Re: [asa] A case of non-biological ID

Vernon,

Since I believe in the sovereignty of God, I believe that everything is
designed, and arguments for intelligent design are unnecessary to convince
me of it. The question that I ask about your arguments then is whether
they would convince someone who does not believe that God is behind the
Bible. I try to put myself in the place of such a person and think of what
objections he might come up with. Of course, there is no guarantee that
logic alone will convert him.

Broadening the discussion to include all alleged evidences for design, I
would note that there have been scientific discoveries that have led
skeptics to at least waver in their claim that there is no design in
nature. Big bang cosmology is a prime example of this. This change in
outlook was not the result of some campaign by Christians to find a proof
of intelligent design but the result of scientific research by people who
had no such goal. Now disbelievers in design are forced to bank on the
existence of a multiverse.

Even though there may be people who will never be convinced by any
evidence, I still find it an interesting philosophical question to ponder
possible evidences for design.

Some time ago I tried to compare your claims concerning Genesis 1:1 with
numerics on some extrabiblical statement. I chose "Mary had a little lamb"
and assigned numbers to our alphabet by the same pattern as used for
Hebrew. I found a number of sets of words whose values were multiples of
13. Since 13 is considerably less than 37, patterns involving 13 are much
less impressive than patterns involving 37, but it is an example of a
number that occurs in a passage quite a bit more frequently than would be
expected in an arbitrary passage. You will note that I picked a type of
feature that corresponded to a type of feature that you had found in
Genesis 1:1. One wonders whether other interesting features could be found
in "Mary had a little lamb" that are absent from Gen. 1:1.

I actually brought up this example to apply to an analogous situation with
scientific observations that may be used to argue for design. It has been
pointed out that in a total solar eclipse the moon blocks out just the
right amount of the sun for us to make important scientific observations
about the sun. Also our position in our galaxy gives us a favorable spot
from which to make astronomical observations. Since these situations are
not necessary for advanced life forms, the anthropic principle cannot be
invoked. Thus they have been proposed as evidences for design. I like
these arguments except that I can think of an objection. Maybe if we were
situated elsewhere in our galaxy, we might have other advantages that we
don't have here but can't imagine because of limitations here that we
don't recognize.

Gordon Brown (ASA member)

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Vernon Jenkins wrote:

> Forum,
>
> I submit the following notice (which appears in the current issue of the Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network) for the attention of new members and for those Christians who may wish to be reminded of relevant, cast iron, facts.
>
> Here is a mystery. It transpires that a fair alternative reading of the Hebrew of the Bible's first verse uncovers a structure of coordinated numerical geometries which, in all its essentials, incorporates information delivered expressly in the Greek of verse 13:18 of its final book, Revelation. Key to the whole matter is the understanding that 666 has a substantial extrabiblical presence, (1) as epitome of triangularity and, (2) as first triangular multiple of the unique number 37. In the first of these roles, all its numerical attributes are observed to be triangles - their sum, the unique cube 216, or 6x6x6. In the second, the Genesis 1:1 structure is observed to comprise the first three triangular multiples of 37 - the third being 2701 (sum of the 7 words) having a perimeter of 216.
>
> To whom will we attribute this impressive feat of non-biological intelligent design? - for the inference must be that, from the beginning, it was planned that the Bible should be a self-authenticating text!
>
> www.otherbiblecode.com
> www.whatabeginning.com
>
> A concise overview of these phenomena may be found at www.whatabeginning.com/Misc/Wonders/P.htm and www.whatabeginning.com/ObDec.htm
>
> Vernon
>

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Received on Mon Jan 14 16:03:55 2008