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One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I
may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty
of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple.
Psalm 27.4
One would think it impossible miss the beauty and
significance of
the sevenfold symmetric perfection
of the Canon Wheel. What could be simpler than a
perfect Circle? What worthier design for God's Work than this
universal symbol of Eternity,
symmetrically divided in accordance with the fundamental numerical signature of Scripture -
the Number Seven -
embedded as a watermark throughout the text on all levels from Genesis to Revelation?
And as if this weren't enough, the entire structure is
supernaturally integrated with the 22 letters of the divine
Hebrew alphabet - the
original vector of revelation! Oh! Human language is utterly insufficient to communicate the perfection
of the Holy Bible - words, sentences, paragraphs, indeed whole books - must needs overlap
in the mind of the reader to see but a glimpse of God's infinite Wisdom and Knowledge radiating
from Scripture. Of course, this is exactly what He has provided in the structure of His Word which
is nothing less than
infinity designed to be held in the palm of your hand, its fearful symmetry
burning bright before your very eyes!
Yet not all have the gift of this vision. I therefore have answered the questions in the side box to
reveal the absolute mathematical impossibility that this structure could have occurred by
chance or even deliberate human effort.
Of course, there is a certain futility and absurdity in presenting these arguments.
It would be much simpler if the skeptic would merely ask God to open his eyes - like the blind men
enlightened by Christ two thousand years ago. This has nothing to do with blind faith - on the contrary,
it is the unbeliever who suffers blindness! The evidence is shining like the noontime sun in a
cloudless sky! An analogy may help make this clear.
It is rather like meeting a man who denies that Chinese is a language, and refuses to learn
anything about it until it has been mathematically proven that the marks in the Chinese book
are interrelated in the same way as other languages, and that they certainly were not randomly
scratched out.
The joke is that even if the proof is understood and accepted (a very unlikely outcome, considering
the effect of willful ignorance), the
unbeliever has not come one step closer to knowing - let alone receiving - the
message contained in the book! If, on the other hand, the
unbeliever were willing to learn to read Chinese, the proof that it is indeed a language would simply
fall out as an inevitable
side effect. This analogy corresponds exactly with the Wheel. Its primary purpose is not mere
proof that the Bible is the Word of God - what good would that do? It would be just like abstractly
proving that
Chinese really is a language to someone who refuses to learn. The person who chooses to
learn, on the other hand, will
gain all the benefit of the knowledge in the book while simultaneously receiving
- as an inevitable side effect - absolute, irrefutable
proof of the intelligent, purposeful design of the book.
The Bible is divided into seven canonical divisions, starting with the 5 books of the Torah, 12 books of
the Old Testament History, and so forth. This structure can be described by saying there is a
canonical division D1 between books 5 and 6,
another division D2 between books 17 and 18, and so forth.
Six dividers are needed to describe seven divisions. The question of "How many possible sevenfold canons
are there?" is therefore equivalent to asking "How many ways are there to put six dividers between
66 objects?"
This means that each possible sevenfold canonical division of the Bible can be represented as a
line of 66 objects with six dividers dropped between them as follows:
The number of sevenfold canonical divisions is therefore determined by the number of distinct ways
there is to
drop the six dividers between the 66 objects.
This number is very easy to calculate - its a problem of
Combinatorics  .
There are 65 places to drop the first division D1, 64 places to then drop the next
division D2, 63 for the next,
and so forth, so the total is ...
65 x 64 x 63 x 62 x 61 x 60 = 59,471,193,600 possible divisions.
Now rearrangement of the dividers amongst themselves - e.g.
interchanging D1 with D2 - results in the same
canonical division, so we need to divide by the total number of ways to arrange six objects which is
simply 6! = 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 720. The result is:
Numbers of this form are called
Binomial Coefficients .
They are also known as
Choice numbers because they
give the number of ways to select an unordered subset of k objects from a set of n objects.
In the case above, it
is called "65 choose 6" which tells us the number of ways to select an
unordered subset of 6 dividers from the set of 65 dividers standing between each
pair of books. This is simply an alternate description of our initial question. Note that similiar
calculations are used to analyze the probability
of the symmetric structure of the Old Testament canon alone [see Probabilities of the OT Symmetry].
Thus there are about 82 million possible sevenfold canonical
structures of the Bible.
Our task now is to determine how many of these exhibit both bilateral and radial symmetry.
This answer to this question is essentially as simple as the one above, except that it
involves a few "special cases."
1) Bilateral Symmetry demands that there be
divisions between books 22 and 23 and 44 and 45. Otherwise
a canonical division would cross from one Cycle to the next, which is not symmetric. For example,
supposed that
books 43 through 46 form a canonical division. These books are highlighted red in the image.
They lack bilateral symmetry. Thus we must have two dividers as shown in the second image.
2) There now remains four dividers to place symmetrically on the Wheel.
There are two possibilities we must consider.
- a) Suppose we drop D3 anywhere except on the line of bilateral
symmetry, that
is, between Spokes 11 and 12. Bilateral symmetry then demands that we place a corresponding divider
in the mirror position. Radial symmetry demands that we place the remaining pair of dividers
on the radii corresponding to the two just set or symmetrically in the same Cycle as the first two.
Here are examples of each of these possibilities:
We have 10 choices for where to drop D3 and its mirror
D4. For each of these ten choices,
we have these possibilities for D5 and D6:
- i) Radial symmetry gives us only one choice if we drop D5 and
D6 on a different Cycle.
- ii) We have 9 choices if we drop D5 and D6
on the same Cycle as
D3 and D4
since there are 18 open slots there.
Total: 10 x 1 + 10 x 9 = 100.
- b) Now suppose we chose to place D3 on the line of bilateral
symmetry. This leaves three
dividers, so we need to place D4 in line with D3
since bilateral symmetry
demands that all dividers not on the line of symmetry be paired - i.e. it must be an even number.
D4 can be placed on either Cycle not holding
D3, and for each of these choices,
there remains two dividers that can be placed as
a symmetric pair on any of the remaining 20 slots, giving 10 possibilities since interchanging
D5 and D6
yields the same canonical division.
Total: 2 x 10 = 20
Grand Total: 120 possible symmetric sevenfold canons. We can now use this number to determine the
probability of "finding" a symmetric sevenfold canon.
This probability is calculated by taking the ratio of the
number of symmetric sevenfold canons (120) to the total number of possible sevenfold canons
(82,598,880). The answer is one chance in 688,324.
When considering this number, it is
extremely important to recall that the sevenfold structure designed by God can be
derived from first principles using nothing but
the Bible Wheel, two initial conditions, and symmetry constraints. This is exactly the
same pattern that led to many of the most significant discoveries in 20th century
Physics (cf. Fearful Symmetry).
This is another problem from the field of
Combinatorics .
The total number of ways to arrange n things is called n factorial, denoted by
"n!". It is calculated by forming the product of all numbers less than
or equal to n:
n! = n x (n-1) x (n-2) x ... x 3 x 2 x 1
For example, the total number of ways to arrange the letters ABC
is 3! = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6. This is easy to check by simply listing them:
ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA
The logic that gives rise to this formula is elementary.
One simply notes that there are three choices for the first
position, after which there remains two choices for the second position, and
finally one for the last. Multiplying the number of choices yields the total
number of ways one could arrange the three letters.
The answer to "How many ways are there to arrange
the sixty-six books of the Bible?" is therefore:
66! = 66 x 65 x 64 x 63 x ... x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 5.44 x 1092.
Written is standard decimal notation (to three significant digits), this number
appears as:
544,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
This number is so far beyond all human experience that I hardly know how to describe
it. It is 5.44 times 1 followed by 92 zeros! The implications of this are discussed in the
next section.
Let us now put the whole picture together. To understand the blatantly miraculous nature of the
biblical structure, we need to review the gist of the hundreds of pages of evidence given on this site
in light of the fact that it all depends on the exact order of the Christian Canon
which is but one of the trillions of trillions of possibilities! Oh! If God would
give me ten thousand tongues to declare His Wonders! Here is a brief review of a
small portion of the evidence:
- Spoke 1: The three primary books in all the Bible:
| Genesis |
The first book of the Law |
| Isaiah |
The first book of the Prophets |
| Romans |
The first book of the Epistles |
To find these three premier and highly integrated books set as diamonds on Spoke 1 of the Wheel is itself
a standing miracle. The raw probability of this is easily calculated. Consider dropping these books on an
empty wheel. There are 66 choices for Genesis, leaving 65 choices for Isaiah, followed by 64 for Romans.
This means there
are 66 x 65 x 64 = 274,560 ways to place these three books on the Wheel, so there is one
chance in 274,560 that blind history would have given us Spoke 1 as we have it on the Bible Wheel.
Now there are 6 ways to rearrange these books amongst themselves, so we need to divide by 6 to arrive at the
total number of ways to they could be placed on Spoke 1, regardless of order. This yields one chance
in 45,760.
- Symmetries on the Bible Wheel: The perfect sevenfold symmetry of the Canon Wheel
is just the beginning. There are many other symmetric patterns such as this triplet of triplets:
| Epistles to the Scattered: |
James |
I Peter |
II Peter |
| Post-Exilic Minor Prophets: |
Haggai |
Zechariah |
Malachi |
| Post-Exilic OT History: |
Ezra |
Nehemiah |
Esther |
- Word Distributions The divine integration of the
Bible is seen most clearly in the common themes running through the three books on each Spoke, integrated
with the meaning of the associated Hebrew letters. I have written hundreds of articles on this, with
most of the supernatural links just falling open before my eyes. In many cases the correlation coefficient
attains values near unity.
- Spoke 1 - Creation: Of all possible themes to find
on Spoke 1, there is none more obvious than Creation. To find then that the Hebrew and Greek words
describing God's act of creation (bara and ktidzo) are maximized TEN TIMES above average on Spoke 1,
with significant contributions from each book, yields extremely strong evidence of the divine
design of the structure.
The correlation coefficient of 0.90 between the distribution on Cycle 1 and Cycle 2 objectifies this conclusion. When
all of this is viewed in light of the astronomical number of possibilities, we behold the glory of
God's Wisdom.
- Spokes 15, 16, 17 The books on these three Spokes form a triplet of triplets, as
noted by other biblical
scholars who knew nothing about the Wheel
(cf. A Great Cloud of Witnesses and
Symmetries on the Bible Wheel). There are many correlations amongst these
books that clearly demonstrate the divine design:
- Haggai: Haggai appears in two and
only two books of the Bible - Ezra and the Book that
bears his name. They are both on Spoke 15. This is a KeyLink.
- Zerubbabel: The distribution of this
prophet's name yields a correlation coefficient of 0.91 between Cycles 1 and 2. Even the slightest variation
in the order of the books makes this drop precipitously.
- Spoke 22: The Seal of God Nearly half of
all occurrences of the word "seal" are found
on Spoke 22 - the last Spoke, corresponding to the Letter Tav which the Rabbis identify as
the Seal of Truth!
- The Isaiah-Bible Correlation: The hundreds of
KeyLinks between individual chapters of Isaiah and their
corresponding books of the Bible reveals Isaiah to be an image of the Bible within the Bible. This
means God has followed His own Word and provided a second witness to establish His Word. The
probabilities now have moved into the realm of absolute, unequivocal, incontrovertible certainty -
unlike anything ever seen in the history of Science or even Knowledge in general.
Its one thing to
have a probability of one chance in 1092, its quite another to see this
structure replicated as an image within the original structure! In simplistic, round numbers,
this squares the probability, so
that we are now confronted with a probability on the order of one chance in 10184. Numbers
like this are simply not encountered in Science! Yet this number is actually too small because we didn't
calculate the probability that Isaiah would contain the content of the KeyLinks, let alone in the
proper order! This doesn't matter of course, because probabilities like 10184 are
already off the charts. You can't get a higher probability than Unity - and that is what we have with
the proposition the God designed the Holy Bible.
- Alphabetic Verses: The entire structure is
integrated with the Hebrew alphabet. Here are a few of the most obvious examples of this design:
- Spoke 3: The Abundant Giver - The meaning of Gimel is
revealed in the word Gomel (Abundant Giver) given in the first Gimel verse of the great alphabetic
Psalm 119. This then manifests as one of the great thematic threads of II Corinthians on Spoke 3. It
ultimately integrates with the nature of the Eternal Godhead -
God the Holy Spirit. Holy ! Holy! Holy!
- Spoke 4: The words door or gate are
maximized on Spoke 4. Door first appears in
Genesis 4 and
opens
Revelation 4 and Ezekiel - the latter two being linked with many KeyLinks based on the
Throne of God and the Four Living Creatures. Endless Glory!
- Spoke 16: The Eyes of the Lord. The Ayin Verse of
Psalm 34 is quoted in one and only one book of the Bible - I Peter on Spoke 16. This is a KeyLink
where God also used the name of the Letter.
Recall now that the number of ways the 66 books of the Bible could have
been arranged is incomprehensibly huge!
If science ever encounters a number
like "one chance in ten to the 92nd power" the
hard-nosed analyst doesn't mince words. The statement is made with all the
assurance of absolute fact -
the real probability is functionally equivalent to ZERO.
The extremely
high degree of order, symmetry and beauty found in the historic order
forces the conclusion that this is the work
of some intelligent being, but the natural history of the Bible and the nature
of the design proves it could
not have been accomplished by any human or group of humans. There is therefore only one conclusion,
which happens to coincide exactly with the central claim of the text itself and
the cry of the great cloud of witnesses who
gave their lives in service of God's Living Word (II Timothy 3.16f):
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for
doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the
man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
Consider the situation here! All the evidence listed above is a small fragment of the evidence for
design in the structure of the Canon. At every point we encountered structures that are
in and of
themselves very unlikely, as well as beautiful! When these are viewed in light of
the astronomical number of possible
canons, the mind can conclude nothing but that this is the Work of God. When the attention is then
directed to contemplate exactly what we are discussing - the Holy Bible! The
Book recognized by untold millions as the very Word of God! - these probabilities, which already
have been reduced to zero for all practical purposes, are now discarded as an absurd method of
evaluation! It is the SPIRIT OF GOD that opens the mind and heart to the Truth of God's word, and this
Spirit is available to all who ask, as promised by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself (Luke 11.9):
And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that
seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread
of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for
a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much
more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
I pray each and every reader will ask God for this great gift. Amen.
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Answer Thou Me
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Probabilities: What are the Chances?
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