I have been contacted by a loon who is offering big money to anyone who can disprove his mathematical argument that god exists. I’m not interested — it’s incredibly stupid — but hey, if you want to waste your time playing a rigged game, help yourself.
One hundred thousand dollars, $200,000.00, cold hard cash for disproving this theory by these rules.
The Jews have been doing Gematria for thousands of years. There are 20 verses in the Holy Bible telling us that God put this Gematria in the Bible. Dr. Ivan Panin bagan in 1890 to create 43,000 pages of Gematria and went around the country challenging any atheist to disprove ANY of these 43,000 pages of proof that God wrote the Holy Bible. Not one Yot or Tittle of Dr. Ivan Panins 43,000 pages of proof has been disproven in the past 130 years.
‘The Theory of Biblical Patterns’ shows the significance of God’s prime digits, ‘3’ for trinity, ‘7’ for divine perfection and God’s prime pairs, 3 and 7 side by side, ’37’, and ’73’ and ’23’ the number of chromosomes in human DNA. All probabilities are shown. The first 28 are from Dr. Ivan Panin 130 years ago and have never been disproven. A half a dozen others are from various sources such as Dr. Chuck Missler. The remainder God gave me directly.
It’s numerology. It’s utterly absurd. Here’s one of his 100 proofs.
So the number of words in Genesis 1:1 is evenly divisible by 7. Big whoop. What am I supposed to disprove? That a multiple of 7 is not divisible by 7? Or that this mathematically trivial fact is not evidence of god? I suspect he has the former as his trump card, that no one will disprove a truism, so he’ll never have to cough up his cash.
So 7 is “Gods (sic) prime digit”.
I’d have thought it’s more likely to be his dominant hand’s index finger or thumb.
Number of words in which translatuion and language I wonder?
Not that it actually matters.
Exvept ..ya think he’s covered himself legally here? (Probly?)
@1. markp8703 : Thing is, either one on their own is rather useless and its only combine dthat they really work ain’t it?
Might be some sort of “moral” about co-operation and working together being necessary there kinda?
I recently thought up an antagonist for a Chronicles of Darkness game (Urban fantasy/horror) that was a numerological cult trying to formulate or solve a “divine equation,” leading them to hunt down a character who they believe holds part of the secret. I was kind of going for a surreal feel, but now that you’ve posted this, it just feels silly.
@Bronze Dog
My group once played a game in which we were trying to prevent Bad Guys TM from finding and killing too many Tzadikim Nistarim. At the start of the game there were 45, near the end we were left with 38 and the lore says that if there are ever less than 36, God judges humanity unworthy and ends the world. It was awesome.
7 is not even, it is odd. Therefore the number of words in Genesis 1:1 is oddly divisible by 7. Therefore the foundation of the argument is flawed. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The use of “1 in 10^1 probability” is freakin’ adorable.
I wonder which translation he uses? The King James, the Catholic version, the Protestant version, the New International Version, the Latin text, the Greek text or the Hebrew text and are the Apocrypha in or out? Now if all those had the same numerical pattern that would be a coincidence.
Whatever the number, it’s either going to be a prime number, which I’m sure would be terribly significant, or a composite number with prime factors, any of which could be claimed to be meaningful. Whoop.
Had the number of words not been divisible by seven, either some other meaningful number would have been found, or alternatively he could have declared “it’s a magic seven.” Either way, God.
If man is five. . .if man is five. . .if man is five. . . then the devil is six, etc.
@7: “I wonder which translation he uses?”
I assume Hebrew since the graphic shows Hebrew letters.
But we don’t have the original scrolls, we have a few copies of the original scrolls and those copies do not always agree with other copies. So what was his choice of the source Hebrew documents?
Jo1storm @5: (Reads the Wikipedia entry on Tzadikim Nistarim) Neat premise. Glad you enjoyed the game.
As for my numerology cult, they’re hunting down a Deviant who is essentially an incomplete Spirit-Claimed. The spirit in question is one of void and symbols for “nothing”. They figure the Deviant has some resulting insight into the mysteries of zero and possibly imaginary numbers that would contribute to the solution. Still haven’t decided what might happen if the cult actually solves the equation, though.
FTFY
666 divided by 3 (trinity) = 222
2+2+2+1* = 7
Checkmate!! you raving loon!
*222 is one number
Just as bad as that horrible Kent Hovind offering $1,000,000 to anyone who can prove evolution is true or Dumb Idiot Ham offering $10,000,000 to anyone who can prove that the earth is billions of years old. None of these challenges are worth accepting because no matter how many times you prove to them that evolution is true and the earth is billions of years old, these 2 dummies won’t abandon their young earth lies and fantasies and find excuses not to pay you for winning the challenge.
Just showing that he knows scientific notation just like all the real scientists do
Assuming he’s using Hebrew, as depicted in the chart, I would ask which version he’s talking about. I’m sure there are variations even among Hebrew sources. As I understand it, the convention of word divisions (i.e. spaces between words) in ancient Semitic can depend on your source and how the divisions are represented. In one non-biblical case that I’m aware of, dots were used between words, although the lack of a dot between “house” and “David” has resulted in controversy whether the reference is to a dynastic “house” or a temple. So was “betaDavid” one word or two words with a “typo”.
I can disprove it. The probability calculation is wrong.
Chance of Genesis 1:1 being divisible by 3, 7, 37, or 73 is (7 * 37 * 73) / 56721 + (3 * 37 * 73) / 56721 + (3 * 7 * 73) / 56721 + (3 * 7 * 37) / 56721, or around 51.6% across an even distribution across all positive integer word lengths.
Chance of Genesis 1:1 not being included in the list of proofs if it weren’t evenly divisible by 3, 7, 37, 73, or some other “special” number instead of being used as a disproof: 100%.
Same reasoning applies to every other element of the list. Therefore, the chance of the list being representative of all of the things that look neat to the person putting them together rather than an actual attempt at proving or disproving a hypothesis: 100%.
@Bronze Dog: That’s not too far off the plot of the movie Pi.
The number of words in genesis? Is that the original aramaic, or greek version, or some medieval translation to latin with added text?
Chapter and verse numbers were not part of the original text, but were added much later by monks/rabbis. Thus “Genesis 1:1” is a human construct not a divine one. I’ll take my $100,000 or $200,000.
I’ll give him credit for at least looking at the original Hebrew (or as close as we have to the original), not whatever translation is most convenient. Genesis 1:1 does indeed have 7 Hebrew words.
Oh wow… i flipped though a bunch of his 100 proofs, and I think they are all based on just that one verse, Gen 1:1 So I might disproved all 100 in one go!
Paninology isn’t exactly new: see Brendan McKay’s analysis at Ivan Panin and Friends. Older readers, as they say, may recall McKay’s work on the so-called “Bible Codes”, including his discovery of a prophecy of himself! in War and Peace, albeit a translation into Hebrew.
Basically every “probabalistic” proof that various things that happened are monstrously unlikely to have happened by chance involves looking at the very specific outcome that occurred in close enough detail that, sure, that specific outcome is incredibly unlikely, but not actually less likely than other events described in identical detail. You don’t need a bible or an abiogenesis event or whatever to play this game. I can sit here with a pile of 10-sided dice and roll a bunch of them. I just got the outcome: 7, 10, 1, 5, 3, 10, 1, 7, 1, 6 with the set I rolled. That particular outcome has a one-in-ten-billion chance of happening, and I made it happen right here on my table. Am I a miracle-worker, to get so low-probability an event to happen in front of me? Of course not: every outcome had a 1-in-10-billion chance, and one of them was certain to happen. If I’d been able to say in advance what 10 numbers I’d roll, that’d be pretty extraordinary. Pointing at them after the fact and saying “check out how that happened!” doesn’t impress anyone, nor should it.
The “probabalistic provers” of whatever sort of thing they want to prove (impossibility of life arising by chance, asserting deep structure to the bible, whatever) are basically playing the same trick with a bit of obfuscation because they limit themselves to low-probbility events to which one can ascribe significance. But again, it’s after-the-fact, and they blur the difference between “something of this importance would happen” and “this particular thing would happen”. Creationists used to play this game all the time, multiplying together all the infinitesimal likelihoods of the events leading to human life on Earth at the time it arose and concluding that particular event was monstrously unlikely. Which, of course, it is, just like every Powerball drawing has a monstrously unlikely result and yet they do it every week. If we shift focus to “what is the likelihood that an abiogenesis event eventually leading to a sentient lifeform occurs somewhere?” (because, after all, if we were advanced protoplasmic blobs in another galaxy, we’d be asking the same question)… well, that’s a question we frankly do not have the astronomical or biological basis to answer fully, and, hell, maybe the existence of life is a miracle, but the point is that it seems a lot less unlikely when you ask the right question.
Which brings us to this sub-Bible-Code balderdash. The Torah has 5 books, several parshot, and lots of verses to which you can ascribe all sorts of mystical significance. There are a number of sacred numbers in Judaism beyond 7 (12, 18, and 144 are the three I know the most about, but I’m not a student of gematria). There are a lot of mathematical relationships available beyond factoring. Given that information, I could come up with a list of several hundred “sacred correspondences” which each have a priori probabilities less than 10%. If I test them out, I can probably come up with a lot of them that show up, because “less than 10%” isn’t “impossible”, and eventually your number comes up. Then I could take these individual low-probability events, multiply together their (presumably independent, although that too is a point of sloppiness) probabilities, and discover that this particular list of “sacred correspondences” is far too unlikely to occur in the Torah by chance. But it’s really just the same trick — if you’re looking through an extremely large number of “unlikely events” the fact that one of them happens to appear isn’t actually that surprising.
And none of this even takes into account one more obvious rejoinder: let’s posit that these extraordinary correspondences are in fact deliberate; why assume therefore that they’re divine? People write novels without the letter “E”. People write monospaced text which fits exact rectangles without typographical tricks. The idea that a bronze-age civilization who had a numeralogical framework would deliberately embed that numeralogical framework into sacred works written by ordinary human beings is not a particularly unbelievable human endeavor.
robro@16: How many divisions has the Pope?
Is he paying out in Crypto?
Ok, everyone asking which bible he used, you are doing it wrong. The obvious answer is that the verson of the Bible that truly holds God’s word is the one where the number of words in the random section are divisible by 7. (Also for some reason God’s word is ‘fish’.)
“god’s prime digit is seven” WTF, Here, let me show you my prime digit (raises middle finger in salute to the xtain terrorists). And, I thought many xtian terrorists said that ridiculous numerology was anti-xtian. But, then, of course if you look behind the curtain, numerology and xtianity are both delusional superstitions!
What’s left of Genesis 1:1 once God is factored out and what does that mean?
I have to wonder if he’s hinting that 1=2; and referring the famous result you get when you do bogus algebra that divides by zero. So 1=2, anything equals anything else, nyah, nyah, and even if you find a flaw in his gematria, you get $000,000, which is equal to $100,000 (which is equal to $200,000).
Remember yesterday when I was talking about how I had to open letters to the editor at a newspaper and screen out the crank letters, back before the Internet?
This was the kind of crap I had to look at almost every day.
Now they get a website. Jeebus. Christ. And we talk about it.
Complete nonsense of course, for all the reasons noted above, as is all numerology. But leaving all the problems with translation language etc – what would be the point (to “god” I mean)?
It’s like discovering the numbering system in a Haiku then running around looking for things to match the numbers (after subtracting, multiplying, etc to make them fit).
Well, to be fair, he’s counting the Hebrew letters correctly.
However, he’s mixing up the order of the letters. Some letters in Hebrew change their shape, depending on whether they’re the final letter of the word or not.
So he’s got ץ at the end of a word instead of צ and has mixed up ם and מ a few times.
I guess a blind squirrel can count correctly, even if it can’t read :)
You have that backwards (the final tzade has a vertical descender; the non-final tsade has a horizontal line), but yes, he’s using the non-final form of the letters in “arets’. And, yes, “shamayim” actually has the final mem where a non-final mem should be, and a non-final mem where a final mem should be. And “elohim” has a non-final mem at the end.