n follow yoFirst let me strongly state that I am very glad that everyone has the right to believe what ever it is they want.
My gripe, is with people who want to force their own beliefs on others without a rational or scientific basis, or those who cherry pick the bits they want to use and ignore the bits they don't. This is applicable to any religion, science, philosophy, mission statement, et al.
Now, discussing the case of Creationists, and the case of many Intelligent Design proponents, we have a group of people expounding belief in the bible as the undiluted, literal, and verbatim word of God. This is the basis for claims that the world was created 6000 years ago, humans co-habited with dinosaurs, fossil record is a result of the Great Flood, and all the rest of it. Now, these people are more than welcome to believe what they want. However, when they bring their beliefs into the public arena, as in the case of creationism/ID they have by trying to see it taught in Biology classrooms, they open themselves up to public discussion of those beliefs. My question is simple. If you believe that the bible is the literal word of God, then please explain the mistakes, of which Pi = 3 in Kings is just an example.
One of the most interesting mathematical statements in the Bible is in I Kings 7:23-26, describing a large cauldron, or "molten sea" in the Temple of Solomon:
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, gourds encircled it - ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea. The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths.
Now the Hebrews were not an especially technological society; when Solomon built his Temple he had to hire Phoenecian artisans for the really technical work. So the author of this passage may not have known the exact value of pi, or thought his readers might not be aware that specifying the diameter of a circle automatically specifies its circumference. In any case, the essential point was the impressive size of the cauldron, and its dimensions were only approximate, because the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is stated to be exactly three rather than the real value of pi which is 3.14159....
If the rim was made in the form of a lily blossom, we could expect it to have had decorative details with bumps and re-entrants, in which case any really exact measurement of diameter and circumference would be meaningless.
Even the comparatively innocuous idea that the writer of I Kings might have been speaking in only approximate terms is unacceptable to some people, because it implies, however slightly, that some passages in the Bible were never intended to be taken with exact literalness. There have been a lot of efforts to explain away the approximation to pi, and also some folklore about the attempts.
The most famous episode took place in the 19th century, when the legislature of Iowa supposedly considered a resolution to make pi legally equal to 3, based on the Biblical passage. Actually, the effort was the brainchild of a well-meaning but not overly mathematical legislator to make things easier for practical calculations by legislating a standard and simple value of pi. If we can define other weights and measures, why not pi? The proposal had very little to do with the Bible and died a quick death in committee.
"Fudge factors" or "finagle constants" are scientific slang for ad hoc postulates whose sole function is to get a theory out of trouble. The creationist claim that radioactive decay varies in rate is a good example; the only function of this postulate is to make it possible to deny the ages of rocks determined by radiometric dating. Another flagrant example of fudge-factoring is that of creationist author Theodore Rybka, who attempted to resolve the pi problem in an article entitled Determination of the Hebrew Value used for Pi, published in the January, 1981 issue of Acts and Facts, a bulletin of the Institute for Creation Research.
Note that the passage in I Kings explicitly gives both the diameter and the circumference. An estimate of pi is simply the ratio of the circumference to the diameter: 30/10 or exactly three. The passage in I Kings also elaborates on the depth, volume, and wall thickness of the cauldron. Rybka ignores the value given in plain words for the diameter and proceeds to develop a formula for the diameter using all the other dimensions and the totally unwarranted assumption that the cauldron was perfectly cylindrical. He converts the cubit, which was a variable unit of measure, to meters, and converts the Hebrew unit of volume, the bath, to liters. The volumes of one-bath jugs found by archaeologists give Rybka five values: 22.8, 22.9, 22.0, 22.7 and 23.3 liters. Blithely ignoring a variation of 1.3 liters or almost 6%, he averages the values to get a volume for the bath of 22.74 liters. He then puts this value into his formula and gets a value for pi of 3.143. "The calculations only warrant three-figure accuracy, however, so the final value is pi=3.14 which is identically the modern three figure value."
Now hold it a minute. First, the variation in the volume of the bath is so large that only two figure accuracy is justified, and the uncertainty is only accentuated our uncertainty as to the exact value of the cubit. Second, if the whole point of the discussion is to demonstrate the literal inerrancy of the Bible, 3.14 is just as much an approximation as 3 is. The decimal expansion of pi never ends and never repeats to infinity. (This would have been a great place to put such a statement, which would have been utterly beyond the capabilities of the ancient Hebrews, or even the translators of the King James Bible, to have known. What a stunningly convincing proof of supernatural authorship it would have been!) Finally, given a ten-cubit (about fifteen feet) diameter vessel with a circumference of fifty feet or so, anybody should be able to get at least three-figure accuracy in determining the value of pi. At the very least, anyone measuring the cauldron with even the crudest device should find a circumference of thirty-one cubits.
The clincher comes when Rybka uses his formulas to check the diameter and circumference of the cauldron. For the circumference he gets 29.97 cubits, very close to the figure of 30 given in I Kings, but he calculates the diameter to be not ten but 9.545 cubits! All Rybka has done with his elaborate manipulations is remove the approximation from the circumference to the diameter. We are told that the author of I kings did not use an approximate value for the circumference; he used an exact value but his determination of the diameter (which would by far have been the easiest dimension to get correctly) was off by about half a cubit or about nine inches!
Personally, I believe that the bible is a beautiful piece of allegorical prose, that explains the understandings of Judeo-Christian philosophy as it could be understood by the various authors within their local context of time and place. If the bible is an allegory written by humans trying to convey the spirit of their religion, then mistakes about specific scientific fact become perfectly understandable, and add to the humanity of the work. But if you INSIST that it is the word of God handed down on tablets of stone, well, then I have to ask why God doesn't seem to pay much attention to the specifics of His creation.
Looked at from a different perspective, is it OK for Creation scientists/ID people to say, "Evolution is a false theory, and it CAN'T be a simplification of the natural processes as understood by early farmers at the dawn of the bronze age, we know this because of what it says in Genesis, but getting things wrong like the value of Pi CAN be a simplification of a mathematical rule as understood by early farmers at the dawn of the bronze age"?
Who gets to decide where it is acceptable for the bible to be simplified, and which bits must be taken as verbatim fact? To be totally fair and committed to the bible as the source of all information, if you are really, really sincere about it, then as well as believing in creationist/ID, you should also drive a car with wheels that have a ratio of 3:1 for the wheel rims, and see how that goes. Or, like me, accept that if SOME of it can be simplified for ease of understanding by the masses, then ALL of it may contain simplifications.
If there is an obvious flaw in my logic here, please, without any personal attacks, in a rational, step by step fashion (so I caur reasoning) tell me
My gripe, is with people who want to force their own beliefs on others without a rational or scientific basis, or those who cherry pick the bits they want to use and ignore the bits they don't. This is applicable to any religion, science, philosophy, mission statement, et al.
Now, discussing the case of Creationists, and the case of many Intelligent Design proponents, we have a group of people expounding belief in the bible as the undiluted, literal, and verbatim word of God. This is the basis for claims that the world was created 6000 years ago, humans co-habited with dinosaurs, fossil record is a result of the Great Flood, and all the rest of it. Now, these people are more than welcome to believe what they want. However, when they bring their beliefs into the public arena, as in the case of creationism/ID they have by trying to see it taught in Biology classrooms, they open themselves up to public discussion of those beliefs. My question is simple. If you believe that the bible is the literal word of God, then please explain the mistakes, of which Pi = 3 in Kings is just an example.
One of the most interesting mathematical statements in the Bible is in I Kings 7:23-26, describing a large cauldron, or "molten sea" in the Temple of Solomon:
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, gourds encircled it - ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea. The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths.
Now the Hebrews were not an especially technological society; when Solomon built his Temple he had to hire Phoenecian artisans for the really technical work. So the author of this passage may not have known the exact value of pi, or thought his readers might not be aware that specifying the diameter of a circle automatically specifies its circumference. In any case, the essential point was the impressive size of the cauldron, and its dimensions were only approximate, because the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is stated to be exactly three rather than the real value of pi which is 3.14159....
If the rim was made in the form of a lily blossom, we could expect it to have had decorative details with bumps and re-entrants, in which case any really exact measurement of diameter and circumference would be meaningless.
Even the comparatively innocuous idea that the writer of I Kings might have been speaking in only approximate terms is unacceptable to some people, because it implies, however slightly, that some passages in the Bible were never intended to be taken with exact literalness. There have been a lot of efforts to explain away the approximation to pi, and also some folklore about the attempts.
The most famous episode took place in the 19th century, when the legislature of Iowa supposedly considered a resolution to make pi legally equal to 3, based on the Biblical passage. Actually, the effort was the brainchild of a well-meaning but not overly mathematical legislator to make things easier for practical calculations by legislating a standard and simple value of pi. If we can define other weights and measures, why not pi? The proposal had very little to do with the Bible and died a quick death in committee.
"Fudge factors" or "finagle constants" are scientific slang for ad hoc postulates whose sole function is to get a theory out of trouble. The creationist claim that radioactive decay varies in rate is a good example; the only function of this postulate is to make it possible to deny the ages of rocks determined by radiometric dating. Another flagrant example of fudge-factoring is that of creationist author Theodore Rybka, who attempted to resolve the pi problem in an article entitled Determination of the Hebrew Value used for Pi, published in the January, 1981 issue of Acts and Facts, a bulletin of the Institute for Creation Research.
Note that the passage in I Kings explicitly gives both the diameter and the circumference. An estimate of pi is simply the ratio of the circumference to the diameter: 30/10 or exactly three. The passage in I Kings also elaborates on the depth, volume, and wall thickness of the cauldron. Rybka ignores the value given in plain words for the diameter and proceeds to develop a formula for the diameter using all the other dimensions and the totally unwarranted assumption that the cauldron was perfectly cylindrical. He converts the cubit, which was a variable unit of measure, to meters, and converts the Hebrew unit of volume, the bath, to liters. The volumes of one-bath jugs found by archaeologists give Rybka five values: 22.8, 22.9, 22.0, 22.7 and 23.3 liters. Blithely ignoring a variation of 1.3 liters or almost 6%, he averages the values to get a volume for the bath of 22.74 liters. He then puts this value into his formula and gets a value for pi of 3.143. "The calculations only warrant three-figure accuracy, however, so the final value is pi=3.14 which is identically the modern three figure value."
Now hold it a minute. First, the variation in the volume of the bath is so large that only two figure accuracy is justified, and the uncertainty is only accentuated our uncertainty as to the exact value of the cubit. Second, if the whole point of the discussion is to demonstrate the literal inerrancy of the Bible, 3.14 is just as much an approximation as 3 is. The decimal expansion of pi never ends and never repeats to infinity. (This would have been a great place to put such a statement, which would have been utterly beyond the capabilities of the ancient Hebrews, or even the translators of the King James Bible, to have known. What a stunningly convincing proof of supernatural authorship it would have been!) Finally, given a ten-cubit (about fifteen feet) diameter vessel with a circumference of fifty feet or so, anybody should be able to get at least three-figure accuracy in determining the value of pi. At the very least, anyone measuring the cauldron with even the crudest device should find a circumference of thirty-one cubits.
The clincher comes when Rybka uses his formulas to check the diameter and circumference of the cauldron. For the circumference he gets 29.97 cubits, very close to the figure of 30 given in I Kings, but he calculates the diameter to be not ten but 9.545 cubits! All Rybka has done with his elaborate manipulations is remove the approximation from the circumference to the diameter. We are told that the author of I kings did not use an approximate value for the circumference; he used an exact value but his determination of the diameter (which would by far have been the easiest dimension to get correctly) was off by about half a cubit or about nine inches!
Personally, I believe that the bible is a beautiful piece of allegorical prose, that explains the understandings of Judeo-Christian philosophy as it could be understood by the various authors within their local context of time and place. If the bible is an allegory written by humans trying to convey the spirit of their religion, then mistakes about specific scientific fact become perfectly understandable, and add to the humanity of the work. But if you INSIST that it is the word of God handed down on tablets of stone, well, then I have to ask why God doesn't seem to pay much attention to the specifics of His creation.
Looked at from a different perspective, is it OK for Creation scientists/ID people to say, "Evolution is a false theory, and it CAN'T be a simplification of the natural processes as understood by early farmers at the dawn of the bronze age, we know this because of what it says in Genesis, but getting things wrong like the value of Pi CAN be a simplification of a mathematical rule as understood by early farmers at the dawn of the bronze age"?
Who gets to decide where it is acceptable for the bible to be simplified, and which bits must be taken as verbatim fact? To be totally fair and committed to the bible as the source of all information, if you are really, really sincere about it, then as well as believing in creationist/ID, you should also drive a car with wheels that have a ratio of 3:1 for the wheel rims, and see how that goes. Or, like me, accept that if SOME of it can be simplified for ease of understanding by the masses, then ALL of it may contain simplifications.
If there is an obvious flaw in my logic here, please, without any personal attacks, in a rational, step by step fashion (so I caur reasoning) tell me
