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Coincidence or Verbal Gymnastics?

Posted on July 11th, 2011 by Staks

Yesterday, I was reading the Huffington Post Religion Section (always a good time) and I saw an article from my favorite Rabbi, Adam Jacobs. For those unfamiliar with him (which should be almost everyone), he is a fundamentalist Christian… I mean Jew.

I have actually written a few Examiner articles responding to his craziness (Links down below). I have also had some e-mail conversations with Rabbi Jacobs. This current article was all over the place, but one of the claims he made I found interesting. He claims that the Bible predicted that the mathematical representation for Pi is equal to 3.141509 and that it is too great of a coincidence and therefore must have been divinely put in the Bible by God.

Here is the catch, the Bible actually got Pi wrong! You see according to I Kings 7:23-26, Pi is equal to exactly 3. So since this obviously doesn’t match with mathematics as we know it, the good Rabbi takes this verse and adds II Chronicles 4:2 to it to come up with a complex equation which surprise, surprise equals 3.141509. So now, instead of the Bible getting the number for Pi wrong, it actually gets it exactly right to 6 decimal places thus proving that God wrote the Bible or that when the Bible gets something wrong we can make it right by jumping around the Bible to find other verses from other books of the Bible to twist around in our minds to the get it right.

This is what religious literalists do. It is what Harold Camping did to get all his failed End of the World dates and it is what his religious critics did to prove him wrong when reality was surprising not sufficient. It is what Young Earth Creationists do to get their dates and what other religious literalists do to explain away all the things that don’t match up to modern science. In fact, it is the very tool used in the creation of the Bible Code used by some religious wackos to predict… the past.

The way the Bible Code works is that you feed a page of the Bible into some calculations and it will reveal predictions of the future that are currently in the past. For instance, when they did the Bible Code before 2001, they saw that the Bible actually predicted the JFK assassination and the Challenger explosion. And when they did it after 2001, they found that it predicted 9/11 too. Surprisingly they didn’t figure that out until after it already happened. This same calculation also showed that any book of significant length could predict the same things; thus proving that Moby Dick was also divinely inspired.

Examiner Articles Responding to Rabbi Jacobs:
Atheist responds to open letter
Atheist continues dialog with Rabbi Adam Jacobs
Rabbi Adam Jacobs reasonable argument for God’s existence
Atheist attempts to educate Rabbi Adam Jacobs on morality