A Second Channel of Communication?

[Cosmic Yak]

I appreciate that you aren't trying to goad me, and you certainly come across as a very honest, genuine person. I am also very aware of the dangers lurking in the spiritual marketplace (and elsewhere). But perhaps you should ask yourself if your certainties about life are really warranted, given that so many people of equal capacity for observation, reflection and critical thought have concluded that God is real. You might also wish to consider whether you are in a position to know how God would wish to communicate with us. Finally, given the kind of language you have used above, you might want to ask yourself if it is really appropriate to be lecturing someone you hardly know on what they should teach their children. You aren't the first person on this thread to use that particular card, but that is no excuse for making such an offensive suggestion. Children should, be taught how to think, not what to think, and that applies to atheists and sceptics as well as theists. I sincerely hope, therefore, that those who would lecture me on how to educate my children are practicing what they preach. There are three sides to every argument: one side, the other side and the truth. None of us can see the complete picture, so the best we can ever do regarding the question of God, or any other important question, is give the two sides we know.

Yet you apparently think that you do know this. Care to walk us through the process that led you to this conclusion?

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Blue Triangle you are clearly contradicting yourself.

First of all the maths is not tortuous. It's some of the simplest manipulations it is possible to do. Secondly, the maths is either perfectly accurate or, in the case of the pi and e calculations, reasonably accurate. It is impossible to get complete accuracy when working in this way with irrational numbers, as anyone with some familiarity with maths understands. Doesn't shed any light on the author? It tells you at the very least that the author knew more mathematics than Was known by man at the time the Scriptures were written. Isn't that of interest?

So the maths is simple. OK.

You forgot to add that this ancient scribe would also have had to have been a calculating genius, able to calculate the product of 29 numbers, then another eight numbers, then divide one total by the other, then adjust the text, with further abtruse calculations, to obtain the desired total (whilst ensuring the text was still grammatically correct and meaningful). That's also assuming that he knew pi to 5 significant figures, which was better than the best accuracy available then (unless we accept that a later editor did that, which introduces further complications, since he would be very restricted in how much he could have tampered with the text).

In addition to all of that, he would have been required to insert all the geometric marvels that appear in the text: 2701, for the entire text (a number whose geometric properties he would have to be an expert on), 703 for the last two words (this number being the core triangle of triangle 2701), numbers representing the stellar arrangement (37 stars of 73) and its internal hexagon (19 X 73, sum of words 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7). Then there is hexagon 1801 (sum of words 1, 3, 5 and 6), which happens to be the hexagon produced by self intersection of triangle 2701.

Further combinations of words give other geometric properties of the triangle, all thanks to this ancient scribe, who also managed to ensure none of it would be changed in future - unless we accept that those who, over the next couple of millennia, may have edited it, were also in on the deal, had the same extraordinary abilities as our antediluvian genius and had the same futile goals as he. One of these giants would of course have encrypted Euler's number into the opening verse of John, many centuries before the rest of the world discovered natural logarithms, somehow managing to obtain the same level of accuracy, such that when summed the errors almost completely cancel out.

Oh, wait. Now the maths is abstruse, needing a genius to calculate it.

An unkind observer might think you were shifting your position depending on what point you're arguing, and who you're arguing it with. Yaks, however, are made of nobler stuff, so I will let you explain this yourself.

 

[Myriad]

In a world where respectable physicists argue over whether or not this universe is a simulation, politicians are expected to lie, nuclear proliferation, consumerism, celebrity worship, bankers and advertisers running riot and people being paid millions of dollars to sing a tune, act in a movie and kick a ball between two posts, while others are bombed out of their homes for political objectives,…

If the next three words are "only one man…" then we'll have a heck of a movie trailer script.

...I wouldn't be so sure about where the line should be drawn between sanity and insanity.

Aw, too bad. But okay.

Let me put it this way: I don't have to know the state of a person's physical health, nor exactly where the line between good health and poor health should be drawn, to point out "that's not good for you" when I see them chewing asbestos.

When your hidden numbers offer practical solutions to dishonest politicians, nuclear proliferation, consumerism, economic woes, and war, let me know. (As for speculating about whether the universe is a simulation, I'm pretty sure Plato did that too and he probably wasn't the first.)

I will answer this more fully tomorrow, but perhaps you should ask yourself in the meantime if your confidence in your own position regarding God is justified. I don't know what that position is, but you seem confident enough about it to see fit to question my sanity, and without really looking at what I have to show you.

Question your sanity, just because you come bearing decoded secret messages from God? Perish the thought.

My position regarding God is not a popular one here, and I avoid making it the topic of discussion out of consideration for the egregore.

However, confidence in such a position is a peculiar measure, one that hardly seems applicable. If there is no God, then my position is mostly irrelevant, as I neither have nor seek any substantial social influence on others' beliefs. If there is a God or gods, then my position (and everyone's) is precarious indeed; any actual god could act at any time so as to change all such positions in short order.

Even a hidden message might do it. Something like, "I am thy God; here's My latest new covenant with humanity; and by the way here's the underlying physical mechanism of gravitation, and a summary of the neurological adaptations that gave refined language ability to the human species in an evolutionary eye blink, to prove My credentials. Notice that this message is embedded in ancient text yet it's simultaneously decryptable into Latin, contemporary English, and Mandarin; I manipulated your entire history of language development to accomplish that; pretty awesome, huh?"

You might notice that "Look at this improbably cool number!" falls rather short of that.

 

[blue triangle]

The same reductio applies to your forceful god: what point?

The futility is not in the doing of it but in the doing of it in the service of a monumental lie. If it was achieved by other means, then we have a great mystery before us.

What purpose, to eventually hand the bungled morass to a few minds self-declared visionary?

Bungled? Hardly. And Vernon Jenkins does not declare himself to be anything other than a servant of God.

If this god wanted clarity, why speak through humanity's most fragile mouth: noisy biased brains?

God chooses who he wishes to choose. He doesn't always choose the best, for sure, but Vernon has done his job very well, in the opinion of many, myself included. He was senior lecturer in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Polytechnic of Wales (now the University of Glamorgan) and so I trust you would accept that he has at least done his sums right.

Why pick numerology, pareidolia, confirmation instincts? Why sow your seeds on fallacies?

It's based on the well-attested numeration schemes employed for counting by the ancient Greeks and later the Hebrews. It is identical to the standard scheme of gematria used by kabbalists, although he himself has used it far more profitably. Paredolia? That has yet to be shown, and you and the rest here are far from doing it, other than throwing some of your favourite words at it.

Why base your ministry on the most wretched mistakes humans are capable of?

Others may have done it wrong, but that does not mean it can't be done right!

What's wrong with speaking to our best ears? Put your revelation into Nature where our best stand, on shoulders, sifting critically through the real.

Perhaps because our very best minds are usually claimed by the world early on. When scientists start speaking of God they are usually confined to the intellectual wilderness. Rupert Sheldrake is a case in point. His unorthodox thinking, which led to the theory of morphic resonance, lost him a professorship at Cambridge.

 

[turingtest]

We're only a step or two away from this.

 

[blue triangle]

Blue Triangle you are clearly contradicting yourself.


So the maths is simple. OK.



Oh, wait. Now the maths is abstruse, needing a genius to calculate it.

An unkind observer might think you were shifting your position depending on what point you're arguing, and who you're arguing it with. Yaks, however, are made of nobler stuff, so I will let you explain this yourself.

Thankyou, I will. Each individual calculation is simple, but to encode all of them simultaneously, would require something with the putative ability of a quantum computer. You don't have to know all the information to extract any one part of it, and the methods by which they are extracted are extremely siple

 

[Slowvehicle]

Thankyou, I will. Each individual calculation is simple, but to encode all of them simultaneously, would require something with the putative ability of a quantum computer. You don't have to know all the information to extract any one part of it, and the methods by which they are extracted are extremely siple

Right.

Out of all the potential operations, you select the one that leads to the result you want.

Special pleading is still special.

 

[Donn]

If the next three words are "only one man…" then we'll have a heck of a movie trailer script.

That nearly offed me!

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Thankyou, I will. Each individual calculation is simple, but to encode all of them simultaneously, would require something with the putative ability of a quantum computer. You don't have to know all the information to extract any one part of it, and the methods by which they are extracted are extremely siple

Please supply your evidence that this is how it was done.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Blue Triangle, another thought has been vexing me.
You claim that these encoded numbers are a message from your god, and are an attempt by him/her/it to communicate with us.
Again, assuming that these hidden messages are real, and not merely a product of persistence and pareidolia, how are we supposed to respond?
The message so far is "4,000 years ago (or however long it is), I knew the value of Pi, more or less". OK. What do we then do? Are we supposed to find another religious text, say whatever holy book the Pastafarians have, and mess around with it until we can encode "Yeah. We know too, but you made a couple of mistakes", then wait another 4,000 years before discovering a response in another religious book?
Even assuming that what you claim is true (and you've got a long way to go before I'm prepared to accept that, based on the excellent contributions by other posters), this seems like a ridiculously lengthy and convoluted way to communicate. If your god is so interested in talking to us, why doesn't he/she/it just turn up at the UN HQ and get on with it? Why bother leaving a 4,000 year-old Easter egg (pun intended) to which we have no useful response, and which aids us not a bit?

 

[Slowvehicle]

That nearly offed me!

Second.

 

[Delvo]

So the maths is simple. OK...

Oh, wait. Now the maths is abstruse, needing a genius to calculate it.

Simple after some things were invented (calculators) or discovered (e), seemingly impossible before then.

 

[Delvo]

You forgot to add that this ancient scribe would also have had to have been a calculating genius...

The quote you're responding to was not based on the idea of an ancient scribe encoding magic numbers without help. It was based on the idea of an ancient scribe being told what number to inscribe in a sentence and finding a way to write it. The subject was what this would tell us about whoever told the scribe that number. Your claim was that it would somehow require omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. My counter was that telling the scribe what number to put in the text does not require any of that. I said nothing about the scribe inventing it all alone.

In other words, I was accepting your premise that the scribe had deliberate help, for a hypothetical consideration of what that would imply, and your response about the genius scribe was as if I had been working with the premise of no help for the scribe.

I do, in fact, think it was written without any special modern knowledge of numbers, but in the post you were responding to, I temporarily indulged the contrary idea to show that even then, it still doesn't logically lead where you want it to lead.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Simple after some things were invented (calculators) or discovered (e), seemingly impossible before then.

So if Blue Triangle's god had had access to a calculator, he/she/it would have been able to work out the value of Pi more accurately?

 

[jsfisher]

So if Blue Triangle's god had had access to a calculator, he/she/it would have been able to work out the value of Pi more accurately?

It was a work in progress. Doesn't pi = 3 appear elsewhere in the Bible? It does not take much to improve when you set the starting bar so low.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

It was a work in progress. Doesn't pi = 3 appear elsewhere in the Bible? It does not take much to improve when you set the starting bar so low.

Indeed it does- 3.14, in fact.
http://www.purplemath.com/modules/bibleval.htm

Thanks for raising this point, because while looking for the answer, I discovered that, far from this being 'unknown to anyone in the world at that time', as claimed by Blue Triangle, the value of Pi was in fact known to the Egyptians and the Babylonians.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/191389/a-brief-history-of-pi.html

As scholars have dated the writing of Genesis to around the 6th or 5th century BCE, it appears that Blue Triangle's assertions are on even shakier ground than they were before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis

 

[Rincewind]

Blue Triangle, another thought has been vexing me.
You claim that these encoded numbers are a message from your god, and are an attempt by him/her/it to communicate with us.
Again, assuming that these hidden messages are real, and not merely a product of persistence and pareidolia, how are we supposed to respond?
The message so far is "4,000 years ago (or however long it is), I knew the value of Pi, more or less". OK. What do we then do? Are we supposed to find another religious text, say whatever holy book the Pastafarians have, and mess around with it until we can encode "Yeah. We know too, but you made a couple of mistakes", then wait another 4,000 years before discovering a response in another religious book?
Even assuming that what you claim is true (and you've got a long way to go before I'm prepared to accept that, based on the excellent contributions by other posters), this seems like a ridiculously lengthy and convoluted way to communicate. If your god is so interested in talking to us, why doesn't he/she/it just turn up at the UN HQ and get on with it? Why bother leaving a 4,000 year-old Easter egg (pun intended) to which we have no useful response, and which aids us not a bit?

It's this God saying "Look at me you puny humans - see how clever I am!"

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair..."

 

[Slowvehicle]

It's this God saying "Look at me you puny humans - see how clever I am!"

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair..."

...with math errors...

 

[blue triangle]

The approximations of these significant constants is interesting — but to my mind, being unconcerned with fawning respect of superstition, I see only more questions.

You, and I was there once, see a hand at work. I recall when the Bible Code craze struck. For a short time, one intense afternoon, I experienced actual shock at the thought of a real god speaking undeniably. All those terrors and rumours of childhood came to the fore. I can't rightly say what calmed me; this was pre-internet, so there was no further information with which to immunize. I think my basic indifference to the foul idea of a god was enough to shrug-off the spell.

If you think the idea of a God 'foul' then you are hideously misinformed both bout his character and your own highest nature. Or maybe you would rather there was none for reasons of your own. Either way, I contend that none of your own musings, fears, or perhaps second hand opinions, will make any difference as God's reality.

The Bible Code, more properly called the Torah codes, is a truly fascinating phenomenon and I have reason to believe it may be real, athough the work Vernon has done is unrelated. One thing I did note several years ago was that some pretty competent mathematicians and probability theorists on either side of the debate couldn't reach agreement on whether the Torah code was genuine, which didn't bode well for showing that numerical codes such as Vernon Jenkins has done is real. So very little such work has been attempted, although the little that has been done is very suggestive of it being real.

The questions this pi/e business raises in me are about the surrounding territory, and the fidelity of the data.

Fidelity:
Do the letter-numbers always map as shown? Are there differing systems? Delvo indicates controversy.

In the Masoretic text of Genesis, 1000-year-old copies of which are still extant (and I've checked the lettering myself) it always 'maps' yes. There are other versions of the Hebrew Bible, such as the Samaritan Bible, and there a Greek version of the Old Testament. But the Masoretic Bible, being the basis for the Leningrad codex, which is the oldest complete version of the text, and which became the Biblia Hebraica and Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the modern Hebrew Bible, is the encoded one - and it could only be one, given that small textual changes rapidly destroy the patterns.

Is there some impact in the two languages when converting to the numbers? If one does the pi calculation in Greek, for example, what then?

Changing to another language destroys the encoded material, which depends upon the precise letters used. The pi calculation therefore wouldn't work in Greek, if by this you mean a Greek translation of the text of Genesis 1.1. The e calculation, done identically to the pi calculation, is in Greek.

Is there certainty that the words chosen for the calculations are the intended ones — to reveal these constants — or are there flavours of the wording that give other numbers?

The wording in the Masoretic is fixed for all time now, in the electronic age. The only thing that counts here is the letter sequence in Genesis 1.1, as given in the Masoretic. It doesn't matter if these weren't the original words written, because it was, I believe, meant to be discovered now - in the age of the electronic calculator.

Essentially: how special is the pleading? How narrow is the needle to make these constants, however crude, appear?

If one letter was changed or dropped or added to genesis 1.1, most of the patterns would be destroyed They are very sensitive to alternative spellings, etc. It's possible that some of it might remain intact.

For instance if a Hey (= 5) were added the product of the letter values would increase from 3.14155 . . . x 10E40 to 1.57077 . . . x 10E41. However if a Yod (=10) were added, the pi calculation would be unaffected, increasing to 3.14155 . . . x 10E41. the first five digits would still be present. But in both cases most of the other patterns would be lost. The sum would be 2706 and 2711, for instance, neither number having any particularly notable properties, as far as I'm aware.

Be back.

The surrounds:
What do other initial verses in the rest of the Bible produce under the same algorithm?

As far as I am aware, only John 1.1, if you are talking about pi, e and similar numbers. However, integrated geometry has been found in other verses, and in fact Vernon Jenkins has extended the Genesis geometric patterns into verses 2 and beyond.

What is the frequency of finding pi/e (to the same error margin) in other texts? (Or even the Bible.) i.e. — for all I know the rough pi/e just fall out more often than not.

Sticking with pi, the first five digits would be found about 1 in 90000 times by any such calculation. The production of digits by the calculation used is for all practical purposes a random process (although true randomness is impossible). Since the first digit cannot be 0, there is a 1 in 9 chance of obtaining 3. For all the other digits, the chances are 1 in 10, since 0 is allowed. So the odds against obtaining 31415 in any calculation of this type is 1 in (9 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10), or 1 in 90000. Now there are 31102 verses in the Bible, so there is a fair chance of getting 31415 . . . somewhere, although more chance of not obtaining it. But to find it in the first verse is incredible. I was in Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop yesterday, with a stock of around 100000 books and built like a rabbit warren, with little rooms and corridors everywhere. One of those books was on the subject of pi, a fascinating number for many reasons, and the most well known and useful number in mathematics. The chances of getting 31415 . . . in a verse is equivalent to walking blindfolded for the first time into that bookshop, wandering around and putting my hand on that pi book first. That gives you some idea of the unlikelihood of hitting pi on your first try, which is what happened since Genesis 1.1 is the first verse in scripture.

There are several assumptions you have made, which you marry to the findings, that I see as non-sequiturs.

The causal explanation to these "constants" gifted to a god, with all his attendant properties being so markedly depended from your personal hopes and fears is one. The timing, being coincident with your life and moment of faculty, is another.

You're assuming a lot about my hopes and fears, especially since I gave up belief in God at age 11, and only let God back into my life after he knocked on my door very loudly 27 years later.

I'm not sure what your second sentence means.

There are those who would ascribe these messages to Aliens. Others to wholly different gods. Others to conspiracy by various hated human tribes. I ascribe them to the category of "potential knowledge — pending verification".

That, my friend, is very sensible!

Once the vital steps of beating the findings from all sides has passed, and should there remain viable intrigue, then only is some degree of wonder acceptable. Even so, it would not point to any hand behind the scenes — much more and varied evidences would be compulsory.

I basically agree with you here, although I would caution against the kind of skepticism that drifts into cynicism, ie, for whom no amount of evidence is ever enough. You are your own man, though.

I hearken to my previous posts wherein I urge you to speculate on the rôle you play on this urgent stage you so pace. If it is only you, and a smattering of others, who so ardently feel this hand taking your scruffs to rub your noses in such hidden arithmetics, then why? Why only you? Why leave so many billions bereft of the same visceral attendance to the event?

Etcetera.

I can't answer that one. In my case, I would guess it might be because, as Paul wrote, "My strength is made perfect in your weakness."

 

[blue triangle]

Indeed it does- 3.14, in fact.
http://www.purplemath.com/modules/bibleval.htm

Thanks for raising this point, because while looking for the answer, I discovered that, far from this being 'unknown to anyone in the world at that time', as claimed by Blue Triangle, the value of Pi was in fact known to the Egyptians and the Babylonians.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/191389/a-brief-history-of-pi.html

As scholars have dated the writing of Genesis to around the 6th or 5th century BCE, it appears that Blue Triangle's assertions are on even shakier ground than they were before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis

I said it wasn't known to that level of accuracy (five digits) at that time, although it was surpassed a few centuries later. Here's a wiki article on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_computation_of_π