09/08/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Bce11h795/
Apparently we need to talk about whether the Earth is moving.
Yes. It is.
And I mean that both scientifically and biblically, because I keep seeing the claim that the Earth cannot possibly be rotating because “we would feel it,” or because the Bible talks about the sun rising and setting. But something moving at a constant speed does not automatically feel like movement. If you are sitting on an airplane cruising smoothly at 500 miles per hour, you do not feel 500 miles per hour. You can pour a drink, read a book, or sit there wondering why the person in front of you decided their seat absolutely needed to recline those extra three inches. What you feel much more readily is acceleration, deceleration, turbulence, and changes in motion. Earth rotates extremely smoothly, and because the atmosphere, oceans, buildings, cows, coffee cups, and all the rest of us are moving along with it, we do not feel ourselves being hurled eastward. At the equator, the surface of Earth is moving at roughly 1,000 miles per hour because of Earth's rotation. That sounds ridiculous until you remember that speed itself is not what your body normally detects. Changes in motion are.
And Earth's rotation is not something scientists simply decided must be happening because somebody at NASA said so. We can measure it right here on Earth. One of my favorite examples is the Foucault pendulum. Hang a sufficiently large pendulum and let it swing freely, and over time the direction of its swing changes relative to the floor beneath it because the Earth is rotating underneath it. Even better, the amount of apparent rotation changes with latitude exactly as a rotating Earth predicts. Modern ring laser gyroscopes can also measure Earth's rotation directly without needing to look at the sun, moon, stars, satellites, or anything else in the sky. We also observe the Coriolis effect in large scale atmospheric circulation and ocean currents. Different methods, different areas of physics, same conclusion. The Earth rotates.
Here is another way to think about it. Suppose the Earth really were completely stationary and everything we see crossing the sky every day were physically circling us once every 24 hours. The farther away an object is, the larger the circle it would have to travel in the same amount of time, which means the faster it would have to move.
Once you extend that idea to sufficiently distant stars and galaxies, you eventually require objects to travel faster than the speed of light simply to make one trip around Earth every 24 hours. Meanwhile, a rotating Earth explains the daily motion of the entire sky with one very simple motion: we are turning.
Imagine standing in the middle of a room, slowly turning around, and insisting that you are perfectly still while the walls, furniture, windows, refrigerator, neighboring houses, mountains, moon, sun, stars, and the rest of the universe are all racing around you. Technically that is one way to describe what you are seeing. It is just an extraordinarily complicated explanation for something that becomes very simple when you admit you are the thing turning.
But what about the Bible? Scripture talks about the sun rising and setting. Yes, and so do I. So do meteorologists. So do astronomers. We still publish “sunrise” and “sunset” times even though nobody checking tomorrow's sunrise time is making a theological declaration about geocentrism. That is observational language. We describe what something looks like from where we are standing. Ecclesiastes 1:5 says, “The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.” That beautifully describes the cycle we observe from Earth. It does not give us a physics lesson explaining which body is rotating.
Then there is the “firmament,” because this one comes up a lot too. Genesis 1:6 in the King James Version says, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” The word translated “firmament” there is the Hebrew word raqia. The ESV translates it “expanse”: “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters.” That matters because when modern English speakers hear “firmament,” we can picture some kind of hard, solid ceiling over the Earth. But that picture owes quite a bit to the history of translation. The Hebrew raqia describes something spread or stretched out, an expanse. Genesis itself then tells us something extremely useful about what this expanse includes. Genesis 1:20 says, “Let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” Whatever conclusions we draw about the raqia, we need to account for the fact that birds fly in or across this expanse. The word does not simply settle the modern debate by saying, “There is a solid metal dome over a flat Earth.”
There are other verses people bring up too. Job 37:18 asks, “Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a cast metal mirror?” That is poetry from a book absolutely packed with vivid descriptions of nature. Job also talks about the “storehouses of the snow” in Job 38:22. I don't know many Christians arguing that somewhere above us God has a literal warehouse with snow stacked on pallets waiting for winter. Biblical poetry uses physical imagery to communicate truth. Reading the skies being “hard as a cast metal mirror” as a technical statement about atmospheric composition while reading the storehouses of snow figuratively is not consistent interpretation.
And Scripture actually contains some remarkably interesting descriptions of the Earth. Job 26:7 says that God “hangs the earth on nothing.” Isaiah 40:22 describes God as sitting “above the circle of the earth” and says He “stretches out the heavens like a curtain.” I would be careful about claiming those verses secretly contain modern astrophysics, because that makes the same mistake from the opposite direction. The Bible was not written as a twenty first century astronomy textbook. But neither do those passages require a stationary flat Earth underneath a literal solid ceiling.
Joshua 10 is another passage people bring up because Joshua commands the sun to stand still: “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon” (Joshua 10:12 ESV). And then Scripture says the sun stood still. I absolutely believe God performed a miracle there. But notice something important: the passage tells us what happened from Joshua's perspective and what God accomplished. It does not explain the physical mechanism God used to accomplish it. Saying “the sun stood still” is no more a scientific declaration that the sun normally travels around a stationary Earth than me saying “the sun came up at 5:45 this morning” is a declaration that I reject Earth's rotation.
Then there are verses saying the Earth is established and “shall never be moved.” Psalm 93:1 says, “Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.” Psalm 104:5 similarly says God “set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.” Those verses can sound like definitive proof of a motionless Earth if we pull one English sentence out by itself. But look at what the Psalms are doing. They are praising God's sovereignty, His ordering of creation, and the stability of the world He established. If “never be moved” literally meant the planet experiences absolutely no physical movement, then earthquakes would contradict Scripture. Tectonic plates could not move. The Earth could not orbit anything. Technically you couldn't even dig a hole without moving part of the Earth. Clearly that is not what the Psalmist is trying to teach.
This is why genre and language matter when we read the Bible. Poetry should be read as poetry. Observational descriptions should be understood as observational descriptions. Hebrew words should be understood in their Hebrew context instead of automatically carrying every idea that became attached to an English translation hundreds or thousands of years later. None of that weakens Scripture. It is actually taking Scripture more seriously because we are asking what the biblical authors were communicating instead of forcing them to answer modern scientific questions they were not addressing.
And Christians do not need to be afraid of measurable science. If God created the universe, discovering how that universe operates is not discovering something that threatens Him. A Foucault pendulum does not disprove Genesis. A gyroscope does not disprove Joshua. Measuring Earth's rotation does not require us to throw out Scripture. It simply tells us something about the physical world God made.
So yes, the Earth is spinning. We can observe its effects. We can measure the rotation directly. Multiple completely different branches of physics agree on it. And none of that requires us to twist the Bible, ignore the Bible, or stop believing what the Bible says.
The Earth is moving.
Thankfully, God designed the whole system well enough that your coffee stays in the cup.
