It is amazing how critics seem to want it both ways. Critics about Noah's Flood say that "all the world" (paraphrasing) simply means the local area. It was not the whole earth that was covered but only a regional flood. They contend that there would not have been enough water to cover the whole earth, including the mountains. But the Bible does say the whole earth. Regarding the darkness at the Crucifiction, the Bible mentions the whole land. My contention here is that this does not refer to the whole earth. If it did, it would have emphasized it, just as the Bible says in the Flood story.
The main point of my initial reply though was to disagree with the standpoint that someone made about the impossibility of a 3-day eclipse of the sun that would have produced the darkness. The only reasonable cause would have been dark cloud cover. Of course the author knows the difference between cloud cover and darkness. But think about it. If the weather were changing because of approaching heavy rains, one would probably remark about how dark it would be getting. He would not resort to meteorological terminology.
I do not know your moral position. I will propose to you, though, that contrary to the critics, the Bible is extremely historically accurate. Yes it is a book based in theism. However, it is also a witness in a sense to geology, biology and other sciences. Of course it does not use scientific terminology, which had not yet even been invented. The fact is that many of the sciences, particularly archaeology and geology have supported the historicity of the Bible. That does not mean that the Bible has been "proven" accurate in every respect. But one thing is for sure - nothing has proven the Bible wrong, except for those who choose to hold that it is only a book of fairy tales.
Now I know many of you are salivating right now to come back at me with pseudo-scientific jargon about this or that or the other. I am not going to enter into an unending thread. But I challenge you to re-evaluate the data from a totally objective viewpoint. View the data only as it is, not as what can be deduced by conjecture or opinion as to what seemingly happened in the past. Read the words, and if you have a problem understanding them literally, then understand them in a colloquial sense and in the manner that the author may have used words. A modern example is the word gay. A century ago the word was used prolifically to mean happy, fun, etc. - the "gay nineties" referred to the decade of the 1890's. Today we of course know what it has come to mean. So if a future historian would be reading about John Doe who lived in the early part of the 20th century and that he was gay, you could see how controversial a discussion about him would be.
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