I see the light
You get out what
you put into it
FightingAtheist posted a helpful video on YouTube so that theists could understand what it would take to turn him into a believer. FA suggested that a fulfilled prediction could fill the bill, supposing that the prediction had sufficient specificity to demonstrate genuine knowledge of the future and wasn't trivial in nature. He also observed it would have been impressive if Jesus had tipped off his disciples to the theory of relativity and Einstein's equation for mass-energy equivalence:
Just think, what if Jesus had said something like this? “My disciples, I say unto thee that energy is mass times the speed of light multiplied unto itself.”Yes, that would have been a killer item to embed in the Bible and way better than most of the stuff you find there. I also agree with FightingAtheist that it would have made the Bible a much more credible tome. If Scriptures were that scientific, a lot of us would have to line up behind FightingAtheist to be inducted into the ranks of the believers.
Unfortunately, however, the Bible is more famous for things like the implication that pi might be 3 or that crickets have four legs. The Bible is not a work of science.
Or is it?
FightingAtheist challenged his theistic viewers to post videos explaining what it would take to change their minds about God and turn them into atheists. Some of the respondents, however, preferred to try to convert FA instead and prove to him the existence of their supreme deity. (No doubt FA could have predicted this without requiring any miraculous foreknowledge of the future.) I was especially taken by the rebuttal posted by h20Enthusiast, aficionado of quack energy schemes, Christianity, and 9/11 conspiracy theories. It is h20's contention that the Bible is a book of science. The Bible clearly identifies—with astonishing accuracy—the value of the speed of light. He can prove it mathematically!
Of course, you have to do a little work to winkle it out, because it's not like Jesus simply says, “Verily I say unto you, but light traveleth as many cubits in a day as the number of weeks in a year multiplied unto itself eight-fold. That's a lot, bitches.” (There are 52.177 weeks in a year and (52.177)8 = 5.49 × 1013, which equals a light-day for a cubit of slightly less than half a meter—which by most accounts it was in the time of Christ. It would certainly have been in the ballpark.) h20 says it's more subtle than that.
You can (and should, but with the sound turned down) watch h20's video for the full impact of his reasoning (try not to be offended by his obligatory use of “Fools say there is no GOD” and “ATHEISTS are FOOLS”), but here's a summary of his delightful argument:
The second epistle of Peter, in chapter 3, verse 8, says, “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” It's obvious, of course, that 2 Peter 3:8 is referring to time dilation, right? How fast does one have to be traveling in order to achieve a time dilation where one day in the traveler's frame of reference equals a thousand years in the rest frame? It's simple algebra, right?
Hmm. It looks like we're about to subtract a number very close to zero from 1, leaving a number very close to one (just a tiny bit smaller, of course). Which means that we're about to discover that v, the speed of travel, is awfully goshdarn close to c, the speed of light. (But just a tiny bit smaller. Big surprise.) In fact, we get v = 0.999999999996c. To the utter amazement of h20Enthusiast, however, when he plugs in 299,792,458 m/s for c, he gets v = 299,792,457.999, plus some loose change and a bunch of exclamation points. (He's very good about showing all of his decimal places, less good in his prose style.)
h20Enthusiast finds the results compelling, astonishing, and thoroughly gratifying. You see, God encoded the speed of light into the Bible. Yes, indeed. You can tell, because when you apply Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that extreme time dilation occurs near the speed of light, and demand extreme time dilation equating 1 day to a thousand years, you get a velocity very near the speed of light. Awesome. And when you plug in a long decimal expression for the speed of light, you get it back!
Amen. And try not to laugh.
Addendum
h20Enthusiast may be pleased that his YouTube video went from 60 viewings to 300 in less than half a day after I cited it here (and drew a crowd of visitors from Pharyngula). He seems less pleased that his argument (which he attributes as original to xRevelator) is regarded as unpersuasive. He's posted some responses to the comments on the YouTube page for his video:
h20Enthusiast (1 hour ago)Actually, it fits inside my head just fine. Perfectly comfortably. Vacuous statements don't take up much space.
I do understand your objection.... it doesn't look like evidence to you ... I get it.
h20Enthusiast (1 hour ago)
im implying the AUTHOR also CREATED the speed of light.
sorry if that doesn't fit inside your head.
Postscript
h20Enthusiast quickly grew tired of being assaulted by atheist hordes (or so it appears) and made his video private. Although I captured the key items in this post (and you can see other details at Good Math, Bad Math, the entire content of h20's video is essentially a video transcript (with a few anti-atheist insults sprinkled in) of xRevelator's screed on his YouTube page, which you can check out in its original form here. Or just pore over the following rant, where I quote xRevelator's statement in extenso for your edification:
STATEMENT OF BELIEF
Why do I believe in God? I am a scientific person and everything should be weighed carefully by facts and evidences. No compromises.
The verse that peaked my interest is this one:
Peter 3:8 NIV
"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."
One might ask, how can a day be a thousand years and a thousand years be a day? This sounds rather absurd. But, using scientific knowledge, the absurd becomes logical.
It is called Einstein's Theory of Relativity - Time Dilation.
Here is a mathematical explanation:
Say, if a spaceship traveling at 80% the speed of light for 1 hour, how much time has passed by relative to Earth?
Δt' = γ Δt
. . = Δt / √( 1 - v² / c² )
. . = ( 1 hr ) / √( 1 - ( 0.8c )² / c² )
. . = 1 hr / √( 1 - 0.64 )
. . = 1 hr / 0.6
. . = 1.667 hr
The earth experiences 1.667 hours.
Therefore, the spaceship is effectively traveling to the future as 1 hour on the spaceship traveling at 80% the speed of light equals 1.667 hours on Earth.
Reading the verse again (Peter 3:8), how fast is the Lord traveling so that a thousand years on Earth is like a day with Him?
Solution:
Δt=t_0/√(1-v²/c²)
1000 years=1day/√(1-v²/299,792,458² )
365250 days x √(1-v²/299,792,458² )=1 day
133407562500 x (1-v² / 89875517873681764) = 1
133407562500-133407562500v²/89 875517873681764=1
-33407562500v²/898755178736817 64=-133407562499
-33407562500v²= -11990073767863191518066568236
v²=89875517873008072.672541095 531972
v=299792457.998876403809564537 24992
The answer is 299,792,457.998876403809564537 24992 m/s. The speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 m/s. It strangely yields a resultant of 99.999999999625% of the speed of light. This is truly baffling.
We should take note of the strange accuracy of the verse. It could result to any random number, but what is truly baffling is that it registers a resulting answer digit for digit accuracy of the speed light except for the last digit before the decimal.
The answer obviously should be less than the speed of light because time will cease to exist at infinity at the speed of light.
The Bible has clearly demonstrated by this simple verse on its precise accuracy of scientific facts way beyond its time. The first quantitative estimate of the speed of light was only made in 1676 by Ole Christensen Rømer and Time Dilation by Einstein only in 1905.
How is it possible that the ancient Bible holds hidden knowledge of time dilation and the speed of light? This is quite strange which offers no logical explanation.
Either we dismiss this as mere coincidence or we accept the Bible as a book of truth.
This is no longer a matter of belief, but rather a matter of accepting reality.
