Re: Peer review and ID

On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 14:04:46 -0600 (MDT) gordon brown
<gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu> writes:
>
> On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, Freeman, Louise Margaret wrote:
>
> > Are you also offended when your child is taught that bats are not
> birds, that rabbits don't chew
> > cuds, or that pi equals 3.14, not 3?
>
> When an English translation of the Bible has a statement that
> contradicts
> what should have been obvious to almost all the author's
> contemporaries,
> why should the first reaction be that the author must have been an
> idiot?
> It seems more reasonable to assume that he might not have been an
> idiot
> and that we should try to determine the correct interpretation of
> what he
> said. An important tool in deducing the true meaning of words and
> phrases
> in ancient languages is to find the contexts in which they are used.
> It
> shouldn't seem surprising that the ancients constructed their
> taxonomies
> based on different criteria from those that are used in 21st
> century
> science.
>
> As for I Kings 7:23-26 and II Chron. 4:2-5, shouldn't we consider
> that the
> diameter and circumference given there might be of two different
> circles?
> The sea had a lip protruding from the top, under which there were
> figures
> of gourds, presumably fixed to the outside of the sea. A tangential
> observation about these passages is that it can be noted that there
> is a
> copyist's error in either I Kings 7:23 or II Chron. 4:5.
>
> Another comment: Children should be taught that 3.14 is an
> approximation
> to pi, not equal to pi.
>
> Gordon Brown
> Department of Mathematics
> University of Colorado
> Boulder, CO 80309-0395
>
>
Gordon,
You can produce a possible explanation for the ratio of the laver. But no
lagomorph (hare, Strong's 768) or hyrax (coney, 8225) chews the cud
(1625). The root of the last (1641) has a primary meaning of drag or drag
away, and is specifically associated with bringing up the cud. The
scriptures thus present the erroneous natural history of antiquity. The
claim I have encountered that the hare ingesting some of its feces is cud
chewing won't wash. The scriptures are not, contrary to a popular claim,
scientifically inerrant. Consequently, I consider it wiser to recognize a
crude estimate of pi, less exact when measures were a cubit, a span, a
hand, a fingerbreadth, a pace--all connected to human movement or, in
other cases, activity
Dave
.
Received on Sat Oct 22 19:40:47 2005