{"id":955,"date":"2021-08-24T08:41:58","date_gmt":"2021-08-24T12:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=955"},"modified":"2021-08-25T08:39:14","modified_gmt":"2021-08-25T12:39:14","slug":"the-life-of-pi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2021\/08\/24\/the-life-of-pi\/","title":{"rendered":"The Life of Pi"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Pi is the world\u2019s most famous irrational number.

It can also prompt people to do some pretty irrational things.

February 6, 1897, was not the brightest hour for my home state of Indiana.\u00a0 That was the day our House of Representatives approved Bill 246, which declared the legal value of pi to be 3.2.

Incredibly, the proposition was titled \u201cA Bill for an Act Introducing a New Mathematical Truth.\u201d\u00a0 But mathematical truths are constants.\u00a0 They cannot be changed by legislatures, Supreme Court rulings, or public referendums.\u00a0 They simply are what they are.\u00a0

Pi, of course, is the esoteric number that defines every circle.\u00a0 It represents the ratio of a circle\u2019s circumference to its diameter.\u00a0 It is \u201cirrational\u201d because it can be calculated to an extraordinary number of decimal places without any repetition or pattern: 3.141592\u2026and on and on, all the way to at least 62.8 trillion digits, the latest calculation that was announced just this summer.\u00a0 To put it simply, pi is what makes a circle a circle.\u00a0 And that\u2019s that.\u00a0

Hoosier lawmakers, undeterred, were influenced by the amateur mathematician Edward J. Goodwin, who claimed that 3.2, as the correct value of pi, would make geometry much easier for students.

Kiona Smith, financial historian for Forbes,<\/em> points out that at first the representatives referred the bill to the Finance Committee, evidently assuming that group was used to dealing with numbers.\u00a0 One skeptic suggested it go to the Committee on Swamplands where it might \u201cfind a deserved grave.\u201d\u00a0 Eventually Bill 246 wound up before the Committee on Education, which forever made itself unworthy of that name by approving it and sending it to the floor of the General Assembly for a vote.\u00a0 The representatives promptly voted affirmatively.\u00a0 All that remained was consideration by the Indiana Senate.\u00a0

Fortunately Clarence Abiathar Waldo, a Purdue math professor, happened to be in Indianapolis on that February day. \u00a0Waldo, when asked if he wanted to meet the esteemed Edward J. Goodwin, \u201cdeclined the courtesy with thanks, remarking that he was acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know.\u201d

Professor Waldo quickly gave the senators a math lesson.\u00a0 Incredibly, the bill still came disturbingly close to receiving enough votes to become law.\u00a0

It was a day Hoosiers are still trying to live down.\u00a0 I\u2019m comforted at least to know that it was someone from my alma mater who saved the day.\u00a0

That brings us to one of the most notorious verses in the Bible \u2013 famous because it appears to imply that God doesn\u2019t know the value of pi.\u00a0 As part of King Solomon\u2019s project to construct the first temple in Jerusalem, along with all the associated elements of Jewish ritual worship, craftsmen made an enormous basin to hold water.\u00a0 It was called the Sea.\u00a0 We read in I Kings 7:23:\u00a0 \u201cHe made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high.\u00a0 It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.\u201d

If the Sea were 10 cubits in diameter and 30 cubits in circumference, the value of pi would be 3.0.\u00a0 That clearly won\u2019t do.\u00a0

Over the centuries, Bible students intent on preserving the integrity of Scripture have proposed a variety of explanations.\u00a0 Maybe the Sea was a supernatural vessel that somehow existed in an extra dimension.\u00a0 Maybe the numeric values of the Hebrew letters in that sentence add up to a secret code.\u00a0

Or more likely, as the medieval Jewish sage Maimonides proposed, maybe the human author of the book of I Kings simply rounded things off to convey a general sense of the Sea\u2019s dimensions.\u00a0 What seems certain is that our convictions about the inspiration of God\u2019s Word don\u2019t need to rise or fall on this single verse.

In his book Whistling in the Dark<\/em>, author Frederick Buechner points out that there are two kinds of laws in the world.

There are laws that represent the way things ought to be.\u00a0

For instance, the speed limit on Midwestern interstate highways is 70.\u00a0 That\u2019s the law.\u00a0 During the oil embargo crisis of the late 1970s, when economists feared that gasoline might be in short supply for a long time, the speed limit temporarily dropped to 55.\u00a0 Highway laws are thus clearly flexible.\u00a0 Motorists, for their part, generally interpret them as suggestions.\u00a0 As Captain Barbossa says concerning the Code of Parlay in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean<\/em>, \u201cThe Code is more what you call guidelines than actual rules.\u201d\u00a0

Then there are laws that represent the ways things really are.

The equation that describes gravity, for instance, is fixed.\u00a0 According to Newton\u2019s laws of physics, it is the same in every corner of the universe.\u00a0 So is the speed of light in a vacuum.\u00a0 So is the value of pi.\u00a0 These are absolutes that are \u201ctrue to what is there.\u201d

This raises an interesting and important question:\u00a0 What kind of laws are God\u2019s laws?

Buechner provides an example:\u00a0 \u201cHe who does not love remains in death\u201d (I John 3:14).

This law is not arbitrary.\u00a0 It is not subject to change.\u00a0 There are times we may wish it wasn\u2019t true.\u00a0 But it is.\u00a0 That\u2019s because it\u2019s aligned with the character of the Creator who, more than anything or anyone else, is \u201ctrue to what is there.\u201d

This makes healthy spirituality rather straightforward.\u00a0 We choose to align all that we say and do and believe with the unchanging character of God.\u00a0\u00a0

Buechner suggests, \u201cIf you don\u2019t believe [that he who does not love remains in death] you can always put it to the test, just the way if you don\u2019t believe the law of gravity you can always step out a tenth-story window.\u201d

That first step will be a long one.

Even if Indiana\u2019s General Assembly should happen to pass a law suspending gravity.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pi is the world\u2019s most famous irrational number. It can also prompt people to do some pretty irrational things. February 6, 1897, was not the brightest hour for my home state of Indiana.\u00a0 That was the day our House of Representatives approved Bill 246, which declared the legal value of pi to be 3.2. Incredibly, the proposition was titled \u201cA… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":956,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[295,294],"class_list":["post-955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gods-laws","tag-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":962,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions\/962"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}