To Non-believers?

"no one has proven the bible false..."

First 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 can follow your reasoning) tell me.

Misguided wrote:

"1) The moon is leaving the earth. It i sgetting farther away each year. It also governs the tides. In the past of course the moon was closer. Causing the tides to be so strong that it would flood all of the earth twice daily. And not that long ago either."

The moon's slipping farther away at too slow a rate.

"2) The earth is slowing down. They call it a leap second. About every two to three years the earth spins one second slower per year. If you look in the past the earth was spinning faster. You wouldn't have to go that far back and everything on earth would fly off into space because of the speed of the earth's spin thus proving earth can;t be millions and millions of years old."

Wrong. The leap second thing has more to do with the fact that a year's not exactly 24hrs long.

"Oil has been shown to be made from just about anything in the matter of a few moments."

And they've oxidized noble elements. All happen under extreme circumstances you'd not find on this planet.

"And the half life cannot be accurately determined as we have no knowledge of what decays faster in the past as we aren't sure of the environment or atmosphere which science can tell you would play havoc on the half life."

Wrong! Atomic decay has nothing to do with those things. It happens to be the rate at which the atom sheds various particles.

*Points to King Clone, an 11,700 yeal old tree. Also points out tree rings will occur twice a year only under extremely rare conditions that would leave behind a load of evidence.*

I'd like to see where you got the numbers for those two points.

Evidence that the earth is older than 6000 is based on two processes that I'm aware of. The first is carbon dating. I don't know much about how that is, and it may even be the second process. Radioactive isotopes have what's known as a halflife. If you know the original mass of the object, you can determine the amount of time that has passed by measuring the current mass.

So yes, there are scientific ways of measuring the age of any given bit of matter. And yes, there are certainly ways that the evidence can be staged somehow. Anyway, assuming your evidence is true, it's impossible to say that the earth has been slowing down forever, or whether the introduction of a rogue planet or a comet or some other force X years ago has disrupted the various gravitational fields.

Who knows, maybe the earth is millions of years old, but humanity landed on some weird comet sent out by an alien civilization mere thousands of years ago?

And besides, your evidence doesn't sugguest anything now that I think about it. If the planet can slow down, there's no reason why I couldn't start up again. If there is a force slowing it down, then there could just as easily be a force starting it up again; conservation of energy and mass means that its kinetic energy has to be going somewhere, not that things just slow down eventually under absolutely no external pressure.

The Bible doesn't teach a young Earth, just a created Earth.

www.reasons.org

There are more than 20 passages throughout the Bible, not just Genesis that describe the creation of the Earth.

The Earth is approx. 4 billion years old. The Moon became an Earth satellite when a Mars-sized object crashed into the Earth. The lighter material from both the crashing object and the Earth's crust formed into the Moon. The Earth has gone through at least a couple of strilizing events in its history. The radiometric age of rocks is the proof of the 4 billion year old age of Earth. The ratio of carbon 14 to carbon12 also confirms this age. The abundance of zircons documents this age.

First, what the hell does the moon have to do with it? And FYI if you would pick up a Biology and Earth Science book or two, it would give you all the info you need and more!!!

You want evidence? Look at the mountains, oceans, nature, rocks, etc. Do you even KNOW how long it takes to form rocks and mountains? I'm gonna say no, because we both know you don't know jack. It takes millions of years to form, and with all the rocks and mountains on earth, it would of taken millions and billions of years to make what's on earth today. Earth is only 4 billion years old... still a baby. Earth has about another 10 or so billion years left for it to still stay alive and support life.

Do your research before you ask a 5 year old's question. Give you evidence... HAH!!!! Pick up a book you know it all wannabe!!!!

wtf does the moon leaving the earth have to do with the age of the earth? I believe we cant learn everything in one incarnation and it whould be foolish to believe that you were here once and thats it.

. A person who believes in reincarnation assumes responsibility for his own spiritual evolution through rebirth. He does not need priests, confessionals, and rituals to ward off damnation (all ideas, incidentally, that were not part of Jesus' teachings). He needs only to heed his own acts to himself and others. A belief in reincarnation eliminates the fear of eternal hell that the Church uses to discipline the flock. In other words, reincarnation directly undermines the authority and power of the dogmatic Church. No wonder reincarnation made the Defenders of the Faith so nervous.

1 the moon is not moving farther away from the earth. Its an illusion. the ocean whould rise if the moon left the earths orbit. Your eyesight must be getting worse in your old age

the moon does however get closer and further but it doesnt leave earth's orbit because of the gravity holding the moon in place.

2 the earth cannot speed up or slow down if the earth sped up we should be stuck to the ground. if the earth slowed down we whould be weightless.

I'll bite. I like to bite. However, take this as light hearted friend. It is not meant to bite you, but to enlighten you and increase your faith.

Since you fixate on literal statements by a wonderful storybook of great literature, I'll help you out just a little.

Let's get past your chidings and focus on what you really want to discuss. You want your bible to be true in all its messages, all of its things. How nice. Unfortunately, no written piece of literature, let alone one of that age has ever been infallable. You are reading a book of stories friend. Even your Christ was so concerned about your failure or inability to understand even teh simple that he spoke in parables so that there would be no chance of getting his message wrong.

Why must you limit your god, your Mother to a fraction of time you so dictate. do you not have faith, confidence, and trust in your God. Do you not think She can handle a period in excess of 6000 years? Why limit her so?

By this question, you show your weakness, your failure to trust and believe. Science has not changed anything religious, nor has it threatened religion per se. Where do you look for God? In a paper book, or in yourself and in all things, both good and evil?

In seeking your trees, you miss both the forest and the trees. One thing science has discovered which should assuage you. The earth, the universe and all that is in it is vastly, vastly, vastly complicated and mysterious. All avenues are currently open friend, even the ones that you believe science disproves.

You are dumber then ****. Have yo ever opened a science book. All these questions and more are explained. It seems that you have achieved a minimal amount of literacy, but that advanced reading comprehension is still far outside your grasp. I hope you are too young to vote. The world is has about as much superstitious based ignorance as it can handle.

This is the worst science I have ever heard.

You took a few random facts and made a theory out of them. Good job. Now if you only would do some research you would find things aren't that simple. When you try two dumb ideas down you just sound dumb.

I will not bother offering you any evidence as I would first have to prove to you that the earth is round and orbits the sun...these are other scientific facts that your primitive belief system rejects.

I could but what's the point? You obviously have your mind made up. So why don't you start being a good christian and love thy neighbor instead of trying to ridicule him. This type of argument never convinces anyone that they are wrong and you are right, anyway.