Has NASA really found that everything in the Bible is true? The missing day HOAX.

Rumours claim that NASA scientists performing calculations for orbital satellites had discovered a missing day in time, which was later resolved when a Christian member of the NASA team pointed out that according to the Bible, God had made the sun stay still for approximately a day.

The headline attached to many of these rumours claims that NASA had effectively “proved the Bible”.

An example version of this rumour can be read below –

NASA’s recent discovery shed new light on what the Bible says, thus confirming that these biblical stories are in fact true.

In the words of Mr. Harold Hill, the President of the Curtis engine Company in Baltimore, also a consultant in space programs: “One of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland”.

As scientists were inspecting the positions of several space objects including the Sun, the Moon and the planets and their positions in 100 and 1000 years – this is done regularly in order to prevent our satellites from colliding with the orbits of the planets. The orbits have to be determined on time so that the space projects do not interrupt their course. During the computer calculations, a red signal put everything at a standstill, meaning that something was wrong, either with the data or the results. After the intervention of the service department, the scientist concluded that somewhere in space a day was missing in elapsed time!

Nobody could solve the issue until one Christian explained that in Sunday school they were told about the Sun standing still. Of course, no one believed, but when the man took the Bible, he opened the book of Joshua and a pretty absurd statement made a lot of sense.
They read the passage when God said to Joshua: “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not be a man of them stand before thee.” (Joshua 10:8).

Joshua was worried because he was surrounded by the enemy, and if darkness fell, he’d be conquered. So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still! That’s right – “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Ja’-sher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.” (Joshua 10:13).The scientists soon concluded that this was the missing day. They examined the computer calculations and found that the time missing was in fact 23 hours and 20 minutes, which doesn’t make a full day like in the book of Joshua.

After reading the Bible again, they saw that it said “about (approximately) a day.” Although the Bible was true, they were still missing 40 minutes which had to be accounted for, because if not, it could create problems 1,000 years from now. The Christian then remembered something in the Bible which said that the Sun went backwards. No one believed again, but then they opened the Bible and were proved wrong.

Hezekiah was visited on his deathbed by Isaiah the prophet, who told him that it’s not his time yet. Hezekiah asked for a sign, and Isaiah asked if the Sun would go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees? Hezekiah answered: “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backwards ten degrees.”
“And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” 10 degrees equals 40 minutes! The 23 hours and 20 minutes from Joshua and the 10 degrees (40 minutes) in the 2 kings accounted for the missing day!

This classic urban legend not only predates the Internet, it predates NASA itself. In fact its early origins can be traced back to the 1930s, possibly earlier. Creationist speaker Harry Rimmer penned a book named ‘The Harmony of Science and Scripture‘ where he attempted to demonstrate that science and the scripture of the Christian Bible actually correlated with each other, and in that book he wrote – amongst many other things – about how he determined that there had been a missing day at some point in Earth’s history- a missing day that was backed up by astronomical research. Rimmer provided calculations from a 19th century book as proof.

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Despite those claims being thoroughly rebuked by those in the field, this story managed to persist beyond Rimmer, and adapted itself into a type of Chinese-whispers type tale where – at some point – NASA scientists had been added to the mix, presumably to keep the story current.

All of this happened long before the dawn of the Internet, and when home computers did eventually become a common fixture in many households, it wasn’t long before it this story made its way to the e-mail chain letter scene, and then later spread largely through social media.

Needless to say NASA are aware of the story. Back in 1997 in their “Ask an Astrophysicist” section they directly responded to the myth (and not for the first time)

We, too, have heard an “urban legend” about scientists at NASA GSFC finding the “missing day” in computer calculations of the motions of the planets. The legend has been around for longer

than NASA itself, but turned into a NASA “event” sometime in the 60’s. The story goes that some scientists were doing orbital mechanics calculations to determine the positions of the planets in the future, for use in determining the trajectories of future satellite missions. They realized they were off by a day. A biblical scholar in the lot remembered the passage from Joshua and all was set right. But these events, in fact, never occurred. It is easy to understand why:

The “GSFC finds missing day” urban legend doesn’t make sense for the following reason. If we want to know where the planets will be in the future, we use accurate knowledge of their initial positions and orbital speeds (which would be where they are located now), and solve for their positions for some time in the future. We solve a very well determined set of equations that describe their motions. The major dynamical component of any planet’s orbital motion is determined by solving an equation (force is equal to themass times the acceleration) which is the perhaps the most fundamental in classical physics. The validity and predictive power of this equation are well documented and can be seen every day: a recent example is the lunar eclipse that was visible to much of the world last Sunday. This calculation would not cover any time before the present, so some missing day many centuries ago, if it had occurred, could not be uncovered with this method.

In general, trying to prove events that are said to have occurred in the Bible, using scientific principles, doesn’t work. Most scientists draw a clear distinction between things that are taken on faith, and those that are testable and therefore falsifiable. Science deals with the latter, and religion with the former.

Basically, it didn’t happen. No calculations exist, and NASA have explicitly stated the story has nothing to do with them.

In terms of religious apologetics, this is certainly one story to stay well away from. It is a work of fiction.