You have a wash basin with the following dimensions:
- It's circumference is 30.000 feet.
- It's diameter is 10.000 feet.
What is Pi?
Is this an indirect reference to 1 Kings 7:23? If it is, I will say that this verse has generated some of the most ridiculous conversations I've ever heard by people with a very poor understanding of mathematics (both those for and against the Bible).
Something in your quote is improperly (or misleadingly) defined, AV. If you are implying a circle, the 2 numbers cannot be correct. If the wash basin is not a perfect circle, then you should not use the term "diameter."
And yet there is no error in the 1 Kings passage. Pi is an irrational number. Therefore, no matter how many digits you provide, it is an approximation. The only "exact" way to express pi is with the mathematical symbol (the Greek letter, pi). It always freaks people out that things like pi, e, i are actually numbers ... but yes, they are actually numbers. Using other representations (such as 3.14 for pi) is only an approximation of those numbers.
So, the question then become, what is the proper way to approximate pi? You need to specify the number of significant digits and then round. Given that pi approximates as 3.14159265...., it is perfectly acceptable to round it to one digit: 3. The number of significant digits is entirely context dependent, and so there is no problem with 1 Kings approximating pi as 3. Note that the verse never uses the modern notation (the symbol pi), nor does it claim to be exact. There is no error.
However, saying the circumference is 30.000 with a diameter of 10.000
is incorrect. It would be more proper to say the circumference is 30 and the diameter is 10 (i.e. with 1 significant digit). Or, even better, it would be 3.(10)^1 and 1.(10)^1, but the Biblical writers didn't have that type of notation.
If we're going to talk about Biblical "errors," let's try to be sure the challenge isn't so obviously erroneous itself.
