Reason, Behold Your Enemy

If ever, out of morbid curiosity, you have landed on TBN while channel surfing to see what the Evangelicals—that potent subset of the American electorate—might be watching, you may have seen the work of Jack Van Impe, the self-proclaimed “walking Bible” due to his shtick of spouting strings of dubiously relevant scriptural passages during his television program. Jack, like many of his ilk, has been predicting the end of the world for quite a while now. That it never seems to happen when he says it will has not stopped the tenacious Van Impe, whose show is a remarkable example of the televangelical formula perfectly executed: quote scripture, predict the Rapture, scare the shit out of your audience, quote scripture, and shill your latest product.

In the video below, Jack, his otherworldly wife, Rexella, and Chuck Ohman, his almost impossibly mellifluous announcer, inform us of the next grave danger to mankind. Watch the video to find out what it is, and we’ll catch up on the other side.

Did you catch that ordering information? After all, you don’t want to be caught with your pants down when the Satan-helmed alien hordes make their move.

It is very difficult to define a “ridiculousness scale” to quantitatively evaluate the content of this video. But I have to admit that there is little contained in this piece that seems much less plausible than anything presented in the Bible. (Is it silly to think that Satan controls a bunch of aliens out to get us but not silly to believe he rules over the damned for all eternity in a lake of fire?)

It would all be good for a laugh if these weren’t some of the same people who do this:

Richard Feynman on Uncertainty

A Divine House of Cards

Discussing the Bible reasonably is made exceptionally difficult by its stark paucity of testable claims. It is simply not a scientific book. Very frequently, we are given prophecies that are said to have come true, but we can never be absolutely sure that they did (there is always some uncertainty in history), nor can we be sure that the “prophecies” were actually written before the presaged events. For the most part, Biblical authors neither signed nor dated their work.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Bible is what is not included in it. There are many facts that would be very impressive had they been put in the Bible years before readers could fully appreciate them. Consider pi, for instance, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. How interesting it would be if God told us that this number’s decimal expansion went on forever, that no matter how we tried, we would never come to the end of calculating it, nor would we ever find it repeating itself. What a powerful idea that is! What better way to make us mere mortals understand the majesty and infinitude of God than by giving us a glimpse of infinity in every wheel that rolled beneath a cart?

Well, pi is in the Bible, but the Bible gets it wrong. In 1 Kings 7:23, we are told: “Then he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.” This says quite clearly that pi is a whole number: three. It is an error of less than five percent, but it is still an error. Let’s just say that one should use the version found in a modern table of fundamental constants if a calculation is a matter of life or death—in, say, planning a space mission.

Of course, there are many who so want to believe in the literal truth of the Bible that even this error can’t sway them. Some say that the figure quoted above is just an approximation (in which case 31 would have been a much better one than 30). Others say that it is a matter of the unit used, the cubit, but this explanation doesn’t actually explain anything, as it is merely another apology for a poor approximation. This explanation and another, somewhat more realistic one are given on a site called Answers in Genesis. I am not persuaded by these explanations, but they are at least genuine efforts. Check the link and see what you think.

While we are on the subject of mathematics, let me make a simple statement, which I will call a theorem. But before I do that, let me introduce a simple definition: A prime number is a natural number that is evenly divisible only by itself and one. (I should also define what a natural number is; it is a “counting” number: 1, 2, 3, etc.) Let us introduce the following:

THEOREM: All prime numbers are odd.

This is a statement that employs something called a universal quantifier. A universal quantifier makes a statement about all things having a particular property. Here I am making a statement about all prime numbers, namely that all of them are odd. I assume the reader knows the difference between an even and an odd number, so I won’t bother defining them here (whereas in a more rigorous setting, I might have to do just that).

What about this theorem? Is it true? Is there another way to write it that might make it easier to evaluate? As it turns out, there is. A universal statement like the one above can be written using an existential quantifier. In this case, if I say that all prime numbers are odd, I am equivalently saying that no prime number exists that is even (and among natural numbers, there is no option other than even or odd). In other words, if my theorem is true, there are no even prime numbers. If, however, even one prime number exists that is even, the theorem is false.

Well, there is an even prime number, the first prime: two. It is the only even prime, the lone exception to the “rule” above. But since it exists, the theorem is false. Now, it is easy to plug the hole in this theorem and make it true by restricting the primes we consider to those greater than two. But the point is that a universal statement is undone by a single exception. In mathematics, this is referred to as a counterexample.

Can we find a counterexample to an absolute statement in the Bible? If so, what would be the significance? Let us examine the first question first.

Consider the following statement from Genesis 6:3: “Then the LORD said, ‘My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.’”*

We can easily present this as a theorem: “For all humans, the time between an individual’s birth and death shall not exceed 120 years.” We can also rewrite it as an equivalent statement and even tighten it up a bit, since someone in his or her 121st year is still called 120 years old: “There will not exist a human being such that 121 years or more passes between his or her birth and his or her death.”

Enter Jeanne Calment. Born in Arles, France, on February 21, 1875, she died in the same town on August 4, 1997, aged 122 years and 164 days. Although there are people who are claimed to have reached a more advanced age, Mrs. Calment is one for whom the most official documentation exists. She was awarded the title of “world’s oldest person” by the Guinness Book of World Records when she was a spry 113 years old. Her dates of birth and death are beyond dispute. She clearly lived more than 120 years … and 121 … and 122.

What becomes of our theorem? Well, since it states that we would not be able to find a person older than 120 years and we did find such a person, the theorem is disproved by counterexample.

Now we are left considering the consequences. I might have a mathematics book that contains a theorem with a faulty proof. Such a theorem cannot be said to be proved, but it is also not necessarily false. But let’s say a counterexample turns up that shows us for sure that the theorem is false, at least in its current form. Well, that would certainly be something to address in the next printing or edition of the book, but it would not necessarily render the rest of the book’s contents useless and condemn it to the garbage heap (unless every other theorem hinges on this false one).

With the Bible, however, another theorem winds up doing it in: “The law of the LORD is perfect” (Psalm 19:7). (This statement is actually contradicted by Hebrews 8:6-7, but I will leave that to the reader to verify.) The problem comes from realizing that disproving the earlier theorem provides a counterexample to this one, disproving it as well. How many other laws or observations in the Bible are incorrect is beyond the scope of this essay, but we know that at least two such statements are false. The worst part is that one of these statements provides the divine imprimatur, the authoritative endorsement of the book’s remaining contents.

In the Bible we are given implausible stories that resemble nothing from our common experience; tales of gross violations of fundamental laws of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology; natural histories that are contradicted by modern science; and statements and predictions that can be demonstrated to be false. But blind faith proves itself again and again to be immune to reason, so it takes no great skill or inspiration to prophesy how many believers this argument or any like it will convince.

Not a soul.

*From the Revised Standard Edition, 1982

A Measure of Man

I expect that as cognitive science research advances, we will develop a quantifiable measure of consciousness, which will enable us to compare the consciousness of one animal with that of another. What form it will take is not certain, although it may be something that matches up fairly well with the ratio of synaptic connections to brain volume.* But an informal measure of how human consciousness compares with that of the lower animals can come from appreciating our need to externalize our memories. Using symbolism and formal languages, humans convert paper, computers, and even patches of dirt that can display our scribbles to external brains. Whether it is to temporarily enhance our working memories or to preserve our thoughts for posterity, this activity clearly demonstrates the human experience of the environment as something far transcending that of the other animals. While the simpler beasts are content to experience and remember life with only the equipment with which they were born, humanity, through a necessity borne out of the nature of its intelligence, had to invent an artificial memory.

*There is a measure called the encephalization quotient, which relates an animal's brain mass to its body mass and compares it to other animals of similar size. While interesting, I believe that it falls considerably short of a "metric of consciousness," which is admittedly difficult to define.