(December 30, 2014 at 8:53 am)Parkers Tan Wrote: Yet, your allegedly all-knowing god has written into his divinely-inspired book that this circle was built giving pi a value of three. Ignorance of fine measurements and decimal math is exactly what we'd expect from a bunch of ignorant goatherders -- not an omniscient god.
Meh
Not a strong argument for pi=3.
Rebuttal 1) bible expression has rounding error
Rebuttal 2) bible meant that line around rim of Sea thing was at least 30 cubits long.
Remember any tortured, ad-hoc rationalization which can be construed to verify the truth of the bible will be adopted as irrefutable truth for true believers.
I judge the overall infallibility of holy writ by other criteria, chiefly those things that are not included e.g. germ theory, copernican astrophysics, who got elected President of the US in 1956.
For me, truth cannot be known with certainty because of the problem of induction. A proposition can only be shown to have been true at some time in the past with respect to conditions some time further in the past. It cannot be shown to be true in the present.
But the bible is just SO BAD in this ability. Newtonian physics was good enough in predicting positions in the heavens to get Curiosity to Mars and Rosetta to a FREAKING COMET and match velocities at some incredible distance from here. And I understand the standard model is able to make even more accurate predictions, though I don't understand the standard model (not enough maths in my head.) We've seen that the propositions of those disciplines have predicted the future well enough to give us terabyte disks and fiber driven bandwidth enough to have this interchange. The bible rounds pi off to 3 and has been able to accurately predict.... well nothing, really. Not much of a track record to bank on, is it?
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
