M

[Man]

Hi all, 

 

I'd just like to have somebody else's opinion on this:

A guy named Vernon Jenkins found a calculation with the first verse of Genesis that gives him pi to 5 digits (rest is wrong, and he does not find 3.1415 but  3.1415×10^45). Anyway no big deal here because his calculation  is too random  (thousands of other way to calculate something from a verse)

 

What is confusing is that  he  did  the  exact same calcul  for John1.1 and found the constant e to 4 digits. As the verses both talk about  "in the beginning", the verses are linked theologically. 

 

Opinions? Thank you. 

[disillusioned]

1 hour ago, Man said:

Hi all, 

 

I'd just like to have somebody else's opinion on this:

A guy named Vernon Jenkins found a calculation with the first verse of Genesis that gives him pi to 5 digits (rest is wrong, and he does not find 3.1415 but  3.1415×10^45). Anyway no big deal here because his calculation  is too random  (thousands of other way to calculate something from a verse)

 

What is confusing is that  he  did  the  exact same calcul  for John1.1 and found the constant e to 4 digits. As the verses both talk about  "in the beginning", the verses are linked theologically. 

 

Opinions? Thank you. 

 

I haven't looked at those calculations specifically. I will, and will get back to you. But in general,  it's easy to find a number you're looking for if you know what it is, and you don't have any specific rules to follow. A few years ago,  some friends and I watched the movie The Number 23. The next day, to fill a boring half hour and to mess with my friends, I found 23 ways that the number 23 could be derived from our personal information. Nothing to it, and certainly of no significance. 

[♦ Fuego ♦]

It shows what people will do when they get bored enough. Our minds look for patterns, like finding faces or shapes in clouds. Given enough random data, I could start to find patterns for messages in it. It is likely that I could find mathematical woo in adding up assigned values to letters in sentences in pulp detective novels. Coincidental, nothing more.

 

[disillusioned]

I just had a look at it. It's just silliness. Nothing at all to see here.

[TheRedneckProfessor]

6

[Wertbag]

Speaking of pattern recognition, I saw there are still conspiracy theorists quoting the face on mars as proof of a NASA cover up of alien civilisation. The original photo was taken in the 70s and we have multiple newer high res shots that clearly show it is nothing more than shadows on a mountain and yet the belief persists. 

Reminds me of a joke. A Christian, a muslim and an atheist go to inspect an image found in a piece of toast. The Christian sees the image of a bearded man, falls to his knees and says "it is the image of Jesus, god be praised!". The Muslim shakes his head "it is clearly an image of Mohamad, praise be to Allah!" the atheist sqints at the image, falls to his knees and says "I believe! Praise be to Santa!" 

[♦ Fuego ♦]

I figured the atheist would just eat the toast because he's hungry. 

 

[MOHO]

42 minutes ago, Fuego said:

I figured the atheist would just eat the toast because he's hungry. 

 

I was expecting that too.

[bellas]

18 hours ago, disillusioned said:

I just had a look at it. It's just silliness. Nothing at all to see here.

Thank you! Are you into mathematics? I would love to know the probability of that thing occuring but I am no mathematician at all. I shower to my father who said the chances of finding some constant in genesis was almost 1 because there are just thousands way to calculate. And then for John 1.1, considering they use the same calculation, so it is a predetermined calculation, he considered that the chances were 1 in 900 to find a constant to 4 digits (giving them the possibility to find 10 constants, they would have been happy finding any of them) which he finds pretty random.

[LogicalFallacy]

Did you know that if you close your fist and starting at the left hand little finger knuckle count the months January through to December - every month on the knuckle will have 31 days, and in the 'valleys' between the knuckles the days will be 30 expect for February which has 28. This is gods way of reminding us how many days in an month.

 

Amazballs.

 

I've heard Christians use Fibonacci numbers, golden number, blah blah to 'prove' god. It's all just fiddling with numbers.

[disillusioned]

23 hours ago, bellas said:

Thank you! Are you into mathematics? I would love to know the probability of that thing occuring but I am no mathematician at all. I shower to my father who said the chances of finding some constant in genesis was almost 1 because there are just thousands way to calculate. And then for John 1.1, considering they use the same calculation, so it is a predetermined calculation, he considered that the chances were 1 in 900 to find a constant to 4 digits (giving them the possibility to find 10 constants, they would have been happy finding any of them) which he finds pretty random.

 

Your father is right; the chances of finding a constant in any Bible verse is basically 1, as long as there is no restriction on how to calculate.

 

I'm a high school math teacher, so not a mathematician, but it is an area in which I have a great deal of interest and some (limited) knowledge. 

For reference:
Genesis calculation
John calculation

 

A couple things to note:

 

1) As you pointed out in the OP, he does not derive pi. 3.1415x10^17 is not pi. It's off by a factor of 10^17. This is what mathematicians call a non-trivial error. If one were to try to use this value of pi to calculate anything, you'd be way off.

 

2) It's even worse for e, as here he is off by a factor of 10^40. It might be more interesting if both calculations were off by the same factor, but they aren't. They aren't even close. 

 

3) No justification of his methodology is given. Why letters divided by words? Presumably because that way gives him the string of digits he's looking for.

 

4) Even ignoring the order of magnitude errors, his calculation underestimates pi and overestimates e. Why? Surely, if this were actually of special significance, God could just get it right.

 

5) There are over 31000 verses in the Bible. I understand that these two are linked theologically, but there are thousands of pairs of such verses. The chances that you could find some pair of theogically linked bible verses which admit the approximate derivation by some unjustified means of some pair of constants to within some unspecified order of magnitude seems to me to be basically 1.

 

These are the main reasons why I called it silliness.

[Lerk]

On 7/24/2019 at 7:50 AM, Man said:

Hi all, 

 

I'd just like to have somebody else's opinion on this:

A guy named Vernon Jenkins found a calculation with the first verse of Genesis that gives him pi to 5 digits (rest is wrong, and he does not find 3.1415 but  3.1415×10^45). Anyway no big deal here because his calculation  is too random  (thousands of other way to calculate something from a verse)

 

What is confusing is that  he  did  the  exact same calcul  for John1.1 and found the constant e to 4 digits. As the verses both talk about  "in the beginning", the verses are linked theologically. 

 

Opinions? Thank you. 

 

1) There's no reason to thing such a thing should be doable. Why would you go looking for numeric information in text? Unless you're using the original language, and the text was intentionally coded that way, it's meaningless. Except in very rare circumstances (i.e. coded messages intended for a specific recipient), text is there for the meaning of the words -- text is for actual meaning. Sometimes there's hidden meaning (such as in the book of Revelation, though its "hidden" meaning has nothing to do with what people today like to speculate it's about), but it's not about secrets of the universe. Why would this god put the value of Pi in a secret code? If it thought the ancient people needed the value of Pi, it would have had some prophet spell it out to some significant number of digits.

 

2) If it's good for 5 digits but fails beyond that, then it isn't actually a calculation that gives the value of Pi. So, no, Vernon Jenkins didn't actually find anything.