Evolution on Trial

Watched one of those old classic black and white movies yesterday; “Inherit the Wind,” with Spencer Tracy as liberal attorney, Henry Drummond.  It’s a great movie, if you ever get the chance to see it.  I bet I’ve seen it five times.


The movie is an adaptation of the actual trial that took place in 1925, referred to in the press as “The Scopes Monkey Trial” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial), where the teaching of evolution versus creationism was put to the legal test.  In this final movie scene, Spencer Tracy is bemoaning the loss of his longtime fellow lawyer friend and religious fundamentalist, Matthew Harrison Brady, played by Fredrick March.  Gene Kelly, a liberal news reporter for the Baltimore Herald, gets on Tracy’s case about Tracy being a phony atheist/agnostic, as Tracy himself reflects on religion.  Here’s that final scene, worth the 5-minute look:

I especially like the part where Tracy slaps together the two books, Charles Darwin’s “The Descent of Man” and the “Bible” together, as if to say, there’s some kind of room for both. You can decide.

But now to get to my question.  In one scene, earlier in the movie, Tracy talks of biblical Joshua making the sun stand still:

Then Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel: Sun, stand still over Gibeon; and Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the people had revenge upon their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and did not hastened to go down for about a whole day. And there has been no day like that, before it or after it, that the Lord heeded a voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel (Joshua 10:12-14).

Now I think we all already know that the sun actually does stands still, and it is our planet that moves around it.  The sun moving across the sky is just an optical illusion, from our earthly perspective.

Questions:

-Doesn’t the Bible’s claim that the sun stood still “for about a day” prove that many parts of the Bible are to be taken as metaphor? Wasn’t/Isn’t that just metaphorical?

-Barring galactic movement, is anyone here claiming that the sun actually doesn’t stand still, but moves, relative to the Earth?

-If you consider yourself a fundamentalist, and the Bible is to be taken literally, give us your explanation of this biblical claim/phenomenon.

Thanks for recommending.