Lucy Mangan was not impressed by the following stupendous feat of calculation (accessed 02.11.11). Mathematicians Shigeru Kondo and Alexander Yee wrote some code “for a computer” that figured out the 10 trillionth digit of pi. I know, I almost wet myself with excitement too. But imagine if Jesus – instead of trolling around pulling off stunts that were ten a penny at the time – had drawn a circle in the sand, and then a diameter, and then revealed the knowledge of the 10 trillionth digit of pi (revealed in the sense of divine revelation). He might have had to invent zero and the decimal system, but, hey, he’s supposed to have risen from the dead so elementary arithmetic can hardly have been beyond him (although advocating an end to slavery apparently was). Of course, the religious would say that we “militant atheists” would only scoff at such tales of a miracle even if Jesus had indulged in a little geometry. That’s not evidence of divine revelation! That’s a lucky guess!
But what if he’d also written down (in a way that could be authentically dated to around 30 CE, unlike the earliest surviving gospel manuscripts, which are copies of copies of copies (and so on) of originals that no longer exist) the 10 trillion and tenth digit of pi? And the 10 trillion and eleventh digit? And so on, each digit (assuming it is correct) increasing the unlikelihood of Jesus simply being a lottery-winning kind of guy. It wouldn’t take many correct digits on quite a modest scrap of velum for us atheists, two thousand years later, to at least have to scratch our heads and be a little more impressed than Lucy.
Oh, and what is the 10 trillionth digit of pi? Apparently, 5.
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