Expressions of Faith
Questions cannot hurt faith

By Reverend Otto Cleveland
Special to The Advertiser

Alan Watts asked, "Would a loving God put all we need to know in one book?"

God gave us enormous brains. Should we question everything, even the existence of God himself? Should we use these great brains to look at things from different points of view? Yes. Two stories suggest why.

I told a friend that I thought the Bible had some flaws because languages are dictated by culture and custom and therefore cannot be translated. Thus, the Bible must be interpreted.

My friend responded that the Bible was the word of God and that God would make sure that it was correctly translated.

I told her that I had found some conflict between accepted history and the Bible stories. At this point, she noticed I had a fish symbol with feet and the word "Darwin" on the back of my car. She changed the subject.

"Darwin became a Christian before he died," she informed me.

I told her that Darwin was a Christian all his life; his theories of evolution didn't change him.

My friend then described how NASA had found a missing day. The Bible, in Joshua 10:12-13, says that God made the sun stand still and there was a day missing. Joshua was fighting a battle and was worried that if darkness fell, the enemy would overpower him and his troops. So Joshua asked God to make the sun stand still. The sun stood still and the moon stayed and hastened not to go down about a whole day.

My friend claimed that a NASA computer had found the missing day of Joshua while it was looking for planet positions so a planet would not be hit accidentally during a space probe. Because the computer found the planet positions were not where they should have been during the time of Joshua, this must have been the missing day.

This story was in circulation, but how can it be true?

How would a computer know if there was a problem more than 2,000 years ago? It would have to find a discrepancy between the prediction of the planetary positions based on today's measurements and the actual measured positions in the time of Joshua. There were no actual measurements of planetary positions back then.

The sun always stands still in relationship to Earth and planets. Earth rotates on its axis, giving the appearance of the sun and moon moving across the sky. For the sun to appear to stand still it would mean that Earth's rotation would have to stop or be slowed. For example, the Earth would have to slow to one revolution every 48 hours to lengthen the daylight to 24 hours. Slowing and speeding up of Earth's rotation would not change the position of Earth in relation to the sun and planets.

So the story of NASA finding the missing day of Joshua cannot be true.

Perhaps a little bit of questioning would not hurt our faith.

The Rev. Otto Cleveland, who performs weddings, is not attached to a single church.