Scientific Biblical Studies – Current Articles
Remember The Back Button On Your
Browser
The Life Foundations
Nexus
THE WISDOM OF GOD: 100% CERTAINTY
PROBABILISTIC TEXTUAL INDUCTION AND INDUCTIVE
TEXTUAL CALCULUS
Copyright
July 30, 2005 4:23 PM CST
By Dr.
Michael J. Bisconti
Note that this is our first draft of this
article. Therefore, there may be levels
of abstraction and degrees of abstrusity that still place this article well
beyond the understanding of the ordinary person. Either way, this article will be difficult for most people to
comprehend.
One of the innovations of Biblical Textual Calculus is “inductive
textual calculus.” First, however, we
must talk about “probabilistic textual induction,” one of our other
innovations. Probabilistic textual
induction says:
The more facts you have supporting a textual
conclusion (a conclusion regarding the nature of a text) the more likely the
textual conclusion is true.
This means that if you have 10,000 facts
supporting a textual conclusion it is more likely the conclusion is true than
if you had only 100 facts supporting the textual conclusion. Note, however, that either way you have only
achieved “a likelihood of truth.” You
have not achieved “objective certainty” (100% certainty). The term “objective certainty” refers to an
objective (nonmental, real-world) status of actual, physical entities, NOT to a
person’s mental state of certainty relative to some fact or facts regarding one
or more ancient, biblical, manuscript texts.
In order to achieve universally
accepted objective certainty, it was necessary that we exclude human
judgement, including our own, from the inferential processes that generated the
objectively certain conclusions. Had we
included human judgement, we would have, of course, reached the same conclusions
since there was so much supporting evidence.
However, the inclusion of our personal judgement would have
“contaminated” the inferential processes.
The conclusions would, therefore, have
been invalidated as “universal principles.”
We could still have used the conclusions as “local principles,” of
course. Universal principles are those
that cannot be refuted by anyone. Local
principles are those accepted by one or more but not by all.
All inductively based conclusions fall
short of objective certainty. We,
however, needed inductively based conclusions that did not fall short of
objective certainty. So, we asked
ourselves, “How do we free ourselves from the limitations of induction?” Well, what is the cause of these
limitations? The cause is the finite
nature of the amount of data involved in inductions. Therefore, if we could expand the amount of data involved in
inductions to an infinite quantity, we would eliminate the limitations of
induction.
This, of course, created two seemingly
insurmountable obstacles:
1.
How do we generate an
infinite amount of data?
2.
Once we have generated
an infinite amount of data, how do we process this data in a finite amount of
time?
It turned out we had to answer the second
question first. We were led into
considering mathematical calculus. This
is because mathematical calculus can take FINITE amounts of data and derive
conclusions effectively (to be more precise, transitively [3 >
2, 2 > 1, à 3 > 1]) based on an INFINITE amount of data. Mathematical calculus allows you to
effectively perform an infinite number of computations in a finite amount of
time. We did not invent mathematical
calculus.
The animated graphic below will hopefully
illustrate somewhat how all of this is possible. The graphic is a visualization of concepts underlying mathematical
(integral) calculus. By creating an
infinite number of rectangles you can determine with objective certainty (100%
certainty) the amount of space under the curved line (the red curve). Mathematical calculus includes a formula
that can determine the sum of all of the rectangles WHEN THE NUMBER OF
RECTANGLES IS INFINITE. Notice
how the number in the upper right corner of the graphic gets closer to the
actual space under the curved line as the number of rectangles is increased.
The graphic takes a few seconds to load.
This led us to the notion of “textual
rectangles.” If we had an infinite
number of “textual rectangles” for every “sentence” (linguistic element) in the
Bible, we would effectively (transitively) have the infinite amount of data
needed to perform an induction that would produce objective certainty (100%
certainty). The process of using an
effectively infinite amount of textual data to produce inductively based
conclusions having objective certainty is what we call “inductive textual
calculus.” Here is our formal
definition of “inductive textual calculus”:
Inductive textual calculus is the process
of using an effectively (to be more precise, transitively [3 > 2, 2
> 1, à 3 > 1]) infinite amount of textual data to produce inductively
based, textual conclusions having objective certainty.
Note that the ITC (inductive textual
calculus) process does NOT require an INFIINTE mount of data to arrive at an
“INFINITE-quantity-data-based conclusion.”
This fact overcame the obstacle of the need to generate an infinite
amount of data. This, however, did not
eliminate the need for the utilization of a vast amount of data.
Technical Footnote: There are a few who believe that
mathematical calculus does not operate perfectly in the real world. This is true. However, modern computers dynamically adjust for these
imperfections. This is demonstrated
every time a space shuttle takes off from a NASA launch pad and successfully
makes it into orbit and then, again, later, by the successful return of the
space shuttle to earth.