I'm in the middle of another Bible read, going through Joshua at the moment. Sometimes, I take breaks and watch YouTube content about the Bible while I am reading it. This was a classic.
This video was originally from VenomFangX, one of the YouTube's most notorious Christian apologists. His approach is a bit lame. Rather than appeal to faith, he tries to prove various religious beliefs with facts that, well, aren't very factual. It tends to make the atheists look more honest and intelligent, and I'd rather see people like him just stop already.
The premise of this video is as follows: Jericho was the "city of the moon". In Joshua 6, before the walls crumbled, the Lord had the Israelites circle the city once a day for six days. Each trip around was 360°. And if you add those degrees up, you get 2,160, which also happens to be (aha!) the diameter of the moon in miles. Therefore, God was revealing, in this story, the diameter of the moon, and the measurement of the future: the mile. A fun thought, but not true.
The video was so embarrassingly refuted that it is no longer on VenomFangX's YouTube page, but can be seen via many video responses that other users put together.
The main problems with Sean's theory:
1. The Science: The moon's diameter is not 2,160 miles. It's actually 2,159 miles. (Source: NASA, http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/education/rocket/moon.html) That's pretty close, I'll admit. However, you might expect that a perfect God would make his cryptic messages line up, well, more perfectly. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt here and say that maybe since Joshua's days, the diameter of the moon shrunk by a foot due to gravitational compression. But still, you have to consider....
2. The Logic: They walked around the city, not through it. In other words, they were doing a circumference. If there was to be a hidden message, you would expect the mathematical total to equate to the circumference of the moon, not the diameter. If they had walked through the center of the city and gone six times at 360 cubits each time, I might be impressed. Except...
3. The Scripture: Jericho, the "moon city" was not circled six times. It was circled thirteen times, once each on the first six days, and then seven times on the seventh day. Joshua 6 explains:
12 Joshua got up early the next morning and the priests took up the ark of the LORD. 13 The seven priests carrying the seven trumpets went forward, marching before the ark of the LORD and blowing the trumpets. The armed men went ahead of them and the rear guard followed the ark of the LORD, while the trumpets kept sounding. 14 So on the second day they marched around the city once and returned to the camp. They did this for six days.
15 On the seventh day, they got up at daybreak and marched around the city seven times in the same manner, except that on that day they circled the city seven times. 16 The seventh time around, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the people, "Shout! For the LORD has given you the city!
Here's the math: 6 x 360 = 2,160, which is pretty close to 2,159; but ... 13 x 360 = 4,680, which is not very close at all. (Source: NKJV, Joshua 6:15-16)
Here's another one where you can see what Sean, or however VenomFangX spells his name, looks like:
The logic bombs in this proof were well-refuted by Pogobat. I can't improve on his remarks.
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