Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins
Missing verse. Jesus said, no three positive integers a, b, and c shall satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n. Now that would be impressive.
Apparently, Dawkins is alluding to Fermat's Last Theorem. Several issues:
i) It's prudent not to endeavor to be more clever than you are, because a failed attempt will make you look less clever than you aspire to be.
ii) I'm no expert, but it's my impression that Dawkins bungled the formulation by omitting n>2. He should leave math to mathematicians and stick to evolutionary biology.
iii) What is the implicit argument in his tweet? I suppose it's something like this: Gospel writers can fabricate reported miracles, but a scientific or mathematic theory, theorem, conjecture, or discovery that's centuries ahead of its time can't be faked. It would be unmistakably anachronistic and undeniably impressive. Assuming that's in the ballpark of what he was gesturing at:
iv) Since modern mathematical and scientific notation didn't exist in the 1C, how could that be expressed in Aramaic or Koine Greek?
v) Since the formula would be unintelligible to Christian scribes (as well as readers), it would almost inevitably be miscopied.
vi) Unbelievers don't think the Gospels reliably record the sayings of the historical Jesus. So even if the Gospels contained something like Fermat's Last Theorem, unbelievers could chalk that up to the narrator, or his hypothetical source, rather than Jesus. He just put that in the mouth of Jesus.
vii) Assuming (ex hypothesi) that Jesus said that, it might prove that he was a mathematical genius, but human genius is no proof of deity, and it's irrelevant to his mission as the Redeemer and eschatological judge.
viii) Is Fermat's Last Theorem especially impressive–or the solution!
ix) Premature scientific and mathematical theories and discoveries would alter the future course of history by kickstarting math and science. It's like those scifi scenarios in which the time-traveler inadvertently changes the future because he carries his modern knowledge with him when he goes back in time, where he says or does something that seeds the past with future know-how or technology. Indeed, he becomes trapped in the past because the future from which he came no longer exists, so he's now unable to return to that point in the erstwhile timeline.
First of all, what Fermat had was a conjecture not a theorem. He claimed he had "a truly marvelous proof," but no such proof has ever been shown to exist. The conjecture was finally proven 358 years later but the proof is highly complex and builds on the work of a number of others. It's unlikely that the current proof is the one Fermat claimed to have.
ReplyDeleteRobert Edwards
Delete"First of all, what Fermat had was a conjecture not a theorem. He claimed he had "a truly marvelous proof," but no such proof has ever been shown to exist. The conjecture was finally proven 358 years later but the proof is highly complex and builds on the work of a number of others. It's unlikely that the current proof is the one Fermat claimed to have."
Meh. Semantics. One could argue for either.
I was reminded of Dallas Willard's words from his essay "Jesus the Logician:"
ReplyDelete"Now when we speak of "Jesus the logician" we do not, of course, mean that he developed theories of logic, as did, for example, Aristotle and Frege. No doubt he could have, if he is who Christians have taken him to be. He could have provided a Begriffsschrift, or a Principia Mathematica, or alternative axiomatizations of Modal Logic, or various completeness or incompleteness proofs for various 'languages'. (He is, presumably, responsible for the order that is represented through such efforts as these.)
He could have. Just as he could have handed Peter or John the formulas of Relativity Physics or the Plate Tectonic theory of the earth's crust, etc. He certainly could, that is, if he is indeed the one Christians have traditionally taken him to be. But he did not do it, and for reasons which are bound to seem pretty obvious to anyone who stops to think about it."
Your post helps flesh out what some of those "pretty obvious" reasons are. Thanks.
Wouldn't atheists treat such a revelation as they do other prophetic claims and simple argue the formula was inserted into the manuscript at a later date? Why expect them to drop naturalism in this case.
ReplyDeleteFor that matter, the atheist could just argue, "Obviously the Greeks knew lots of mathematics at the time, so the New Testament clearly borrowed from the Pythagoreans to come up with this."
ReplyDeleteThe problem with stipulating *ANY* data criteria is that as soon as it's stipulated, it becomes the past. If Jesus had explained Quantum Mechanics in the New Testament, we'd simply have 2,000 more years of physics. Same thing with mathematics.
And that's not a good thing. Imagine Nero with nukes. Or, if it took them too long to develop it, Mohammed. Or Genghis Khan. Do you really think the world would exist today had Christianity, with its morality, not first spread through the entire world to soften the barbaric evil that was just taken for granted back in the day?
I was just mentioning this today to a friend. As bad as the Nazis were, they knew they had to do what they were doing in secret. The Roman legions didn't bother with that. They raped whoever they wanted, killed whoever they pleased, took slaves whenever they felt like it--and the entire culture could not have cared less. It was accepted, because it was brutal back then. Two thousand years of Christianity has made it where even now dictators hide their atrocities, lest they face war crimes tribunals.
Imagine giving those people the ability to kill on a world-wide scale before the ethics of Christianity were imposed on a world-wide scale. Well, you can see what would happen by looking at the places where Christianity was banned in the 20th Century: The USSR and China have a combined murder toll of nearly 100,000,000 deaths under Communism. Hitler didn't even get 10% the death numbers as Communism.
So maybe Jesus knew what He was doing when He didn't satisfy Dawkin's stupid demands.
It's always a safe bet that Jesus knew and knows what he was and is doing.
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