Maybe God doesn’t like maths? Or how else can you explain the fact that the Bible is wrong about the pi value? Join us on a transcendental irrational walk for Pi Day, which is observed annually on March 14th.
“You can either accept that the word of God is fallible, or you could hold steadfast to your God-given beliefs,” a self-professed atheist rants in the blog “Gospel of Reason”, which has since been deleted by the authors. But then “shout loud to the heavens that PI, …, is equal to 3.0 because God said so.”
A flop?
What this ideological fanatic got so excited about is a verse in the Bible: “And he made the Sea of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the other; it was completely round. Its height was five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference,” it says in Kings 7: 23. It says almost exactly the same in 2 Chronicles 4: 2.
“He” is King Solomon. And the sea is a huge bronze water basin in the forecourt of his temple. But the dimensions really do make you wonder. This would mean that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter is 3.0. But this value—known as pi or π—has a decimal form beginning 3.14159 and so on.
In the focus of science
The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians were far better at this already a millennium earlier. They used 3.125 to approximate pi. Why is the Bible so far off the mark?
Jewish scholars discussed this question long before modern atheists even discovered it. The discourse is documented in the Talmud, a collection of doctrinal writings whose content dates back to pre-Christian times.
And yes, there are even scientific studies that trace this debate. “On the rabbinical approximation of π”, for example, is the title of an essay from 1996. The authors obviously had a lot of fun. The essay is ten pages long and the bibliography contains thirty references. Um, what was that again about these figures?
A close examination
There are various explanations for the biblical inaccuracy: the pool could have been oval. Or it was due to different measurements of the inside and outside of a thick edge. And sometimes the writers of the Bible merely rounded numbers up or down.
Rabbi Matityahu Hacohen Munk took the closest look in the 1960s. According to Hebrew scriptural tradition, the word meaning ‘line’ is spelled one way, but read and pronounced a different way. It becomes interesting when you follow the gematria, the substitution of numbers for letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Then the deviating words result in a pi value of 3.141509—pretty close.
Irrational and transcendental
Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, meanwhile, landed a direct hit: “The [exact] ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference cannot be known [is irrational] … but it is possible to approximate it.”
He said this around six hundred years before the Europeans even discovered it: pi is an irrational and transcendental number. This has nothing to do with states of mind or esotericism. Instead, pi is infinitely long after the decimal point without repeating itself. And pi cannot be represented using algebraic expressions either.
Philosophical follow-up questions
This throws up another question: Does God know all the digits of the pi number? After all, He is omniscient and at home in infinity. This is exactly what people are discussing in the reddit forum r/askphilosophy. However, the result is not very enlightening. In the end, it is down to how exactly one should formulate the question.
So the Bible does have the last word. Let’s take Colossians 3: 14: “But above all these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfection.”
Photo: Maishaangona – stock.adobe.com
Background: Pi Day
There are so many things to commemorate and celebrate, even the number pi. It was founded by Larry Shaw, a physicist and the curator of a museum of science, technology and the arts in San Francisco.
The day is frequently observed on 14 March. This goes back to the US date format: 3/14 (month/day/year). Ideally, the champagne corks should be popped at exactly 1:59 and 26 seconds. Then you have the first seven decimal digits of pi covered: 3/14 1:59:26.
UNESCO has designated this day as The International Day of Mathematics. The day marks Albert Einstein’s birth and the anniversary of Stephen Hawking’s death: two of the most famous theoretical physicists of all time.
Those who are not keen about the US date format can celebrate the pi number on 22 July. Because 22 divided by 7 roughly equals 3.14—close enough for a celebration. Until then, you can search for your own birthday and find out how old you are in “pi years”.