I found this post today in the WordPress Dashboard, making what at first almost appears to be a Good Argument that the Bible Is Wrong In This One Case Someone Pointed Out Here in I Kings 7:23, which says,
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.
The argument is that the Bible says pi equals “3. Also known as 3.00 or 3.0.” Well, 30 divided by 10 is 3, so it sounds like he’s got a point. Pi never ends, so if you say “it’s 3,” you’re really kind of wrong.
But you’re still wrong if you say it’s 3.14159. There is no string of numbers you can point to and say, “that’s pi!” and be correct. Even if the Bible used digits instead of words, here, there is no way it (or any other text) could state pi “correctly.” Sure, you can state it with more digits, and be less wrong. But it is not possible to state pi with any number of digits and be correct.
But his argument immediately goes off the rails in another direction, too. “3.00″ is not at all the same thing as “3″. “3″ could be anything from “2.50″ through “3.49.”
In math, you cannot get a result that’s more precise than its least precise input. Said another way, the maximum allowable precision in an output is equal to the lowest number of significant digits in any of the inputs. And “ten” and “thirty” are the only inputs, and they each have one significant digit. So the output cannot have more than one significant digit.
And pi - to one significant digit - is three. That is, 3. Not 3.0, nor 3.00.
So the Bible implies that pi, to one significant digit, is 3. Which it empirically is.
To be clear, I’m nothing close to a Biblical scholar. But you can spot the holes in this “scientific” argument 1.609344 kilometers away.
