Re: Peer review and ID

On Sat, 22 Oct 2005, D. F. Siemens, Jr. wrote:

> 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
> .
>

I don't expect the Bible to be written in such a way as to be inconsistent
with the scientific understanding of its original readers, but I would
expect people who had made measurements to realize that pi is definitely
greater than three. I would guess that the measurement of the
circumference of the laver would be made by putting a string around the
cylinder (if it was a cylinder) and for the diameter by laying a rod
across the top, thus including the protrusion there.

Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
Received on Sun Oct 23 21:29:02 2005