(no subject)

[maradydd]

By way of Pharyngula, apparently the creationists are starting to abuse information theory, not just physics, in their tortured attempts to justify their doctrine.

Of course, you understand, this means war.

ETA: /me reads the comments. Oh. Apparently creationists reject Claude Shannon's work on information theory. Infidels. They shall be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

One thing that I will never understand is why creationists believe that an omniscient God is bad at math.

Comments

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

One can derive that, if one makes a variety of assumptions that aren't necessarily specified in the text. For example, they could have been measuring the inner circumference of the vat, but the outer diameter. (Obviously, with Bronze Age technology, the thickness of the vat wall is not insignificant.)

I've seen another source that claims that the average vat in that culture had a flared lip, so measuring the diameter across the lip, but the circumference around the main body of the vat, would have gotten them measurements that don't match up.

And then there's your other point, that they're probably just rounding the numbers. I mean, it's not like they intended to publish their findings in some kind of peer-reviewed forum, and standards for journalistic accuracy back then were pretty slack.

One of the only things I find at all respectable about Answers In Genesis is that they maintain a list of "arguments we wish Creationists would stop using" (with the subtext being "because they suck so hard and make us all look bad"). If pro-science folks had such a list — a list of "arguments we shouldn't use against Creationists, because they're crappy arguments and we can do so much better" — I'd nominate the "the Bible says pi equals 3.0!" argument for a high place on the list.

[Edit: Realized I was talking to the person I was referencing, edited first sentence of para 3 accordingly. Oopsy.]

[geekosaur]

You had me wondering for a moment. :) Anyway, my comment above was the formal restatement of the "it's not a math textbook" quick quote. Rounding is one of the "givens" of Tanakh interpretation (another is that any mention of "seventy" means "a lot"; it's a direct consequence of the "seven and ten" observation). The exception is when the counting follows the tradition of near-eastern formal documents, as with the censuses [noting that the Hebrew "elef" used to mean "troop", not "thousand" as usually translated]) and the records of donations to the building and dedication of the Tabernacle.

I'm guessing the snark on the skeptics-guide page set you off. I thought the source appropriate for maradydd's journal, but their snarky sidebar obnoxious, fwiw.

---

edited for clarity as to whose snark, and where the referenced comment is relative to this.