Genesis 1:1 - a standing fluke

OK, Vernon, you've pushed me beyond the point of no response.

Please consider the following scenario: Suppose someone (God, say) put the following thought into the mind of some Hebrew scribe and motivated him to write it down: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

How many different ways could the scribe have expressed that thought in acceptable Hebrew? Four? Ten? One hundred? Probably far fewer than 100, but for the sake of argument let's take 100 for a worst case.

Then the chance that the inspired scribe would have chosen to write "beraysheath bara elohim ayth hashemime wa'ayth ha'aretz" (pardon the amateurish transliteration) would have been 1/100. Hence your chance of getting all the amazing numerical phenomena you've found would have been 1/100.

Ordinarily we would not consider the occurrence of an event with probability 1/100 to be a miracle. We might call it a fluke instead.

Or do you claim that divine inspiration comes as through a pipeline letter by letter? Even so, God would have a fairly limited number of ways of expressing that one thought, so if the words happened to give amazing numerical results, the phenomena would still likely be more fluke than message.

The letters and hence the numbers are controlled by the thought but are irrelevant to the thought. It's only a fluke that you can make anything of them.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Vernon Jenkins<mailto:vernon.jenkins@virgin.net>
  To: Gary Collins<mailto:gwcollins@algol.co.uk> ; asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Saturday, July 24, 2004 1:17 PM
  Subject: Re: Genesis 1:1 - a standing miracle

  Hi, Gary

  I suppose we could go on and on - and at great length - discussing these
  matters with little ground being given, either way. And all the time we
  would be missing the main issue, viz that Genesis 1:1, as we find it in the
  original Hebrew, is a remarkable example of non-biotic ID - more likely than
  not, a gratuitous 'sign' provided by an ever present and purposeful Creator.
  So the big question is, How are today's searchers for truth to interpret
  this sign?

  I have already expressed some of my own views. But what of yours, Gary? And
  what of those of the other interested parties on this list?

  Shalom,

  Vernon
  www.otherbiblecode.com<http://www.otherbiblecode.com/>
Received on Sun Jul 25 01:31:30 2004