george murphy wrote:
>
> pruest@pop.dplanet.ch wrote:
>
> > > "Iain Strachan" <iain@istrachan.clara.co.uk> wrote to <vernon.jenkins@virgin.net> (29 Jun 2001 01:07:06 +0100):
> >
> > >[snip]
> > > Other observations I have made subsequently involve evaluating "the =
> > > formula" on every verse in the Torah (some 5000 verses - with a computer
> > > program). I can confirm that the formula effectively computes a random =
> > > varible. The fractional part of the base 10 part of the logarithm of =
> > > the function gives a uniform distribution in the range 0 to 1, as one =
> > > would expect. Genesis 1:1 is the verse that is closest to pi, differing
> > > by 10^-5. If one selects an arbitrary other constant (say the square =
> > > root of two), then one normally finds that the closest one is around =
> > > 10^-4 distant, which is in accord with what one would expect with 5000 =
> > > data samples. The second closest verse to pi has a difference of 10^-4;
> > > so Gen 1:1 is an order of magnitude closer to pi than it.
> > >[snip]
>
> One point that seems to have been missed in all this is the fact that verse divisions were not part of the
> original Hebrew text of the OT or the Greek text of the NT. These divisions often seem quite arbitrary. Thus the
> numerical evaluations of "every verse" of torah, or the rest of scripture, aren't
> very meaningful.
> It might be argued that this criticism doesn't apply to Gen.1:1 and Jn.1:1 because those are complete
> sentences. But the sentence punctuation is also later and to some extent arbitrary. With Genesis, there has been an
> extensive debate among biblical scholars about whether v.1 should be read as a complete sentence which stands as a
> heading for the whole creation account or whether it should be read, as a number of translations do, "In the
> beginning, when god created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void ..." (NRSV). I think Westermann
> has made a good case for the first & more traditional reading but a decision can't be made on grammatical or
> syntactic grounds alone.
> It is also quite common to read Jn.1:1 as a single sentence but we wouldn't have to. One could read it as
> "In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God."
> (This wouldn't be elegant Greek, but John isn't very elegant Greek anyway.) This corresponds to Phillips'
> paraphrase: "In the beginning God expressed himself. That personal expression, that word, was with God and was God,
> and he existed with God from the beginning."
> My major reason for considering this whole line of argument to be at best "mildly interesting" is, however,
> theological, and can be stated in 3 parts.
> 1) Getting pi from Gen.1:1 & e from Jn.1:1 yields little of theological significance. It's supposed to
> prove that the Bible is divinely inspired but at most it could prove that those 2 verses are inspired. & one could
> even argue from the fact that there isn't any similar mathematical correspondence for other parts of scripture that
> _only_ those verses are inspired.
> 2) The argument can be of value only for getting the attention of unbelievers and suggesting to them that
> the message of the Bible deserves some consideration. Has it done so? How many conversions have begun with this
> argument?
> 3) If anybody does take this message seriously, it's going to be very easy for them to get the idea that pi
> and e are the really deep level of scripture hidden below the surface details about the history of Israel & the
> church - just as in _Contact_ pi is hidden below the primes and Hitler and
> the plans for the transit device. & this would be disastrous theologically, for the deep meaning of scripture is
> Jesus Christ.
> Shalom,
> George
>
> George L. Murphy
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
> "The Science-Theology Dialogue"
George,
thank you for your detailed comment! I basically agree with it, although
I'll mention some reservations below. The reason I jumped in on this
thread is that I suspected some problems with the probability
calculations, which might lead Vernon Jenkins to reconsider the
significance of finding pi and e in these verses, apart from the
theological arguments (I agree with you that the most important
arguments are the theological ones). On the other hand, I am interested
in probability calculations for DNA and protein sequence languages, and
perhaps these probability calculations for linguistic sentences may be
relevant for those. But before asking the list for a reasoned judgment
on the correct way to arrive at a meaningful probability estimate (about
which I am not sure), I wanted to reproduce the pi and e approximations.
By the way, adding a iota to ARCHE in John 1:1 (a subscript to the eta
in the text), as suggested by Iain Strachan, gives a value for e correct
within 10^-5.
According to Iain, one would expect the closest hit to pi among 5000
torah verses to be in the order of 10^-4, making the result of 10^-5
found with Gen.1:1 truly extraordinary. I was not convinced by this
reasoning, for three reasons: (a) an error (of a single measurement!) 10
times smaller than expected might easily be a coincidence, as the tails
of the Gaussian extend to infinity; (b) the value of pi was not given
beforehand as a hypothesis to be tested, but was found accidentally
after doing the calculation; (c) it is not known how many different
formulas were tried (the more different ones you try, the higher the
probability of hitting something "interesting").
However, I would not object on the basis of verse divisions not being in
the original text, as the number of 5000 verses is only significant as
an order of magnitude. Any alternative text division into meaningful
statements would probably yield a similar order of magnitude. As far as
Gen.1:1 and John 1:1 are concerned, their unity of content and
distinction from what follows appear to me to be very solid indeed - not
so much on linguistic grounds (of which I don't understand much), but on
theological and context ones. Also, as far as I know, there are no known
text variants of either Gen.1:1 or John 1:1.
With Iain's explicite permission, I quote the following from his
personal mail to me:
> As far as the probability is concerned, I calculated the distribution of the
> logarithm of the number computed by Vernon's formula, and found it to be, to
> all intents and purposes a uniform random variable in the range from zero to
> 1. You are right in stating that you expect one of the 5000 or so verses to
> come within 10^-4, and that therefore it is perhaps not that unlikely that
> one of them is within 10^-5. However, the chance of any _pre-specified_
> verse being this close, given a uniform distribution, is indeed 10^-5. As
> you are aware, Vernon has indicated a large number of other numerical
> properties of the text of Gen 1:1 as well, so I think it's fair to state
> that the chance that _this one_ comes within 10^-5 is indeed as stated,
> because it already seems to exhibit other, independent properties. If some
> arbitrary other verse anywhere else in the Torah had come within 10^-5 of
> pi, then I would not have assigned anything remarkable to it. The fact
> remains that the very first verse is the closest to pi, and it is an order
> of magnitude closer than any other verse. (I should note here that the
> division into verses is perhaps arbitrary, as the original text was not so
> divided, but one had to adopt some division in order to compute the
> statistics).
>
> If one were being ultra conservative, one would not multiply up the
> probabilities of it independently occurring in Gen 1:1 and John 1:1. It has
> been argued (John Burgeson's recent post) that the formula is an arbitrary
> one, plucked out of thin air; one might accuse Vernon (actually it was not
> Vernon who discovered this) of concocting a formula to make the numbers come
> to an interesting constant. So to be ultra conservative, one should only
> take the value given in John 1:1 (what I would term the "validation set"),
> and cite that probability (as now the formula is pre-specified). It is
> still 10^-5, which looks well beyond coincidence. Additionally there are
> other striking integer based numerical properties in John 1:1 which relate
> to the numerical geometry findings that Vernon published in Gen 1:1.
I should be grateful for your comments regarding my questions about
statistics and probabilities. Also, I'd appreciate if any others on this
list knowledgeable in mathematical statistics would care to comment on
the correct way of evaluating the probabilities of such findings.
In Christ,
Peter
-- -------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Peter Ruest Biochemistry Wagerten Creation and evolution CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern Tel.: ++41 31 731 1055 Switzerland E-mail: <pruest@dplanet.ch - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - In biology - there's no free lunch - and no information without an adequate source. In Christ - there is free and limitless grace - for those of a contrite heart. --------------------------------------------------------------
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