I always had my doubts about the claim that there was a scientist who somehow did the math and concluded that there was a day missing. I don’t doubt God made the Sun stay up long enough for Joshua’s battle, I doubt anyone could do that math.
Just to amuse myself, I asked Claude.
Claude said…
This sounds like it’s referring to a well-known urban legend rather than an actual scientific finding — often called the “NASA missing day” or “Joshua’s long day” myth.
The claim, as it circulates:
- A story (traced back at least to the 1930s–1960s, often falsely attributed to NASA scientists) claims that when computers were used to calculate planetary positions far into the past and future, they found a “missing day” in history.
- It’s usually tied to the Biblical account in the Book of Joshua, where the sun is said to have “stood still” for about a day, plus a related passage about King Hezekiah’s sundial shadow moving backward — together adding up to almost exactly 24 hours.
- The story claims this gap was discovered by NASA engineers and confirms the Bible literally.
Why scientists reject it:
- There’s no credible record of NASA or any space agency ever running such a calculation or reporting this finding. It has been investigated and debunked multiple times, including by NASA itself and by the Christian apologetics community.
- Orbital mechanics calculations don’t work by “counting days forward” looking for gaps — they use continuous mathematical models, so a missing day wouldn’t show up as an anomaly in the way the story describes.
- The specific numbers used in the story (23 hours and 20 minutes, plus 40 minutes from Hezekiah, equaling 24 hours) are contrived after the fact rather than derived from any real calculation.
So it’s not a genuine scientific claim — it’s a piece of popular folklore that keeps resurfacing, often in religious or pseudo-scientific contexts, without any documented scientist or study behind it.
I’m inclined to agree with Claude here.