Thunderf00t, VenomFangX, and false arguments

For those of you not "in the know", Thunderf00t and VenomFangX are both Youtube posters who oppose each other's viewpoint on whether the science of evolution describes the myriad of life we see today or if that myriad was specially created by the Christian God. Based on some videos previously posted here, you might guess which one I agree with.

However, on one of the latest (not the greatest, but rather humorous) rebuttals posted by Thunderf00t (which apparently got pulled sometime between 12:15pm and 1:15pm), I saw this humorous message (complete with mis-spellings) posted by ooglebydoogleby:

ime convinced where do i sign up to have my brain removed and a blomonge inseted with a jelly crusifix internal moulding. venom= the snake in the garden. fang= for another negative god. and the x= the the cross of christianity turned 1/8 at 45 degrees 8x45=360 which added to the five days of satanic festivals that the pagans marked the begining of the new year with = one year, 5 representing the devils dominium over the four spacial direction nth sth east and wst the fifth being time. ooohhh..

"Ooohhh.." indeed. The context within which the statement was written makes it even more funny:

VenomFangX "proves" the existence of God (once again) by showing that God knew the "exact diameter of the moon" in miles, as evidenced in the Gospel of Joshua, chapter 6. His "logic" in the video goes something like this:

6 days of marching around the city of Jericho (360 degrees) = 2160

2160 miles = "the exact diameter of moon" in miles

Based on his convoluted argument, VenomFangX twists logic in a way that only the best Bible Coders do to show that "A proves B because of something I make up based on numbers in the Bible." To that end, the statement by ooglebydoogleby is quite (at least to me) funny.

VenomFangX's argument is - of course - a false one, since it is an argument the begs the question. (i.e., God is omniscient and omnipotent. There is evidence that God knew something before man did. Therefore I can prove God's existence through his omniscience.) However, regardless of the fact that this is a false argument, VenomFangX makes several mistakes.

1. The passage of Joshua 6 is actually:

6 So Joshua son of Nun called the priests and said to them, "Take up the ark of the covenant of the LORD and have seven priests carry trumpets in front of it."

There is a mention of seven priests, and no mention of circling the city, nor of the number of times these priests were to circle it. Looking back at Joshua 1-5, though, one sees:

1 Now Jericho was tightly shut up because of the Israelites. No one went out and no one came in.

2 Then the LORD said to Joshua, "See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. 3 March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. 4 Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams' horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. 5 When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have all the people give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the people will go up, every man straight in."

VenomFangX obviously needs to look at his Bible reference again, since it isn't Joshua 6, but Joshua 3 where the statement of marching around the city six times comes into play.

2. VenomFangX appears to place a lot of emphasis on his Bible Coding on Joshua 3, leading up to the what happens on the seventh day (remember that the number "7" has mystical significance in Judaism and Christianity). On the seventh day, the seven priests are supposed to march around the city seven times. This is significant. This is what the whole thing is leading up to. Not including this would be tantamount to heresy! If VenomFangX took this into account as well - as opposed to doing Bible Code searching - then you get the following:

7 priests (6 days * 360 degrees + 7 * 360 degrees)
= 7 (2160 + 2520)
= 7 (4860)
= 34020

As everyone knows, 34020 - while being a really large number - was the code given to the second generation of the TMS integrated circuit, as well as being the code for an image of City Hall Staton on the NY subway system. This proves God exists, since - in his omniscience - he was able to forsee integrated circuits as well as underground public transportation and centralized metropolitan goverment!

Okay, okay, that's a stretch. Maybe I shouldn't have included the 7 priests in the above equation. If I don't include them, then the resulting number is 4860. Consulting the Oracle at Google, one can find that this is the NIH code for the human gene nucleoside phosphorylase, which:

Encodes "an enzyme which reversibly catalyzes the phosphorolysis of purine nucleosides. The enzyme is trimeric, containing three identical subunits. Mutations which result in nucleoside phosphorylase deficiency result in defective T-cell (cell-mediated) immunity but can also affect B-cell immunity and antibody responses. Neurologic disorders may also be apparent in patients with immune defects. A known polymorphism at aa position 51 that does not affect enzyme activity has been described. A pseudogene has been identified on chromosome 2.

This proves God's existence because only through his omniscience would he have known about the creation of the National Institutes of Health and the funding of the Human Genome Project. Only he - in his eternal wisdom - would have encoded such a message in the form of a Bible dictum with no clue as to the means of mathematically extracting the information that would lead people to understand his true meaning. I see, however, that by hiding the number 4860 within his devising of a scheme by which Joshua could knock down the walls of Jericho, God was seeing a greater picture because he correlates the knocking down of the walls of Jericho with the knocking down of the mystery of the human genome! Wow!

Oh, wait. Maybe not. Maybe I've got the whole mathematical operation wrong. Maybe I'm supposed to add the values together (7 priests + 7 days + 13 times around the city = 27). And everyone knows that 27 is the product of 3 * 9, and when you add 3 + 9, you get 12, the number of Disciples! That is what the story of Jericho was really foretelling - the coming of Jesus Christ!

3. The diameter of the moon is not "exactly" 2160 miles. It's approximately that amount at the moon's equator. Between the moon's poles, the diameter is approximately 2157 miles. The average diameter of the moon is approximately 2159 miles. I'm sure that if one looked at the infinite number of different diameters one could draw through the moon, one might find something that was "exactly" 2160.0 miles. If God was omniscient and omnipotent, then wouldn't he have created a moon that was an exact sphere of 2160 miles? (Or is polar flattening and meteor impacts the work of the devil?)

4. The "mile" was not fully standardized until 1959! Below are some conversions of the equitorial lunar diameter into different miles (conversions done using onlineconversion.com, with the value of 3476.28 km):

• 2497.32 Spanish miles
• 2287.03 Ancient Roman miles
• 2160.52 Ancient British miles
• 2160.05 US survey miles
• 1916.36 Scottish miles
• 1875.84 UK nautical miles
• 1877.04 International nautical miles
• 1783.62 French miles
• 1697.40 Irish miles
• 1665.44 Portuguese miles
• 463.50 Danish miles
• 325.28 Ancient Swedish miles

People, this is one of the reasons why much of the world uses kilometers, and not miles. The fact that the moon is approximately 2160 US miles does little to show God's existence. It would have been much more conclusive if there was a Hebrew unit of length that somehow linked closely with the diameter of the moon - in this case. However, Hebrew units of length were not standardized. Therefore, a measurement in ells would be different for each person making that measurement, to such a degree that the "diameter-of-the-moon" argument that VenomFangX makes above would be covered within that really large spread of human-to-human error.