Pi encoded in Genesis claim.

[DBT]

Obviously the claim is being used as an attempt to give the impression of divine inspiration, something that the human authors could not have worked out for themselves.

For example;

First Verse in Torah - 22/7​

Let us begin with a simple hint of Pi and afterwards move on to something far more impressive.

The first verse of the torah is:

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱ-לֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ
("in the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth")

If we take the first letter (Roshei Teivot) of each of the seven hebrew words. The gematria (numerical value) is:

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱ-לֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ

= Beit+Beit+Aleph+Aleph+Heh+Vuv+Heh=2+2+1+1+5+6+5=22

Dividing this by the number of words gives:
22/7=3.14285

This number is 99.96 percent the value of Pi.''

 

[steve_bank]

Was that apple or cherry PI?

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

Obviously the claim is being used as an attempt to give the impression of divine inspiration, something that the human authors could not have worked out for themselves.

For example;

First Verse in Torah - 22/7​

Let us begin with a simple hint of Pi and afterwards move on to something far more impressive.
The first verse of the torah is:
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱ-לֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ
("in the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth")
If we take the first letter (Roshei Teivot) of each of the seven hebrew words. The gematria (numerical value) is:
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱ-לֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ
= Beit+Beit+Aleph+Aleph+Heh+Vuv+Heh=2+2+1+1+5+6+5=22
Dividing this by the number of words gives:
22/7=3.14285
This number is 99.96 percent the value of Pi.''

If God was involved it should be 100% accurate. Of course it can't be because Pi is a transcendental number. However, an all powerful god should have been able to create a universe in which Pi has a finite value.

 

[bilby]

How was God able to get his cryptic encoding of Pi accurate to 0.04%, while the explicit figures for the value in the Bible have an error of 4.7%?

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

Why encrypt the value at all, when he had a perfect opportunity here to be explicit to whatever level of accuracy he chose?

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty one point four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two three eight four six and a bit cubits did compass it round about.

 

[DBT]

AiG defends Kings by basically calling it metaphor, an approximation used to illustrate a different point, hence not applicable to the hidden codes that are meant for the discerning eye.

"Now he 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.” This verse describes a cylindrical vessel built at the order of Solomon.

First of all, notice that this passage does not say “exactly ten cubits” or “exactly thirty cubits.” The numbers have been rounded to the nearest integer (or possibly the nearest multiple of ten). Dividing the circumference (30 cubits) by the diameter (10 cubits), we infer that pi is approximately equal to three. But, of course, pi is approximately equal to three, so the passage is quite correct."

 

[bilby]

AiG defends Kings by basically calling it metaphor, an approximation used to illustrate a different point, hence not applicable to the hidden codes that are meant for the discerning eye.

"Now he 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.” This verse describes a cylindrical vessel built at the order of Solomon.

First of all, notice that this passage does not say “exactly ten cubits” or “exactly thirty cubits.” The numbers have been rounded to the nearest integer (or possibly the nearest multiple of ten). Dividing the circumference (30 cubits) by the diameter (10 cubits), we infer that pi is approximately equal to three. But, of course, pi is approximately equal to three, so the passage is quite correct."

Sure.

But why hide the more accurate number?

To what end?

If you treat any large text as though it might contain hidden cyphers of small quantities of information, you will discover that it does.

The Bible is not different from the works of Shakespeare, or Dickens, or Enid Blyton, in this regard.

Blyton wrote 21 full length "Famous Five" novels, plus a collection of eight short stories - that's 22 Famous Five books, which if we divide it by the Secret Seven, gives us a hidden value that is exactly as close to the Biblical encryption of Pi!!

Clearly Enid Blyton was also inspired by God to conceal accurate values of fundamental constants in her writings!!!

I mean, if we don't accept that, we would have to accept the ludicrous proposition that the folks at AiG are fuckwits with no grasp of statistics, who are far too easily impressed by their favourite book, and who don't even think to check their work to see whether or not their conclusions are as impressive as they want them to be. Which would clearly be absurd.

 

[Jarhyn]

Obviously the claim is being used as an attempt to give the impression of divine inspiration, something that the human authors could not have worked out for themselves.

For example;

First Verse in Torah - 22/7​

Let us begin with a simple hint of Pi and afterwards move on to something far more impressive.
The first verse of the torah is:
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱ-לֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ
("in the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth")
If we take the first letter (Roshei Teivot) of each of the seven hebrew words. The gematria (numerical value) is:
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱ-לֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ
= Beit+Beit+Aleph+Aleph+Heh+Vuv+Heh=2+2+1+1+5+6+5=22
Dividing this by the number of words gives:
22/7=3.14285
This number is 99.96 percent the value of Pi.''

There will always be such a point at which two series with different growth rates will appear to create a fraction relatively close to Pi (or their inverse will).

Further, by making a selection of which of the many series exist to be selected of these numbers, you get many attempts.

Finally, there's no reason to think that some rather autistic people couldn't use a longish string, a stick, and a pin of some kind to actually figure out this ratio and forget that they had even done it in the first place: all of history is rife with people not writing stuff that everyone knew down, right up until nobody knew it because nobody wrote it down.

Most ancient writing and oral history was assembled according to some sort of pattern/rules, and that culture had always had a boner for number games. Jewish mysticism is all about numbers and numerology, and most mysticism across all of humanity across all pf time seems focused either on diversions for or interests of autistic people.

It's quite likely it was accidental, but also possible that it was a known fact by the original authors that was later forgotten, especially in the light of who tends to think of ideas radically different from what happened before their existence; to understand ancient numerologists, look at modern numerologists (they tend to like math!)

 

[ideologyhunter]

1. So, God gets us to 99.96 of pi. Is Satan lurking in the .04? Even so, it's sorta impressive, in that human/chimp shared DNA is 98.8% and the purity of Ivory soap is 99.44%. But Procter & Gamble is catching up with you, God.
2. There's got to be Islamists who are doing the same studies with their scripture. I'm too bored to look up the amazing findings they've made. I do know that Book of Mormon devotees have claimed to find ancient Hebrew verse patterns in the parts that Joseph Smith didn't crib from the Bible.
3. Apparently 'INRI' was written on the holy cross (in one version anyway.) INRI....IN...RI...and what is in Rhode Island? Providence! And what is Providence? God's guidance! And who brought us Providence? Jesus Christ!
4. What was written by the disembodied hand in Daniel 5? Mene mene tekel upharsin. How many letters is that? 4, 4, 5, 8. What is 4 x 4 x 5? 80. What is 80 divided by 8? 10. How many Commandments are there? 10, unless you use both lists, and then it's 20. Still, there were TEN plagues of Egypt and TEN lepers in Luke 17. Jesus Christ!
5. I'm scared; are you?

 

[DBT]

AiG defends Kings by basically calling it metaphor, an approximation used to illustrate a different point, hence not applicable to the hidden codes that are meant for the discerning eye.

"Now he 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.” This verse describes a cylindrical vessel built at the order of Solomon.

First of all, notice that this passage does not say “exactly ten cubits” or “exactly thirty cubits.” The numbers have been rounded to the nearest integer (or possibly the nearest multiple of ten). Dividing the circumference (30 cubits) by the diameter (10 cubits), we infer that pi is approximately equal to three. But, of course, pi is approximately equal to three, so the passage is quite correct."

Sure.

But why hide the more accurate number?

To what end?

Who knows? To confound the non believer? God works in mysterious ways? A sign from God given to the faithful while 'the scoffer who hates God' - destined for hellfire - stays damned?

If you treat any large text as though it might contain hidden cyphers of small quantities of information, you will discover that it does.

The Bible is not different from the works of Shakespeare, or Dickens, or Enid Blyton, in this regard.

Blyton wrote 21 full length "Famous Five" novels, plus a collection of eight short stories - that's 22 Famous Five books, which if we divide it by the Secret Seven, gives us a hidden value that is exactly as close to the Biblical encryption of Pi!!

Clearly Enid Blyton was also inspired by God to conceal accurate values of fundamental constants in her writings!!!

I mean, if we don't accept that, we would have to accept the ludicrous proposition that the folks at AiG are fuckwits with no grasp of statistics, who are far too easily impressed by their favourite book, and who don't even think to check their work to see whether or not their conclusions are as impressive as they want them to be. Which would clearly be absurd.

Well, they are fuckwits, yet kind of amusing in a sad sort of way.

 

[ideologyhunter]

The source quote in the OP comes from a Daf Yomi website -- that is, a website for students of the Talmud. I assumed at first it was from some inerrantist Christian group, because I'm used to hearing about Bible codes from these folks. Wow -- what a lot of mental effort is expended on these numerical pursuits. It all seems like a terminal case of confirmation bias to me. (BTW, Michael Drosnin, who had the best-selling book The Bible Code and its followups, was Jewish and atheist, if you read his statements from press interviews.)
When the Christians push this stuff, it presents a strange picture of their beliefs. God is hidden, even though that means allowing crimes and tragedies to occur without any help from him, and even though that means people will go to hell because they won't follow the true faith if they get diverted by alternate faiths, critical thinking, apathy, etc. But he sure as hell will conceal hidden messages in the scriptures! Drosnin claimed to find predictions of future events, including nuclear war, in the Torah. (He still claimed he didn't believe there was a god; he just said he had found the codes and couldn't explain why they were there.) And now pi shows up in the opening of Genesis. What a bunch of monkeyshines.

 

[DBT]

It seems the claim just won't die.

Genesis 1:1
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

In Hebrew:


בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ‎

If you examine the numerical values of each of the Hebrew letters,
and the numerical value of the words, and apply them to this formula:


.
The number of letters x the product of the letters
The number of words x the product of thewords

You get 3.1416 x 1017. The value of π to four decimal places.


.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

That is incredible, that a number would have that level of precision allegedly hidden in the text, when the Babylonians had a value of similar precision in unhidden numeric form at least hundreds of years earlier.

And people still think this means something. Nothing on pasteurization or sanitation (in a holy book that takes cleanliness very seriously), but a hidden reference to a mathematical number that was already known by others.

 

[steve_bank]

Sounds like a Story Channel show. The channel has some informative history shows, but also has shows on 'the secrets of the bible' and so on.

Hebrew numerology.

Significant Numbers in Judaism | My Jewish Learning

jewish numbers, judaism numerology, jewish magic, jewish superstition, judaism supernatural, gematria, Rabbi Geoffrey W. Dennis

www.myjewishlearning.com

Jews have always enjoyed finding meaning and significance in special numbers, perhaps most intensively through the practice of gematria, ascribing numerical values to letters and words that are said to reveal mystical connections. But even beyond this esoteric practice, certain numbers have a way of reappearing in the tradition, and have accrued significance by virtue of their presence in key texts and rituals.

What Is Gematria? | My Jewish Learning

jewish,learning,judaism, numbers, gematria, numerical values, letters, alphabet, significance, Louis Jacobs

www.myjewishlearning.com

Gematria is a numerological system by which Hebrew letters correspond to numbers. This system, developed by practitioners of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), derived from Greek influence and became a tool for interpreting biblical texts.

 

[bilby]

That is incredible, that a number would have that level of precision allegedly hidden in the text, when the Babylonians had a value of similar precision in unhidden numeric form at least hundreds of years earlier.

And people still think this means something. Nothing on pasteurization or sanitation (in a holy book that takes cleanliness very seriously), but a hidden reference to a mathematical number that was already known by others.

It's particularly remarkable in the light of the same Bible having completely missed an easy opportunity to explicitly specify Pi to a higher accuracy than "3" in 1 Kings 7:23:

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about

They could easily have ended with "... and a line of thirty one and a half cubits did compass it round about", if they wanted to impress people with their knowledge of Pi to approximately two decimal places; and the opportunity was there for arbitrary precision. It's not like the Bible resiles from massive boring lists of data*







* I call my gardening hat "Deuteronomy", because it's a big 'at.

 

[Swammerdami]

Either 3 or 22/7 was plenty good enough for Stone Age man. The Great Creator didn't need to reveal pi with more precision until His Creation was ready for it.

But, aware that calculating pi might be a big trial and/or tribulation, Mr. Yahweh did place Seven digits of this special number into the Book of Job:

Did I fear a great multitude, or did the contempt of families terrify me, that I kept silence, and went not out of the door?
.3. .1 . .4. 1 . .5.. ... .. . . .9.. ... .. 2

Obviously any Biblical scholar would understand that SEVEN digits of this wondrous number was just the appropriate digit count.

The relevant text is NOT, of course, the Hebrew version of this Great Book of Job. The knowledge had to wait for the Truly Chosen, the English-Speaking People, in particular those who adhered to the Translation named after Jesus' brother. The precise wording of that translation, essential to the number's precision, was DETERMINED at the Dawn of Creation -- (there's a thread for you around somewhere if you deny Determinism) -- proving once again, by Divine Miracle, that Reality really is Real! (I leave it to the experts to speculate whether God helped some butterfly flap its wings to steer the translators toward this miracle.)

 

[bilby]

Either 3 or 22/7 was plenty good enough for Stone Age man. The Great Creator didn't need to reveal pi with more precision until His Creation was ready for it.

But, aware that calculating pi might be a big trial and/or tribulation, Mr. Yahweh did place Seven digits of this special number into the Book of Job:

Did I fear a great multitude, or didthe conte mpt offam iliester rifymetha tIkepts ilenceand wen tn oto utofthed oor?
.3. .1 . .4. 1 . .5.. ... .. . . .9.. ... .. 2

Obviously any Biblical scholar would understand that SEVEN digits of this wondrous number was just the appropriate digit count.

The relevant text is NOT, of course, the Hebrew version of this Great Book of Job. The knowledge had to wait for the Truly Chosen, the English-Speaking People, in particular those who adhered to the Translation named after Jesus' brother. The precise wording of that translation, essential to the number's precision, was DETERMINED at the Dawn of Creation -- (there's a thread for you around somewhere if you deny Determinism) -- proving once again, by Divine Miracle, that Reality really is Real! (I leave it to the experts to speculate whether God helped some butterfly flap its wings to steer the translators toward this miracle.)

FTFY.

 

[DBT]

I found a good account of the fallacy of the claim given by a conscientious Christian;

''Disclaimer of bias: I consider myself a Christian who believes that the Bible is divinely inspired. I admit that if these numerical values were encoded into the Bible before they were known to the mathematical community, this would be an impressive piece of evidence for divine inspiration. So I might hope that a claim like this is correct. But it isn't.

The issue here is that the method of encoding presented is entirely and completely arbitrary. At no point does the author justify how he selected various methods of calculation. Consequently, as Dan Romik points out in his answer elsewhere on this page, this method suffers from the research degree of freedom problem.

Consider his method of equating numbers with letters. This method, as pointed out by David K and LangLangC (thanks y'all) is native to the Greek alphabet; however, it was not adopted into the Hebrew alphabet until long after the book of Genesis was written, and would not make sense to apply to the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1. One could argue that God would know the future, and consequently place the verse in such a way as to be decoded in the future. However, Joe Vasta goes on to make clearly arbitrary decisions in his line of reasoning.

Consider the expression that he uses to create the values similar to pi and e: (number of letters)(product of letters)/(number of words)(product of words) Why did he select this combination of multiplication, division, and summing? No explanation is provided.

Now consider that the resulting numbers only match pi and e if you divide by 10^17 and 10^40, respectively. Why are these values different? On what basis are they the "right" numbers to divide by to get the "right" mathematical constants? No explanation is provided.

Now consider that in the original Greek and Hebrew Bibles, there were no chapters and verses! No Christian that I know of claims that the modern divisions of chapters and verses is divinely inspired. They are simply arbitrary markers for ease of navigation. See Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament and Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament.

With so many arbitrary choices, it is possible to claim to find encoded messages anywhere. For proof of this, take a look at my tongue-in-cheek response to a puzzle on Puzzling.SE. I managed to find a "secret message" within the first few digits of pi itself, with the exact same arbitrary way of thinking.

To conclude, due to the apparently arbitrary operations performed, there is no evidence that finding pi and e in this manner is a remarkable or miraculous occurrence. I suspect (but cannot prove) that this is simply a man with too much time to devote to trial and error mathematical calculations."

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/...atical-constants-e-and-π-encoded-in-the-bible