Humor

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The Bible is the very centre of our faith. Without this book, faith would have no basis, no context and no tradition. But what makes the Bible such a special book? How can we ever be sure that what we read in the Bible are not fairy tales or fantasies, regardless of what political, social or religious purpose they might have served once? Or, like my folks used to say so often: “paper is patient” - what could have possibly stopped the writers from exaggerating or altering stories and reports to achieve the desired effect upon the readers?

There are a lot of different ways to approach this question – from the historical to the political and from the philosophical to the religious perspective. So, let's take a few moments to give the statistical perspective a try.

We have learned – or are still learning – that any possible event can actually happen – with a certain probability, that is. So, yes, there is a chance that one cloudy and windy day frogs start raining down from the sky. There is an actual chance that this could indeed happen under specific atmospheric conditions. But I would not start building up any hopes of witnessing such an event in my lifetime – over the last 200 years this has happened only three or four times – so the probability of such a “rain of frogs” is considerably low. Now, take a look at the classic definition of probability (as first thought up by the great Pierre-Simon Laplace) – what are the odds of a “rain of frogs” tomorrow? Quite low, indeed. But – and this is the important part – if it were to rain frogs tomorrow, it could be explained rationally and although it would almost certainly come as a surprise, we could get over it with a good explanation (and a few hours of cleaning up the streets).

Having frogs rain down from the sky is sort of like sitting an ape in front of a typewriter. We would not expect him to write anything meaningful, but we know that if we put 100 apes in front of 100 typewriters and wait for 100 years we will, eventually, end up with a few phrases out of a Shakespeare-play (and several good scripts for “Baywatch” or “Beverly Hills 90210”). As I said, no one would actually expect to witness such an event (just think of all the organisational problems setting up this experiment), but if it were to happen it could be explained. There would be no explanation, however, if the first ape at the first typewriter would hack down “Romeo and Juliet” or the entire United States Tax Code in the first attempt – that would be the statistical equivalent of a week-long “hail of frogs”.

Of course, in theory, even such an event could still be explained, but if we were talking about unlikely events before, this discussion would go into very unlikely events now (notice the very subtle increase). After the first two pages of the 521 income tax form or the third frog-rainy day in succession, no one would talk about strange but simple coincidences anymore.

And now a sudden change of scenery. For the last 35 years, several dozen talented writers have done their very best to come up with original scripts to the ever-popular “Star Trek” series and all of it's spin-offs. After hundreds and hundreds of scripts and thousands of hours of film, it gets more and more difficult to keep little errors out of the new scripts: wrong stardates, wrong names, technical errors and other little things. The authors themselves don't notice them, but every error is eventually found by at least one soldier in the vast army of Star Trek nerds, and if you log on the Internet (and my best guess is, that you do just that every now and then) you can easily find hundreds of error lists written by the faithful fans. Such little errors, Paramount says (and they are right), can not be avoided, because it is impossible to fact-check every episode script against every other script, book or article that has ever been written by one of the other authors. And although the authors spend a great deal of time trying to work out such little mistakes (after all, they're getting paid for it) – including the use of modern technology like computers, on-line searches, taped episodes and the like – they can not avoid every mistake – that is, indeed, a statistical impossibility.

After this brief look at life in Hollywood, you're probably asking yourself what connection Trekkies (or Trekkers?), playwriting apes and frogs raining down could possibly have with Christianity and the Bible.

Let's take a look: A few dozen authors in Hollywood are unable to write a few hundred flawless scripts over a period of 35 years - despite a million dollar budget, computers, the Internet, books, video tapes and – and this is an important factor – the ability of discussing and talking to each other. They simply cannot do this without having 16year-old fans discovering one little mistake after the other.

The Bible was written over a period of almost 4000 years by 48 authors who had no other help than their own abilities, who (mostly) didn't know each other, were often poor, persecuted or living in times of war and turmoil and yet managed to write down what is inarguably the most complex story of all times. The Bible has been studied for 2000 years by thousands of experts and millions of faithful and the meaning of single words alone has sparked year-long academic discussions.

With all that, you would certainly expect the Bible to be full of little mistakes, wrong names, dates and other inconsistencies like that – yet that is not the case. Of course there are always things that are open for dispute – like the fact that Jesus Christ is said to be a direct descendant of King David, yet the only connection appears to be Joseph, who, according to the Bible itself, is is not His father – just one of several examples of the few possible inconsistencies, although there are even explanations for most of them.

But such a complex work, written over so many years by so many authors should not have a few inconsistencies. It should literally be chock-full of errors! The fact that it is not does not make it's existence unlikely but almost downright impossible. If we open up the Bible, we put our eyes onto something just as unlikely as a year-long “rain of frogs” - and we're talking about heavy rain here, folks. Who can see any coincidences in that?

Although none of these facts are secret, most people have never thought about it – which may have two different reasons. For once, there is no actual number anyone could come up with, that would show just how unlikely the existence of the Bible really is. That is because the odds are so low and the number of influence factors is so high, that there simply is no chance of ever having a definite answer to that question.

The other reason is, that a “statistical miracle” is not as blunt (and colorful) as the smashed frog on the front of your car – and that everything that is not blunt, loud or in any way exotic and colorful has not chance of getting noticed in our fast-track society. The Shakespeare-play, handwritten and personally delivered by the ape- now that would certainly get noticed! Too unlikely to ever happen? Certainly yes – although statistically seen it definitly will happen (several times) before the next collective of authors comes up with such a fascinating book under similar or even close-to-similar circumstances.

Besides that, I would guess that not everybody who has a Bible has actually read it and such has had no chance to experience that strange feeling, that you can read right through it without finding inconsistencies at every second page turn.

In addition to all those reasons, we are simply to distrustful when it comes to statistics. “I only believe the statistical analysis I faked myself” as George Bernhard Shaw so eloquently put it. “The statistical analysis has determined, that the artificial ingredient B36 poses no serious health risk”. What one has to rationalize is, that we're not talking about the same standards here. In daily life, something is unlikely to be unhealthy, dangerous or easily swallowed by small children if a certain number sinks below 0.1%. The odds of having a book like the Bible without thousands of inconsistencies are not even on the same scale – thus, they cannot be compared to “normal” odds and probabilities – like, for example, the odds of writing a meaningful article about the Bible that mentions the word only 13 times, while mentioning the word “frog” 7 times.

“The existence of the Bible as a work for all mankind is the greatest gift we have ever received. Every attempt to belittle this book is a crime against all people” wrote the philosopher Immanuel Kant. And if one simply looks at the miracle of the Bible's existence, the influence this book had and continues to have throughout history, if one takes a look at numbers and probabilities, the old-fashioned saying from bible study classes throughout the world maybe doesn't just seem like a phrase anymore:

The Bible – More than just a book!



Christian Reinboth
[email protected]

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