Please debunk the “missing day” theory described in the enclosed flier. –Ross Rhone, Chicago
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The best-known version of the tale, a classic bit of “Xeroxlore” that creationists have been passing around for more than 20 years, is attributed to one Harold Hill, supposedly a consultant to the NASA space program. It seems a bunch of “astronauts and space scientists” at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, were using a computer to calculate the orbits of the sun, moon, and planets so that a satellite sent up today would not crash into something a hundred years from now. This entailed figuring the position of the heavenly bodies many centuries into the past. (Why I don’t know; I’m just telling the story.)
Damn, the missing day! shouted the scientists. Not quite. After further calculations they concluded that the missing “elapsed time” in Joshua’s day was only 23 hours and 20 minutes, not a full day.
Creationists have been trying to work the “missing day” angle for a long time. Folklorist Jan Brunvand says he unearthed a story about an alleged confrontation between an unbelieving scientist and C.A. Totten, an eccentric military instructor at Yale in the 1890s. Totten, who became notorious for his wild theories about science and religion, supposedly made a believer out of an agnostic astronomer by pointing out a “missing day” in the latter’s calculations that could only be accounted for by the passages from Joshua and II Kings. It’s the kind of story that only a true believer could love, since it makes no sense to anybody else.
