OK, one more unclefucking time.
What’s needed for the computer to realize that there’s a missing day, missing 23 hours and 20 minutes, or whatever:
(1) The exact position and motion of the stars and planets now.
(2) The exact position of the stars and planets at a specific date and time prior to the episode with Joshua making the sun stand still.
The first piece of information allows the computer to work forward and backward in time, to say where the stars and planets should be at any time, past or future.
But without the second piece of information, the computer has nothing to compare with. If you don’t know the position of the stars to a fairly exact degree on February 23, 1707 BC, at 2:45am GMT, or on some similarly precise date and time, you have no idea how far off the computer model was, at that day and time.
Maybe the Babylonians, or some other ancient astronomers, were taking and recording such detailed astronomical observations. Probably not. But if they were, we’d still have to (a) find their records, and (b) be able to, independently of the observations themselves, translate from their calendar accurately to ours. AFAIK, we’re 0 for 2.
The point is not that the aforementioned Biblical miracles didn’t happen. The point is that there’s no way NASA’s computer could have proven that they happened, or didn’t happen, for that matter, in anything remotely resembling the manner described.
This is why Harold Hill is a liar, and why you would be too, if you passed on this story (even as something that might or might not be true). It’s not for saying the miracle happened; it’s for claiming proof of the miracle, when the means for the proof are out of our reach.
For all practical purposes, it would be as if he’d said, “NASA flew me to Mars, where we found gold tablets recording the story of the sun standing still,” and recounted that as proof. Again, the problem isn’t whether the sun stood still; we just know that NASA didn’t fly Hill to Mars, so saying they did, citing what he found there as proof of a miracle, would be lying. Same thing here. Regardless of the miracle, we know the proof, as described, couldn’t have happened.
All the story proves is the willingness of many irresponsible Christians to spread stories such as this, and the gullibility of many Christians regarding the veracity of such stories. (You might want to pick up a copy of Os Guinness’ Fit Bodies, Fat Minds, which deals with this subject.) Right now, you’re just gullible. Don’t take it to the next level, OK?