Richard Amiel McGough
08-18-2019, 10:08 AM
Responding to Richard?s welcome.
Hi Richard, great to be in touch again! But, reading your blog, I gather you?re not the man I once knew!
My initial challenge to atheists is contained in my book ?The Second Edge: A Role for Numerical Coincidence in the Pursuit of truth?. This may be freely downloaded from www.whatabeginning.com/book.pdf (http://www.whatabeginning.com/book.pdf)
A number of related papers have recently been published within Academia.edu. These include ?The Euclidean Imperative?, "Genesis 1:1 ? the Chain Tessellations? and ?Genesis 1:1 ? The Parametric Equations, and Beyond?. In the last ? and most recent ? of these I describe how the metric dimensions of an ISO standard for cut paper sizes (published in 1975) mirrors the numbers associated with the first 8 words of the Hebrew Bible. Keeping in mind also the fact that these words preceded the introduction of the Hebrew scheme of alphabetic numeration by a millennium, or so, can you suggest a naturalistic explanation?
Hey there Vernon, :yo:
Thanks for the link, it's an excellent summation of your work. I'm glad you asked about the A4 dimensions because that's a part of your work I had never looked at closely. I found your work on the figurate numbers very helpful and I expanded upon it a lot in my work, but the A4 stuff seemed rather "off the wall" and so I didn't even look at it closely. Now that I've reviewed your argument, I can see why you are so impressed by it. The pair of lattices give a strong sense of a consistent pattern.
The numbers used in the whole A-series are intriguing from a Biblical numerics point of view, since the A0 dimensions (841 x 1189) reflect the number of chapters in the Bible. Have you explored the implications of this fact?
It is interesting that there are three sizes - A2, A3, A4 - that could accommodate a grid of 105 x 99 but that pattern breaks down before and after that triplet because the values are rounded down when an odd value is divided by 2 in the halving process.
A0
841 x 1189 mm
A1
594 x 841 mm
A2
420 x 594 mm
A3
297 x 420 mm
A4 (https://www.papersizes.org/a4-size-factsheet.htm)
210 x 297 mm
A5
148 x 210 mm
A6
105 x 148 mm
A7
74 x 105 mm
A8
52 x 74 mm
A9
37 x 52 mm
A10
26 x 37 mm
Now in answer to your question concerning a "naturalistic" explanation for these facts - Here are the possibilities that I see:
1) Mere Coincidence - I know you would find this incredulous, but we must remember that extremely "improbable" things happen every day. Believers of all religions frequently find "amazing coincidences" that they believe confirm their beliefs. I would recommend David Hand's The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (http://improbability-principle.com/) as an excellent resource on this topic. Now don't get me wrong, I know how hard it is for the discoverer of patterns like this to believe it could be a "mere coincidence" because I experienced that myself with the Bible Wheel. I felt I had discovered a pattern that God himself had used to design the Bible, and that impression grew stronger with every new "connection" I would find. It was particularly impressive when I discovered the Canon Wheel (https://www.biblewheel.com/Canon/SevenfoldCanon.php) in which the seven divisions of Scripture align to form a cruciform pattern reminiscent of the tri-radiant halo of Christ the Word in Christian iconography. The power of my conviction was such that I continued to believe the Bible Wheel required an "explanation" for nearly three years after I rejected both Christianity and the Bible as God's Word! Think about that. It shows how difficult it is for someone to debunk their own beliefs. Now the thing that helped me most was to compare my patterns with contrary patterns found by other believers. I discuss this in detail in my article The Bible Wheel - Patternicity on Steroids (https://www.biblewheel.com/Blog/patternicity/). This helped me see how common "amazing coincidences" really are, and how easy it is for people to convince themselves that the patterns they find or invent are from God and how difficult it is for them to see their own errors. The example that finally set me free from any illusion of design of the Bible Wheel was the discovery that I could create a Roman Catholic Bible Wheel following exactly the same pattern except using the 24 letters of the Greek Alphabet to "seal" the Catholic Bible of 72 books from "Alpha to Omega." I discuss this in my article Battle of the Bible Wheels - Catholic vs. Protestant (https://www.biblewheel.com/Blog/battle-of-the-bible-wheels-catholic-vs-protestant/).
2) Morphic Resonance - this is a naturalist theory that suggests "self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems." I'm not saying the theory is correct, I'm merely showing that such explanations are possible. The truth is that humanity is still an intellectual infant with very little knowledge of how the world really works. We've only known about DNA for less than a hundred years! And modern physics, such as quantum mechanics and relativity are only about a hundred years old. These theories totally overturned our "intuitive" sense of how the world works. Quantum mechanics in particular, with it's non-locality, offers a potential explanation to how apparently independent patterns could be connected and explained.
3) Idealism - this is the theory that MIND is the ultimate "ground of being." This does not necessarily imply a "God" though it is consistent with that idea. It also is not "supernatural" because the philosophy merely says that the ultimate nature of reality is mind. In other words, it is totally "naturalistic" - there is no "natural vs supernatural" dualism in this view. From this perspective, we could explain patterns in religious texts along the lines of Jungian psychology, as archetypes arising from the universal subconscious, like mandalas in dreams.
4) Christian Theism - This is the most "obvious" explanation if you are a believer, but many skeptics would actually find it the least likely explanation because the idea that God designed the opening verse with such mathematical precision is entirely out of keeping with the rest of the book which is filled with confusion, contradiction, superstitions, scientific falsehoods, immorality attributed to God, etc., etc., etc. This was a big problem for me when I was a Christian who believed that God had designed everything in the Bible from the large scale structure of the Bible Wheel down to the individual placement of each and every letter. I finally rationalized this obvious contradiction by saying that God had designed the Written Word to be a "stumbling stone" for unbelievers in perfect analogy of the Living Word. I would say that God designed the Bible to give the believer everything needed to believe, and the unbeliever everything needed to unbelieve. I now see that as a classic rationalization. But what else could I do? And this brings us to the ultimate problem with your "ultimate apologetic" - it doesn't really help bring anyone to "Christianity" because there is no such thing as "Christianity". All we have is an incoherent morass of conflicting ideologies, with the most fervent believers - even those who agree that the Bible is God's Word - failing to agree about the most basic doctrines such as the nature of Christ, the Trinity, Hell, etc. This is why I quit the faith. After years of trying to make sense of it all, I finally realized that no matter what solution I found, it would exclude many other versions of the religion and so I would in effect be merely inventing my own religion, and that would obviously be absurd. It became obvious that a book as confused as the Bible with so many contrary interpretations, could not be the product of a God who was "not the author of confusion."
I really look forward to discussing this further with you.
:sunny:
Hi Richard, great to be in touch again! But, reading your blog, I gather you?re not the man I once knew!
My initial challenge to atheists is contained in my book ?The Second Edge: A Role for Numerical Coincidence in the Pursuit of truth?. This may be freely downloaded from www.whatabeginning.com/book.pdf (http://www.whatabeginning.com/book.pdf)
A number of related papers have recently been published within Academia.edu. These include ?The Euclidean Imperative?, "Genesis 1:1 ? the Chain Tessellations? and ?Genesis 1:1 ? The Parametric Equations, and Beyond?. In the last ? and most recent ? of these I describe how the metric dimensions of an ISO standard for cut paper sizes (published in 1975) mirrors the numbers associated with the first 8 words of the Hebrew Bible. Keeping in mind also the fact that these words preceded the introduction of the Hebrew scheme of alphabetic numeration by a millennium, or so, can you suggest a naturalistic explanation?
Hey there Vernon, :yo:
Thanks for the link, it's an excellent summation of your work. I'm glad you asked about the A4 dimensions because that's a part of your work I had never looked at closely. I found your work on the figurate numbers very helpful and I expanded upon it a lot in my work, but the A4 stuff seemed rather "off the wall" and so I didn't even look at it closely. Now that I've reviewed your argument, I can see why you are so impressed by it. The pair of lattices give a strong sense of a consistent pattern.
The numbers used in the whole A-series are intriguing from a Biblical numerics point of view, since the A0 dimensions (841 x 1189) reflect the number of chapters in the Bible. Have you explored the implications of this fact?
It is interesting that there are three sizes - A2, A3, A4 - that could accommodate a grid of 105 x 99 but that pattern breaks down before and after that triplet because the values are rounded down when an odd value is divided by 2 in the halving process.
A0
841 x 1189 mm
A1
594 x 841 mm
A2
420 x 594 mm
A3
297 x 420 mm
A4 (https://www.papersizes.org/a4-size-factsheet.htm)
210 x 297 mm
A5
148 x 210 mm
A6
105 x 148 mm
A7
74 x 105 mm
A8
52 x 74 mm
A9
37 x 52 mm
A10
26 x 37 mm
Now in answer to your question concerning a "naturalistic" explanation for these facts - Here are the possibilities that I see:
1) Mere Coincidence - I know you would find this incredulous, but we must remember that extremely "improbable" things happen every day. Believers of all religions frequently find "amazing coincidences" that they believe confirm their beliefs. I would recommend David Hand's The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (http://improbability-principle.com/) as an excellent resource on this topic. Now don't get me wrong, I know how hard it is for the discoverer of patterns like this to believe it could be a "mere coincidence" because I experienced that myself with the Bible Wheel. I felt I had discovered a pattern that God himself had used to design the Bible, and that impression grew stronger with every new "connection" I would find. It was particularly impressive when I discovered the Canon Wheel (https://www.biblewheel.com/Canon/SevenfoldCanon.php) in which the seven divisions of Scripture align to form a cruciform pattern reminiscent of the tri-radiant halo of Christ the Word in Christian iconography. The power of my conviction was such that I continued to believe the Bible Wheel required an "explanation" for nearly three years after I rejected both Christianity and the Bible as God's Word! Think about that. It shows how difficult it is for someone to debunk their own beliefs. Now the thing that helped me most was to compare my patterns with contrary patterns found by other believers. I discuss this in detail in my article The Bible Wheel - Patternicity on Steroids (https://www.biblewheel.com/Blog/patternicity/). This helped me see how common "amazing coincidences" really are, and how easy it is for people to convince themselves that the patterns they find or invent are from God and how difficult it is for them to see their own errors. The example that finally set me free from any illusion of design of the Bible Wheel was the discovery that I could create a Roman Catholic Bible Wheel following exactly the same pattern except using the 24 letters of the Greek Alphabet to "seal" the Catholic Bible of 72 books from "Alpha to Omega." I discuss this in my article Battle of the Bible Wheels - Catholic vs. Protestant (https://www.biblewheel.com/Blog/battle-of-the-bible-wheels-catholic-vs-protestant/).
2) Morphic Resonance - this is a naturalist theory that suggests "self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems." I'm not saying the theory is correct, I'm merely showing that such explanations are possible. The truth is that humanity is still an intellectual infant with very little knowledge of how the world really works. We've only known about DNA for less than a hundred years! And modern physics, such as quantum mechanics and relativity are only about a hundred years old. These theories totally overturned our "intuitive" sense of how the world works. Quantum mechanics in particular, with it's non-locality, offers a potential explanation to how apparently independent patterns could be connected and explained.
3) Idealism - this is the theory that MIND is the ultimate "ground of being." This does not necessarily imply a "God" though it is consistent with that idea. It also is not "supernatural" because the philosophy merely says that the ultimate nature of reality is mind. In other words, it is totally "naturalistic" - there is no "natural vs supernatural" dualism in this view. From this perspective, we could explain patterns in religious texts along the lines of Jungian psychology, as archetypes arising from the universal subconscious, like mandalas in dreams.
4) Christian Theism - This is the most "obvious" explanation if you are a believer, but many skeptics would actually find it the least likely explanation because the idea that God designed the opening verse with such mathematical precision is entirely out of keeping with the rest of the book which is filled with confusion, contradiction, superstitions, scientific falsehoods, immorality attributed to God, etc., etc., etc. This was a big problem for me when I was a Christian who believed that God had designed everything in the Bible from the large scale structure of the Bible Wheel down to the individual placement of each and every letter. I finally rationalized this obvious contradiction by saying that God had designed the Written Word to be a "stumbling stone" for unbelievers in perfect analogy of the Living Word. I would say that God designed the Bible to give the believer everything needed to believe, and the unbeliever everything needed to unbelieve. I now see that as a classic rationalization. But what else could I do? And this brings us to the ultimate problem with your "ultimate apologetic" - it doesn't really help bring anyone to "Christianity" because there is no such thing as "Christianity". All we have is an incoherent morass of conflicting ideologies, with the most fervent believers - even those who agree that the Bible is God's Word - failing to agree about the most basic doctrines such as the nature of Christ, the Trinity, Hell, etc. This is why I quit the faith. After years of trying to make sense of it all, I finally realized that no matter what solution I found, it would exclude many other versions of the religion and so I would in effect be merely inventing my own religion, and that would obviously be absurd. It became obvious that a book as confused as the Bible with so many contrary interpretations, could not be the product of a God who was "not the author of confusion."
I really look forward to discussing this further with you.
:sunny: