1/4/2008
Pi in Your Face
Did you know the Bible computes the ratio pi wrongly?
Here’s the argument. 1. 1 Kings 7:23 says
[Soloman] made the sea of cast metal ten cubits from brim to brim, circular in form, and its height was five cubits, and thirty cubits in circumference.
- The text says it was round or circular. Thus, the ratio should have been pi and not 30/10 = 3.
- QED: the Bible misrepresents pi! And the Bible is anti-science or some such.
But that’s ignoring the camel for the gnat. Did you notice that Solomon made a sea 10 cubits across!?!?! A 15-feet (by some measures of a cubit) sea?!?!
Is the Bible telling us that any body of water, about 7 feet deep and 16 feet across should be classified as a sea? How much did it roar? For “roar” is the root meaning of the word yäm, the word in Hebrew. Surely, we can see (or hear) what the ungodly geographers call a “sea” roar, but are we supposed to believe that a large swimming pool roared?
What are we supposed to believe?
That Solomon made a big bowl about 10 cubits across (which gives you an idea how big it is).
Arie Uittenbogaard of Abarim Publications, before he really gets rolling on page 2, deals with some attempted answers and rebuttals (here). One of the attempted answers is worded as so:
The Bible isn’t a science book. It’s more like a story. Like an analogy.
To which he replies:
But if the Bible isn’t a science book, it shouldn’t make a scientific statement. Now that it did, we see that it states a fallacy.
To which I reply, I can’t see one thing that makes this chapter anything more than a description about what was made. I don’t see it as a general statement at all. I can’t see that it qualifies as a “scientific statement” such as “it was 10 cubits across, thus it could not have been other than 30.0 cubits around.”
But that’s okay, Uittenbogaard needs to quickly move past other answers that he finds inadequate. I think he’s hasty here, because he’s on to something better in the next couple of pages. (Which I recommend.)
Still though, it’s not a scientific or mathematical point. The first part of the chapter details what Solomon built for his house, the second part what he built for the temple.
Some people describe this as “The Bible says that pi is 3.0.” Well, not really. Because they did the nose (Monty Python reference). You added a digit of precision that is not necessary meant in the text. From what I can see, it’s rounding to 5 cubits, just as 1 Kings 7:2, describing the dimensions of Solomon’s house seems to round to 10 cubits. And I doubt it’s a “architectural” statement.
1 Kings 7:14 already tells you how you get a “sea” the way described here: You hire someone “filled with wisdom and understanding and skill for doing any work in bronze.” Why doesn’t the Bible “tell the truth” about bronze-working skill right here? Would it help?
But lastly, the word yäm is used in the Bible 300 times as a sea with a shore and ships on it. Likely because the Mediterranean coast was to the west, it also took on the meaning of West, westward, western. The only time it refers to a sea that can fit in a building, is Solomon’s. But sea, skeptics can glide by realizing that language works by metaphoric extensions. Somehow, the idea of the Bible making an oceanographic or geographic definition doesn’t phase them. Just the math does.
ray said,
January 9, 2008 @ 11:28 pm
Solomon had one of those white noise machines installed around his “sea” loaded with the sounds of roaring waves and sea gulls, in part, to drown out the racket his wives were making.
larryniven said,
July 17, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
Are you joking? Please tell me you’re joking. The reason skeptics point to things like math and science and not things like adjectives is that math and science are full of objective, demonstrable facts, whereas most adjectives vary by the observer. To put it another way, there’s no such thing as mathematical metaphor, but there is linguistic metaphor. So if the Bible had meant to say that it was about 10 cubits by about 30 cubits, it would almost certainly have said that. Rather, what it gives are exact figures (to which adding decimal points is perfectly reasonable, by the way), which means people are justified in taking them to be exact figures. This is also coming from a book that is often exceedingly specific when it comes to measurements, so it’s not like you can make some general case about how the Bible is loose with its numbers.
author said,
July 17, 2008 @ 5:39 pm
Larry, please tell me you’re joking. No “mathematical metaphor” doesn’t exist. But estimates and rounded numbers do.
But here’s what really makes your post amusing. You argue that because Science and Mathematics are more precise than say interpreting a passage, they are preferable to actually interpreting the passage. In that case, “sea” has a reasonably precise “scientific” meaning. So you’re failing to connect your point to the context in which I originally made it.
I don’t know perhaps when you measured my post with a ruler or took the square root of it, it lost something in translation, but which is further off from standard “scientific” meaning pi as 3.0 or a sea being the size of a swimming pool. Sea is either egregiously scientifically wrong or it is more colloquial in use. It doesn’t matter that “sea” has more precise implications under oceanography, if you’re going to gloss over it, you do so by interpreting and not forcing it into the paradigm with greater precision.
That said, you seem to pick and chose where you will use standardized methods, because as I pointed out in my post, 30/10 is not scientifically 3.0, because you are adding a degree of precision that is not in the original figures. There are standard predefined rules on this, to which your “perfectly reasonable” adding digits of precision becomes an arbitrary action. It does not become the Bible’s representation of pi, simply because you argue that one can do it that way. So it is still weak to conclude that Kings is making a “scientific” claim to a certain degree of precision, based on the idea that we can do it.
So you seem to extol precise methods for their lack of arbitrariness–even to the point of preferring them as a first line of analysis, but are okay with adding arbitrary precision, despite that the practice is against it.