Ask Mr. Religion
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I have looked at what you posted and I don't agree with you. Science and God are opposite sides of the same coin. We can not read the OT while assuming they had the same understanding of science as we to do today. TO do so is ludicrous. We must understand how ancient people would have viewed and event and then understand their observations against what we know today. Your view requires a cognitive dissonance that I don't believe God ever intended. God created the physical laws that govern how the universe operates. Being created in His image, we can learn to understand those laws and use them for our benefit. There is nothing wrong with coming to understand a passage of scripture a little better by applying what we know today to what is recorded in scripture. Whether the sun stopped or the Earth stopped, God's accommodation is the same.
Quite simply you deny the verbal plenary inspiration of the Bible. That has been my point all along.
Given your view one thing is certain, you will never be able to say with any degree of certainty that anything is true on the basis that the Bible teaches it while you allow that the Bible accommodates its teaching to the mistaken notions of men. Your doctrine of inspiration is not orthodox so long as you do not consider the suppression of the penmen's errors to be an active part of it. This view is akin to baldly stating The Holy Spirit didn't know whether the Earth rotates or not when He inspired this passage. You will simply never know what is absolute truth and what is mere accommodation. Like the liberal, the canon of reason is required to distinguish where Scripture speaks truth and where it accommodates error.
Here you affirm that the narrator's lack of knowledge found its way into the text of Scripture. Every orthodox exposition of the doctrine of inspiration includes within it an affirmation that the errors of the penmen were suppressed. I don't need to know the single true interpretation of every passage in order to affirm the doctrine of plenary inspiration.
Orthodox Christendom affirms God is wise enough to know that if He accommodated errors there would be no way for believers to know when He was telling truth and when He was accommodating error, to the point there could be no certainty about any fact. God is the vantage point in Joshua 10. He answered His servant's prayer. If God was simply accommodating Joshua's misconception, then who knows what is true!
First you imply the Joshua 10 account was a matter of accommodating misconception. Now you are hinting that it utilizes figurative language. Well, the figurative language angle is clearly negated by the fact that Joshua prayed for the sun to stand still, and God answered the prayer in terms of the sun standing still. There are no figurative markers in the text. And, finally, it is clear that external considerations raised by secular science are being thrust upon the interpretation of the text.
Everything advanced in the discussion to date indicates the "misconception" that the people thought in terms of the sun moving. But they can hardly be called as reliable witnesses to the occurrence of a work which transcends nature when they can't be trusted to know the way nature ordinarily works. The text in question does not pertain to different perspectives in a narrative, but to narration. To claim there is inspired and uninspired speech in the narration is to claim that the penmen were not fully inspired. To cast doubt on the narration of these is to cast doubt on the plenary inspiration of the Bible.
The text is also obviously challenging our assumption that the earth revolves around the sun. Why are we at liberty to disregard this challenge? And if we can disregard this challenge, why could not Joshua's contemporaries disregard certain things which would have challenged them? In the end, we would end up merely reading assumptions and challenges into the text rather than simply reading the text as it stands.
Whatever one thinks about physics, astronomy, or any other science, he has no right to impose his unproven, ever advancing scientific explanations on the Bible and make it say something other than what it says.
AMR