I'm appreciating most of that post.
Doubting Didymus
And what if science does encounter something supernatural?
Define "something." Evidence of some event that couldn't be explained with the existing body of knowledge? Or documenting the actual even itself? Are we talking about holy relics linked with miraculous cures or actual Angels descending bodily into the major cities and chatting it up with the locals? In either case I reckon the first thing attempted (after confirmation of the event) would be explanations based on proposed natural mechanisms.
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Some people claim Biblical inerrancy and/or literalness. The only time a trivial argument such as this is of use is when people do that.
http://www.icr.org/article/524/302/
Circumference is Pi x diameter. The diameter was measured at 10 cubits. 10 times Pi is 31.4 to the tenths place. At the smallest circumference likely measured, which would probably have been a track intersecting the points of the diameter measurement, there's at least one whole missing cubit, and more fractions if you want to argue for decent precision being used at the time. If it was simply rounding, they should have said 31 to be accurate. Hebrew could express factions, so why the gross imprecision?
I see some possible explanations: the basin wasn't perfectly circular but may have been slightly ellipsoid (long axis of 10 and short of 9 gives a circumference
very close to 30), the recorded measurement was only an approximation of the actual measurements taken, craftsmen of the time/place regularly used such approximations when actually building and measuring things, during the time between the construction of the basin and the writing down of the account the measurement was changed by word-of-mouth, and so on.
I don't buy the ICR's "significant figures" explanation because that convention was not used in ancient times: hell,
decimal notation wasn't even used back then. Modern Hebrew uses the familiar Arabic numerals and the decimal system with the 0 as a placeholder, but this was not the case in ancient Hebrew. They didn't even have separate numerals, they used
assigned values of letters to represent numbers (the way Romans used I, V, X, etc.).
I find this to be the typically sloppy apologetics of the ICR. Remember what I said about letting science inform your faith? They get this exactly backwards, and they're not shy about it either. Their own
founding principles will not let them admit errors in their preconceived faith, even if the science says otherwise. That's why you see them bend over backwards to come up with wacky rationalizations like that for the passage which, as it has already been said, is only problematic for people who are sufficiently inflexible in their faith to say that every part of the Bible must be inherently correct or literally interpreted.
Let's look at their statement of faith for a second:
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The Bible, consisting of the thirty-nine canonical books of the Old Testament and the twenty-seven canonical books of the New Testament, is the divinely-inspired revelation of the Creator to man. Its unique, plenary, verbal inspiration guarantees that
these writings, as originally and miraculously given,
are infallible and completely authoritative on all matters with which they deal, free from error of any sort, scientific and historical as well as moral and theological.
So there's no way the Hebrews could possibly be mistaken about Pi being equal to three, and the Bible couldn't be in error about them using these measurements on a circular basin, because that's what they wrote in the Bible (being Divinely Inspired, it is also to them completely free of error of any kind).
Here, as in several other instances, they're trying to have it both ways by saying that the passage in I Kings really did mean 10 cubits diameter to 30 circumference, but then they turn around and say that what this
really really means is that the Hebrews were using sig figs for measurement. So the passage simultaneously is literally true, free from any scientific or historical error,
and means something different than what it plainly says.
This whole "founding principles" thing is important when you pick your sources. Answers in Genesis has a similar page explicitly called a "
Statement of Faith" that nobody can disagree with if they want to write apologetics for AiG. If you start to disagree with it, I guess you're out? But
real science doesn't require any such swearing-in ceremony of what you should believe or what you're allowed to think. No scientist has to pledge loyalty to any prescribed belief system to do science. Again, this is because the ultimate arbiter of accuracy in science is the evidence itself, which other people can examine at their leisure. If someone deviates from the scientific method, their results are likely to just wind up wrong and it's usually easy to see where this happens, point it out, and redo the figures in light of the mistake. If someone eventually produces verifiable experiments that consistently violate the Law of Conservation of Matter, too bad for that law!
This kind of thing highlights the utter backwards-ness of anti-evolution apologetics outfits like the ICR and AiG: they tell you upfront that
no evidence could possibly change their minds. Then they have the gal to try dressing up their beliefs as science, when science is constantly revised in the face of new facts. They are the anti-thesis of science. Compare the ICR/AiG's dogma of exclusivity to TalkOrigins, which takes articles/essays/contributions from anybody so long as they're supported by science, not "the correct belief." They get material from atheists, theists, agnostics, whomever so long as it's good stuff. Scientific work in general is like this: if your work poses a legitimte challenge to the established position,
the established position can change. This puts shame to the claim that "evolutionists" are biased, unfair, or suppress legitimate Creation-supporting work. In reality, it's the exact opposite.
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