extraordinary-evidenceSuppose that it were discovered that the digits of π or the natural logarithm, when expressed in terms of a particular base, perfectly encoded the complete text of the King James version of both testaments of the Christian bible. Would that be strong evidence supporting any of the following claims?
Would this be an atheist’s nightmare?
“Most atheists would be moved by strong empirical evidence,” but would this constitute strong empirical evidence for any of these claims?
For what it’s worth, there’s an unproven conjecture that the binary representation of pi contains every finite sequence of bits (see http://baetzler.de/humor/dont_compute_pi.html). So if that were true, then in fact pi would contain every possible expression of every book that ever has been and ever will be published.
Of course, that doesn’t really address your question. Really, your question is kind of silly. You might as well ask, “If God can be proven to exist, would you believe God exists?” As most atheists will at least claim to be rational people, then of course the answer is yes. If there were strong empirical evidence, most atheists would be moved by it.
So I think that to answer this would require answering a bunch of other questions.
1) Are we limiting ourselves to integer bases? What about imaginary and transcendental numbers (yes I realize the latter is a sub-class of the former, but they were still investigated separately, so I thought it was worth mentioning them).
2) How do we encode the numbers to letters? If you allow any possible representation relation (I won’t even limit it to functions) then it would seem to be impossible to not find the KJ bible, and every other type of bible and work of fiction in a subset of the digits of almost any transcendental number. Additionally, if i simply had the function 17 = “the words in the book called the bible”, the number 17 is technically a mathematical constant, and using my code, the bible is properly encoded within. The point of 2) is that the code is not constrained, giving insane degrees of freedom for this to occur.
3) Even if we figure out how to restrict the coding scheme, is there a particular human language that you would expect it to be written in? If not, that gives equally problematic massive degrees of freedom, since you could then create a language for the express purpose of having the bible in these digits simply transformed once given a code. I realize the KJV is one particular translation, but your choosing of it seems arbitrary, and if instead we found some other translation (e.g. Gideon’s) that would seem equivalent to finding the KJV. This holds for all languages as well.
With these three questions I would say that the chances of this occurring are actually quite high, if not p=1, and not just for the bible but for almost any work of literature. So I would bet that the answer is, for anyone who thought about it deeply, no it’s actually quite probable given the number of degrees of freedom the problem here poses.
Now, for people who didn’t really think about it, they might be lured in but I’d hope that the larger community of reasonable nonbelievers would try to rein in such abuses of logic.
It would be an atheist’s nightmare if that weren’t the case (provided the digits of π are really random): any real random sequence of digits is bound to contain every conceivable text, given an adequate encoding.
This is a very simple consequence of the nature of random sequences.
Let’s suppose that having “the digits of π or the natural logarithm, when expressed in terms of a particular base, perfectly encoded the complete text of the King James version of both testaments of the Christian bible” is something unusual, how can it be a proof of anything supernatural?
King James’ Bible was written by men, who could have easily incorporated whichever algorithm into the translation. The value of π (although it’s irrational number and you can never have it wholly) was well known back then.
Also, how can an English translation of an older book made out of Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek manuscripts be something special, in the religious sense? Surely it’s the source that’d be special and holy, and not the later copy and translation.
Scripturally encoded mathematical constants would be far more likely evidence of OCD and schizophrenia than divine inspiration. Look at paranoic and delusional / schizoid writings for examples of deeply obsessed people that manage to find or encode the most amazing stuff in their writing / reading.
You have to ask yourself why would a divine entity only make its presence known through the exact same channels as madness.
Not really. How does a text containing some mathematical constant prove God exists? All it proves is that there was at some time some very intelligent person, human or not. It could just as much prove that there are aliens with a wicked sense of humour. The problem with the premise is essentially that you do not define “God”. If “God” has some characteristics which could possibly be expressed in a text, then “God” would not have the classic attributes of omni-everything. He would be limited by those characteristics which “He” could express in a text. But if “God” has some specified limiting characteristic, then he would not be a “supreme” being in any way, since we could easily imagine a being without such characteristic which would be greater at least in the sense of that characteristic to the “God” under examination.
“God” cannot write a book and still be “God”.
No. The King James Bible is a translation, and so it would (at most) indicate that a clever translator imposed an algorithm on his work. It would say nothing of divine origins, value of content, or existence of “God.”
Even all-powerful deities can’t change mathematical constants such as π, e or γ, they are fixed by their mathematical properties.
So whatever you find in there, it doesn’t matter for the question whether deities exist.
Would scripture encoded in mathematical constants constitute strong evidence for supernatural origin?
It doesn’t matter where the text is hidden, the story it tells is nonsensical and false - strong evidence for a natural (human) origin.
I agree to every answer which concentrates on the infiniteness of the number PI.
But without specified encoding, you can debunk the argument as well.
A simple 1:1 encoding may be 1->a 2->b 3->c, but you can as well encode more generous: 111->a 112->b 113->c …, leaving some codes meaningless, and you can encode economical: 1415-> means “The wordings of the KJB”.
Surprisingly, the KJB is encoded into PI by this encoding, directly after the dot.
No. They will not believe. To do so would mean they'd have to answer to the God of the Bible--and that is inconceivable.
Luke 16:30-1 And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.
They will simply demonize whoever brought something like that out and make them seem absurd, such as with Ray Comfort's Atheist's Nightmare. But as with this, at least there'd be some publicity out of it and the light might come on for some that are not entirely dyed in the wool.
Edit -- Addition:
When folks are set in their mind, it is very hard to convince them otherwise. I thought of this when I read this article, that pretty much shows the atheist difficulty. How to convince the masses of the validity of their theory that all we see came from nothing? Reminds me of the folks who used to try to explain how that the earth really was the center of the universe (see this), and were loathe to give up their misgivings.
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