I've said many times that I have somehow become the intellectual equivalent of the opposite of a "chick magnet." That is, instead of naturally attracting supermodels or society's most brilliant thinkers, I seem to naturally attract kooks, cranks, and assorted weirdos.
My previous post managed to attract no less than its subject: Periander A. Esplana, the author of the mathemagical "miracle" that supposedly proves the divine origin of the 1611 KJV, even though it doesn't actually work with the 1611 KJV. And then the roof fell in. My blog is strictly small potatoes, so it's rare that I get even a handful of comments on any one post. But my previous, as well as its counterpart on the backup blog on WordPress, have already garnered a total of 29 comments as of now - including further rants by Esplana himself. (Nothing really seems to bring out commenters like a KJV-only post. I figure they must be trolling Google Blog Search just to find something to get indignant about.)
Meanwhile, Esplana has also discovered the Bible Version Discussion Board where, posting as "sciencephilosophyreligion," where he continues to hawk his math trivia. Not only that, but he has taken his rebuttals to posts on that forum, and for some reason thrown them into an ebook instead of posting them to the forum directly, as though putting his opinions into a PDF file makes them seem more legitimate.
Espana continually crows that no one can answer his "Bible Formula Challenge." Of course, I do have an answer. It's two words, in Latin:
non sequitur.
This phrase means does not follow: in other words, the argument doesn't lead to the conclusion.
The letter count of the first and last verses of the Bible simply doesn't matter. Is it a statistical curiosity? Sure. Is it an interesting bit of trivia that the letter and vowel counts of Genesis 1:1 and Revelation 22:21 sum up to the same count in 1 John 5:7? Sure, why not? But what Esplana and other math magicians fail to show is how this proves the divine origin of the KJV. Scripture itself never says that the proof of its divine origin lies in letter counts. God commands faith, but he doesn't point to 18th-century typography as proof of his existence.
Before Esplana can convince me that letter counts are proof of the divine origin of the Word of God, he has to demonstrate that it's proof of anything. On the contrary, it's completely arbitrary, and I won't let numerological nitwits like Gail Riplinger, Peter Ruckman, or Periander Espana bind my conscience contrary to the Word of God.
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