Joshua call on God and God stops the sun in the sky right?
Well considering God was only doing this such that Joshua could have light to continue his butchery of a fleeing people (man woman and child), this has to be the most inefficient use of military force ever. The Earth rotates once a day (ish, it actually depends on how you define days, when the Sun is in the same place again (solar time) , or the stars (siderial time)). Just to give that some perspective, the people at the Earth surface on the equator are travelling about 1000 miles per hour (1.4x the speed of sound in the frame of reference of the Earths center of mass), those at temperate latitudes are doing about half of that, and those at the poles are doing zero! This means if God merely stops the Earth, the people on the surface will be doing about half the speed of sound relative to the surface. Given that it generally hurt to fall over, hitting objects at the best part of the speed of sound is probably going to sting!
Just so you know, this is what it looks like for something to hit a wall at about the speed of sound!
However to truely ‘Stop the Sun in the sky’ you need to stop the Earth in it’s orbit. Here the calculations are actually very easy. The Earths orbit around the Sun in about 30 km/ second. Given the speed of sound is about 1/3rd km per second, this means the Earths orbital velocity is some 90 times the speed of sound. So in order to stop the Sun in the sky you need to reduce the Earth velocity by 90 times the speed of sound, which in a frictionless environment is the same energy it would take to accelerate the Earth from rest to 90x the speed of sound.
So how much energy would this take?
Well kinetic energy is given by 1/2 x mass x velocity^2 (thats velocity squared)
So lets take a unit mass (1kg), and accelerate from rest to 30 000 meters per second (30 km/s the orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun)
KE = 0.5 x 1 x 30 000^2 joules (1/2 mv^2)
KE = 225 000 000 joules = 225 000 kJ
So how much explosive would be needed to accelerate a unit mass to his velocity.
Well wiki tells us that a killogram of TNT exploding releases 3 000 000 J of energy per kg, = 3 000 kJ
That means it will take about (225 000/3 000) kg of TNT to accelerate a kg to the orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun. Give or take, it requires about a 100 times an objects mass in TNT to accelerate it to this orbital velocity. So to stop the Earth in its orbit would require about 100 times its mass in high explosives.
Lets just take a look at this in terms of total war. Historically it turns out bombing is not a very efficient way of killing people, such that in WW2 it would typically take about 1 ton of bombs to kill one person. Some ball park numbers,
In the bombing of Berlin, some 60 000 tons of explosive were dropped, which killed some 20-50 000 people. These are actually fairly typical numbers for WW2.
So modern(ish) warfare takes about a TON of explosive to kill one person. That might sound inefficiency till you compare to to God!.
God expends 100x the mass of the Earth in high explosive (~100 x 6 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 tons)
So lets say God killed 10 000 people by doing this, this means that God expended about the same energy as 6 000 000 000 000 000 000 tons of high explosive per person killed. The biggest atom bomb ever was the Czar bomb at some 50 megatons (50 000 000 tons of TNT). This means that Gods expenditure of energy here was about the same as 100 000 000 000 (ONE HUNDRED BILLION Czar bombs per person he killed).
So, lets see, God, determined to wipe out a fleeing people, first tries throwing rocks at them, and manages to kill some of them, and then when Joshua wants some extra daylight to continue with this religious genocide, God obliges by stopping the Earth in its orbit at an energetic cost of 100x the Earth mass in high explosive, when the same effect could have been had with a truck load of flares. Given that people can be killed simply by simply stopping the electrical current that regulates the heart, stopping the Earth such that Joshua can continue to kill man, woman and child by stabbing them with sharp pieces of metal seems to be both EXCEPTIONALLY inefficient and psychologically VERY messed up.
Tags: at, creationists, do, earth, energy, explosive, joshua, laugh, orbital, part 38, people, sky, stops, sun, thunderf00t, why, why do people laugh at creationists, why do people laugh at creationists Part 38
Thunderf00t 
October 6, 2012 at 11:15 am |
If “god” can stop the rotation of the earth, he can stop the rotation of the objects on it as well; also the efficiency of an act of an omnipotent being is always 100%, by definition. (I think)
I do agree though that the story is dumb, and especially with the last few sentences: if you’re omnipotent, there are WAY better ways to kill people than giving more daylight to some genocidal mortals. (and that’s before the immensely barbaric nature of the whole scenario).
October 6, 2012 at 1:01 pm |
I don’t agree. The bible doesn’t say that the stars didn’t move.
So, here is my take, just stopping the Earth’s rotation and taking a slightly different look at what the amount of energy means:
The rotational energy of the Earth is 2.5789e+29J. (The rotational energy of the Earth rotating once per year is so low that the effect of reducing from once/day to once/year is basically the same as reducing it form once/day to 0 at this precision.)
(K = 1/2 * I * omega^2, I = 2/5 m r^2 for a ball, omega = 2pi/T => K = 4*pi^2/5 * m * r^2/T^2. Put in m = 5.9742412e+24kg; r = 6371km; T = 86164.1 s (sidereal day).)
With E = mc^2, the rotational energy of earth is 2869 megatonnes/c^2.
That is megatonnes of antimatter. Not ~60 Czar bombas.
Again taking the number of 10000 killed and using 75kg as a typical mass, you have the energy of annihilating 3825901 antimatter spectres to kill one person.
Still,
October 6, 2012 at 1:13 pm |
…that’s what you get from doing your own calculations.
For simplicity i assumed the Earth to be a perfectly homogeneous sphere. Instead i should have looked it up. The real value seems to be 2.138e29J, about 20% lower. (I guess mostly because the Earth’s density increases as you go down.)
Still the same ballpark. You only get about three million antimatter spectres/person, not four.
October 6, 2012 at 2:35 pm |
After that last post, I thought this one would be a video of Thunderf00t’s daily bowel movements.
Maybe it’s just as well. No sense intruding on PZ Myer’s territory.
* * *
If you go strictly by the bible, then you would have to believe that the earth never moves but that god moves the entire cosmos around it.
Job 38:32 Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?
Job is told that god moves the constellations across the sky at night.
It sure seems like a lot of trouble to move the entire universe around the earth when it would be so much easier to just have the earth rotate. This reminds me of an episode of Futurama where the professor insists that his spaceship never actually moves but that its propulsion system causes the entire universe to move around it!
We also have this passage:
Isaiah 40:26 Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.
Translation: God commands the stars to move across the sky like a great army!
Edward T. Babinski offers a great analogy for this: “Like telling people who start their cars and step on the gas that, ‘God leads forth the trees which speed by on the roadside… Because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power not one is missing!'”.
* * *
Applying good science to religion. Isn’t that a little like polishing a tu–? Well, no sense in being crude. (And please, people, we don’t need a video of THAT.)
October 8, 2012 at 1:51 pm |
Applying logic and science to religion? 🙂
If I was (a) god and needed to provide my homicidal worshipers with some extra killing time I would have given them Daylight Saving Time. If the extra hour isn’t enough they are not worthy of the adjective homicidal.
October 8, 2012 at 1:53 pm |
Damn. That should have been a general reply, not specific to piranhaintheguppytank. But I do agree with pi/tpt.
October 6, 2012 at 2:53 pm |
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October 6, 2012 at 8:29 pm |
I agree there are many parts of the Bible that are indeed, ridiculous. What’s important to remember is that the Bible is, to a large degree, a public relations work. (And one of the most successful public relations masterpieces of all time, I might add. It’s still being used today, despite the fact that its authors are long dead.) It’s purpose was to control the masses through their ignorance so that they can feel justified in killing their enemies, after all if God says it’s ok…
This is just another instance of the gullible and impressionable being decieved by those who would control them.
October 6, 2012 at 8:54 pm |
Yep. God might be omnipotent, but he’s also incompetent.
October 7, 2012 at 12:06 am |
Isn’t this god person supposed to be like the Architect in the Matrix?
If he wanted to stop the Sun in the sky, he wouldn’t stop the actual Sun in the actual sky. He’d tinker with the levers and gears behind the universe, outside the system, beyond any laws concerning energy.
Alternately, if the energy equation had to be balanced to avoid a system crash, dump the excess energy into a temporary buffer, possibly set up in a parallel universe, or a tiny pocket universe created just for this purpose, and then shunt it back when the whole “miracle” business is over. Remember to declare your array limits.
Or, much more simply, relatively speaking, just make everyone *think* that the Sun had stopped.
If you are going to question the activity of gods, you gotta think on their level. 😉
October 7, 2012 at 8:05 am |
Hi, just wanted to thank you for this post.
I’m going to the my parents, family and friends Canadian thanksgiving this weekend and will be using this to direct conversation. My father leads a group of fundamental baptist Christians in my town, and your videos on youtube over the last few years have greatly helped me to understand critical thinking and have pointed out many perspectives of christian biblical stories in an external light… (not to mention that science experimentation and exploration have been my passion since a child)
Should be an interesting weekend, thanks again 🙂
October 7, 2012 at 11:06 am |
Nope nope nope nope.
The Bible is quite clear that the sun goes around the earth, so none of your Godless so-called angular momentum balderdash.
So it’s not the “most efficient” way to kill those people? With God it’s never about efficiency. Look at the Flood.
It’s more a question of aesthetics. 🙂
October 7, 2012 at 4:36 pm |
100 billion czar bombs per person! Cant but help feel theres and element of overkill there!
October 8, 2012 at 2:11 pm |
Would’ve been so much easier to give them night viz goggles.
October 9, 2012 at 12:45 pm |
Ah, but maybe the entire world WAS destroyed, and God just re-created it a minute later with all damage removed.
Remember; A god of omnipotent deception and dishonesty can never, ever be disproven–and that makes him the best god of all!
October 14, 2012 at 6:59 pm |
Fear the day God divides by zero or the universe encounters a nil pointer. Collapse of the false vacuum at the very least. Ok, now I’m just being weird.
October 19, 2012 at 11:03 am |
If you’d ever played a game that revolves around defeating your opponent, you knew why he went for both the overkill and “underkill”. Pitting a whole army against the faction leader’s sole unit is incredibly satisfying, as is killing your opponent by a translocator teleport to their position, instead of blowing a few rockets to their face.
Overkill is splendour, underkill is skill.
January 3, 2013 at 1:48 pm |
This is really stupid analysis.
If “miracles contradict science” do not illicit a simple “duh” then you are missing the boat, big time. Let me spoon feed it to you: that’s a feature, not a bug.
Your argument is:
1) Let’s grant, for the sake of discussion, daylight was extended
2) Ha ha, my junior high physics calculation shows that people would be sent flying a half the speed of sound! Ergo, bullshit, Aren’t I clever!
You probably are not smart enough to see the logical flaw. Your point, which relies on the setup of “accepting” for the moment that god extended daylight, then relies on the absurd (in that context) and unstated assumption that a god who can do that would, inexplicably, not have anticipated the consequences (oh, shit, I didn’t think about what would happen to everything when I stopped the earth’s rotation! My bad!)
Your logic, as it were, is not self-consistent. You change from one playing field to another half-way through. I seriously doubt you can grasp that.
And let me help you out some more. Theists believe that god created the universe. You can simply say: that contradicts science –and be done with it. The ultimate argument stopper. Why concentrate on “in the noise” miracles (like extending daylight) and ignore the mother of all miracles.
Idiot.
April 8, 2013 at 2:55 pm |
>If “miracles contradict science” do not illicit a simple “duh” then you are missing the boat, big time.
Many “miracles” are shown to be explainable phenomena after the fact, so it is worth examining them with a skeptical eye.
Furthermore, while “claims with out proof may be rejected without proof” is a perfectly valid criticism of any miracle, Bible-based or not, there is merit in deconstructing biblical stories, as it demonstrates to
1) those who believe in the Bible as literally true
and
2) those who are ignorant of the sheer infantile nature of the book
how ridiculous most of its claims are, and thus how ridiculous their cherry-picking is.
If the post is the small wedge in the chink of religious suspension of disbelief for even a few Christians, then it was absolutely worthwhile.
Besides, all we are doing, is saying, “Were this story to be true, how would it be achieved within the understandings of modern science? What are the consequences of this (for sake of a better word) theory?”.
November 7, 2013 at 8:05 am |
Well, one way is to say “modern science” (as in heliocentric cosmology) is wrong.
Earth did not rotate, stop and start rotating again, Sun and Moon stopped their daily and periodical orbits around earth. And then started again.
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July 31, 2013 at 12:36 pm |
First off, I do not know what version you use.
King and people of Gabaon were Joshua’s allies. Five Amorrhite Kings with their armies made siege on the poor Gabaonites.
Joshua came to their rescue. That is the political and military background story of the miracle.
Second, your technical point about the miracle:
a) has been answered already, even by a non-believer:
If “god” can stop the rotation of the earth, he can stop the rotation of the objects on it as well; also the efficiency of an act of an omnipotent being is always 100%, by definition.
b) is only a point at all if you suppose it is earth that rotates daily.
Some of us have the grace to be Geocentrics (as when Galileo and St Robert Bellarmine had different views about the miracle in 1616).
July 31, 2013 at 12:37 pm |
Oh, should have mentioned my source, namely Douay-Rheims:
http://drbo.org/chapter/06010.htm
Sorry for oversight!
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November 2, 2013 at 12:15 am |
Let’s not forget the implications that the Sun revolves around the Earth. This was likely the view of ignorant Bronze Age people and written as such without any divine knowledge, naturally this is often dismissed as a colloquialism, but certainly if God authored the Bible, he’d have gotten that right. (Is. 38:8; Jos. 10:13).
November 2, 2013 at 12:13 pm |
@arick mittler
What if the Sun actually does revolve around the Earth?
November 5, 2013 at 12:59 pm |
It does not revolve around the Earth, we are 100% sûre of that.
November 5, 2013 at 2:23 pm |
You may think you are, does not mean it is so.
November 5, 2013 at 2:24 pm |
to be fair (and to play devil’s advocate), we are ~99.99999999% sure of that. there is always the tiniest of tiny chances that we’re wrong. you can, for example, come up with a model that will explain the motion of the planets with the earth in the center. it’s just extremely convoluted and has limited applicability. Newton is much more elegant, but still not 100% correct, in fact we don’t have a 100% accurate model of gravity.
although, while science is never strictly 100% sure of anything, you could use the wording “effectively sure”. we are effectively 100% sure.
November 6, 2013 at 10:38 am
Extremely convoluted?
God moves the Universe around us daily. Angels move the several heavenly bodies along with it, more or less. Those of them that have such duties.
Sun is moved by an angel lagging somewhat behind Universe. Moon is moved by an angel lagging behind the Sun. Both of them obeyed Joshua that day. Stars made a full circle so there was actual time going on, while Sun and Moon were still.
You can call it supernatural, but hardly convoluted.
That Mars and Venus get convoluted orbits (as their angels dance around the Sun with them) does not make this a convoluted explanation.
November 6, 2013 at 6:24 pm
I hate to admit it but you are… 99.99999% right.
June 12, 2014 at 6:23 pm |
ego : What if the Sun actually does revolve around the Earth?
MN : It does not revolve around the Earth, we are 100% sûre of that.
DC : … you can, for example, come up with a model that will explain the motion of the planets with the earth in the center. it’s just extremely convoluted and has limited applicability. …
ego : Extremely convoluted?
God moves the Universe around us daily. Angels move the several heavenly bodies along with it, more or less. Those of them that have such duties.
Sun is moved by an angel lagging somewhat behind Universe. Moon is moved by an angel lagging behind the Sun. Both of them obeyed Joshua that day. Stars made a full circle so there was actual time going on, while Sun and Moon were still.
You can call it supernatural, but hardly convoluted.
That Mars and Venus get convoluted orbits (as their angels dance around the Sun with them) does not make this a convoluted explanation.
MN did not care to answer me, just DC.
Any takers on my answer? MN? DC? Other?
Perhaps arick.mittler?
May 10, 2014 at 11:47 am |
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Why God stopping the Sun in the sky is so stupid, no matter which way you look at it! | Thunderf00t
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Why God stopping the Sun in the sky is so stupid, no matter which way you look at it! | Thunderf00t
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Why God stopping the Sun in the sky is so stupid, no matter which way you look at it! | Thunderf00t
May 14, 2014 at 3:02 pm |
Hey Thunderfag, were you aware that atheism is a mental disease, and that atheists have the highest rates of suicide, and substance abuse than any group in the entire world according to a study done by the American Psychiatric Association? Probably not, because you God-Haters are too busy listening to yourselves pontificate to take notice of all of the things going against you and your religious zeal.
Enjoy your solopsism, you pitiful talking monkey.
July 17, 2014 at 11:39 pm |
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Hey Thunderfag, were you aware that atheism is a mental disease, and that atheists have the highest rates of suicide, and substance abuse than any group in the entire world according to a study done by the American Psychiatric Association? Probably not, because you God-Haters are too busy listening to yourselves pontificate to take notice of all of the things going against you and your religious zeal.
Enjoy your solopsism, you pitiful talking monkey.
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Those types of articles really amazes me sometimes and this all philosophy of questioning God started from the garden of eden. God said this, satan said this: I’m gonna decide.
That’s exactly what you’re doing. Even though I’m not gonna enter in the basis for science (which you used in your argumentation) and the unsolved problem of induction, I’m still going to point out some of the silly claims you guys are making.
1) Why does God do things the way he does and not in another way (assuming that the other way is a better solution or alternative or whatever)? First of all, this is based on the false assumptions (and it has to be) that:
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SCIENE NOW PROVES THE EARTH IS AROUN 6000 YEARS OLD
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