Refers to an event recounted in the Old Testament when Joshua commanded the sun to delay going down for a full day and the moon to halt in its movements.
During the 1970s, a story began to circulate in conservative Evangelical Christian circles that some scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had been calculating the positions of the planets in centuries past. Their calculations had apparently run into a problem because they could not account for 24 hours. Seemingly, when refiguring their calculations, taking into account the Joshua story, all of the figures came out correctly. This became a popular anecdotal example, often repeated, of modern science reversing itself and confirming an extraordinary incident recorded in the Bible, which scientists previously claimed to be impossible. In the 1980s, writer Tom Mclver attempted to track down the source of the story. He eventually traced it to a conservative Christian engineer who had at one time been a consultant to NASA. In speaking to groups of people, he had told this story, though it has no basis in fact, as a means of convincing his hearers that science really supports the truth of the miraculous occurrences recorded in the Bible. When confronted with his false¬ hood, he defended the story because it converted some of his audience to his particular version of Christianity “the end justifies the means.”