that are self-serving in the short term now what's interesting many of those things that are self-serving in the short term are actually detrimental to self in the long term you know ice cream is delicious but if you eat it three meals a day it's gonna be very very bad for you and so this wrestling with what is right and what is wrong and codifying standards and codifying ethics the tension between sin and law well that's a real thing so even if genesis is completely at least early genesis is completely mythical or completely mythic its themes are still true you're noticing a theme in this program in that i'm always talking about the value of these scriptures independent of their historical validity through evolution we have tasted from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and because of that we have been ejected from the innocence that other life on this planet enjoys we alone can reshape this entire planet we alone can use tools to build and improve or to destroy we alone bear that image of god i don't have to worry about original sin because my own sin takes enough time on its own [Music] hi science mike my name is brandy i want to read a few verses and then ask my question after so the first verse is first john 4 where it says in verse 2 this is how you can recognize the spirit of god every spirit that acknowledges that jesus christ has come in the flesh is from god and it goes on explaining that and then the next verse is romans 10 9 if you declare with your mouth jesus is lord and believe in your heart that god raised him from the dead you will be saved and then we have john 14 6 jesus answered i'm the way the truth and the life no one comes to the father except through me so my question is basically do you think that god can be found in every religion and i personally am starting to believe that because i've been a christian my whole life i've been through the fundamental phase um in the season of doubt which your blogs have helped me with so thank you um but i'm coming to this place where i really just think as christians need to be more inclusive but these verses trip me up that i just read and and first on four it talks about you have to acknowledge jesus christ as coming from god and have faith in him for it for you to be considered really talking to god and then verses a few verses down it says dear friends let's love one another for love comes from god everyone who loves has been born of god and knows god but it contradicts just before that because there's many people who love the way that god calls us to love but don't call on jesus um as their savior or saying that they have faith in jesus so i'm just curious what you think about this because i i personally i don't want to just try and make the bible say what i wanted to say but i also know it depends on your understanding of the bible and how you read it so i just want to know what you think because every time i try to talk to someone about inclusivity and the possibility of god working in all religions these verses come up and and i even have a hard time with them so if you have any ideas or any thoughts i would just love to hear it thank you so much for the show um god bless the bible is not a rule book or a constitution the bible was not written to me or to you the bible is a library of books and other writings that the people of god first through judaism and later through christianity wrote in response to their experiences with and understanding of god the bible is full of contradictions by design the old testament chronicled an evolving changing understanding of who god is and shows us the way that the understanding of god changed over time and indeed some of the people who carried those scriptures forward radically modified them in time for probably political reasons and that is part of the bible's story when we read the gospels we have to understand that much of the gospels were written in response to the power of the roman empire when jesus says that he is the way the truth and the life in those gospels he's speaking that he is and not caesar caesar who also claimed to be god incarnate when we read paul and paul speaking about how to discern different spirits we have to understand that paul was part of starting the first christian churches the first seedlings of the christian church is a global movement because of that and because they did not have a bible yet they didn't have councils they didn't have creeds all sorts of competing theologies and ideas sprang up and so paul wrote letters to correct those whose understandings he disagreed with which is why paul is such an influential part of the church probably more than any other person paul and authors later claiming to be paul set the church's fundamental beliefs and doctrines and this is not a bad thing it's why we study the bible but we study the bible with commentaries and in the context of community and why the bible's authority is derived from the church and the church's authority is derived from christ man that is like the most catholic thing i've ever said anyway don't read the bible like it's a it's a rule book it's good that you're wrestling with these words that's what they're there for now is god in other religions i have no idea i'm a mystic i'm not entirely sure who god is i know i find god through christ that's my experience but i don't turn around and minimize the experience of buddhists or hindus or muslims who claim that they are experiencing god i have no way to stake my claim as better or superior to theirs luckily it's not my job to figure out if they're right or not it is my job to do the best i can do to follow and serve god for me that happens through the christian church which i freely admit could entirely be a product of my upbringing and my lifelong experience with christianity i am not the judge or the jury and i am certainly not the executioner i am not god's representative on this planet i'm not his ambassador i'm merely god's follower when other people ask me about my experiences with god i talk to them about jesus because my experiences with god involve jesus american christianity particularly in the last 150 years has involved a white-knuckled grip on knowledge and certainty what i'm learning to do is find god with an open hand to not be so obsessed with being right with being certain but instead to simply trust god to simply follow him each day to pray and to practice my faith to mourn with those who mourn to weep with those who weep to feed those who hunger to visit those who are sick paul brilliantly writes about the fruits of the spirit love and patience gentleness self-control and then paul says something brilliant against these things there is no law my voice my voice speaks for jesus the divinity of jesus the resurrection of jesus other voices that sound full of love and full of godliness do not and so i hold those voices also with an open hand [Music] it's been another one of those overwhelming weeks in my life overwhelming because of how blessed i am by you guys i know i got awfully sentimental and and almost weepy at the end of last week's show but this is an incredible journey there's so many of you that are new to this program and new to my work so if i could just take a moment to let you know there are other ways you can keep going in these conversations about science and faith and atheism doubt all those sorts of things i blog every week on my website that's mikemcarg.com that's impossible to spell so you can also go to asksciencemike.com at the top of the screen there's a button that says blog it'll take you right there i'm also on a podcast called the liturgist podcast with a guy named michael gunger we'd take issues um and dive much deeper than we do on our science mike because we cover one topic for a full hour or even longer you can see that show at the liturgist.com podcast but while you're at the liturgist site we also produce these science faith experiences we call liturgies and uh we have guided meditations and good music and teaching pieces from a variety of interesting people so i'd encourage you to check that out you can search the liturgists on itunes or just look at them all listed on the liturgist.com i also love coming places to do things about science and faith in person i speak at conferences and universities colleges churches anytime you want to talk about science and faith i'd love to see you you can also go to my website mikemcarg.com or ask sciencemike.com click the book now button and uh i'll get on an airplane and come see you we need more questions we're getting great questions i am thinking about making the show longer because there's so many good questions that have been left unanswered i'd love to hear more feedback that so far people say they'd love a longer show but if if you disagree now is the time to say that i need your feedback you can submit questions really easily use hashtag asksciencemike on twitter soundcloud or youtube and of course you can go to asksciencemike.com scroll down to the bottom you can record a voice question right there no extra software needed or you can type a question via text that's a great way to send anonymous questions our show is completely listener supported and i want to thank all those patrons that are involved you can be involved too every single dollar is going to help and you can change or cancel your contribution at any time that's also on ask sciencemike.com in addition to show notes on the show notes every week i include more resources links to books websites videos things that explore the answers deeper it also lets you see where uh you know i spent a couple minutes researching these questions and you can see kind of what i came up with uh the show is produced by greg nordin greg is an animal he does a great job on the show he gets so many comments about sound quality that's all greg and of course our theme song is by jeff bodafort if you need original podcast music or production reach out to jeb he can help you both greg and gem are linked again on the show notes at ask sciencemic.com thanks for listening and i can't wait to see you next week