Remember that Comedy snippet I posted a couple of weeks ago where the band members are in a timeless void ‘expecting’ some message about a ‘mission of God’? Here I provide the mathematical basis for the likelihood of such a timeless void existing. This was originally posted years ago on a Christian blog I had on Blogger.
Note: I was a high school math teacher in the late 1980s through the mid-90s.
I thank God He made me at least to partially understand some of the laws of higher mathematics and some of its constructs. Revelations! One is the construct of infinity. Infinity is a construct–that is, something derived by man to explain things man can’t explain otherwise because in reality they don’t exist apart from man’s so-called understanding. Infinity relates to the topic of Bible study because probably 99.999% of Bible-believing Christians believe in eternity, which is the analogous time-element to infinity, the mathematical construct which in higher math is the equivalent to division by zero or the tangent of a 90 degree angle (where tangent of an angle = opposite/adjacent in a right triangle…remember high school trigonometry?). Thus, eternity is like infinity, which is division by zero. Remember high school algebra? Division by zero is “undefined”; for instance, 0/3 = 0 because 3 x 0 = 0. In fact, any number x 0 = 0.But what is 3/0? Since no number times 0 yields 3, then simply put, you can’t divide by zero. And anyway, who ever heard of dividing by “nothing” (which is what the number zero, invented as a place holder, really is…nothing!)?
Now, as to the tangent of a 90 degree angle being “infinity” (which is enumerated by the sideways 8), this can be shown on a piece of graph paper using some very simple calculus, using what is called “limits”. Remember that the “x axis” on a graph is the horizontal line going across and the “y axis” is the vertical line up and down. Suppose you are graphing a point with a positive magnitude (upward side of a “right triangle”) of 6 and a positive direction (horizontal distance of a “right triangle”) of 3. So what is the angle that is made by these line 6 up and 3 to the right? The opposite side is 6 and the adjacent side is 3. Since tangent of an angle is opposite/adjacent, the tangent is 6/3 = 2. Now take out your “values of trigonometric functions” if you have one, and look under the “tan” column for tangent, and find what angle corresponds to “tan = 2” and you approximate an angle of about 63.5 degrees. Okay, now let us decrease the value of the x-direction to 1. Then you get tangent of the angle = 6/1 = 6. Looking up an angle whose tan = 6 we get to 80.6 degrees. Now let us cut the x-direction into half so that we are now dividing 6 by 1/2. We now get 12, because 6 divided by 1/2 is really 6 x 2 (remember when you divide by a fraction you “flip over” the fraction and multiply?). Since the tangent is now 12, the angle is now 85.3.
You get the picture yet? As the distance in the x-direction gets closer and closer to 0, with the magnitude in the y-direction remaining 6 (or any number), the angle increases along with the tangent of that angle. What if the angle was 89.9 degrees? The tangent is then measured to be 572.9571! What if the angle was 89.999? The tangent would be 572,957.7951! What if the angle was 89.9999999? The tangent would be 572 million, 957 thousand, 795.1! What if the angle is 89.99999999999? Well, my calculator doesn’t go that high in digits! But if it did, the tangent would probably be 5.729571 times 10 to the 150th power or something! You know, a very large number! Larger than a google!
A google is another construct because we never see or experience a number this large in reality with our naked eyes…1 x 10 to the 100th power! This is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes! To make matters ever crazier, mathematicians devised the “googleplex” to denote 1 x 10 to a google of zeroes! That is, the number “googleplex” is so large that to write such a number it wouldn’t even fit into the known universe!!! (So sayeth Carl Sagan, who wouldn’t believe in God if God hit over the head with it!)
Okay, the calculus: As “x”, that is, the adjacent side of this right triangle, gets smaller and smaller, as “x approaches 0” defined mathematically, the tangent of an angle formed gets larger and larger until, given enough “9s” after the 89.9, the tangent approaches “infinity” so that the tangent of a 90 degree angle, where x = 0, is “defined” as “infinity” which is NOT A NUMBER OR QUANTITY, but simply man’s “enumeration” of something impossible. Something that “does not exist.” In short, “infinity does not compute”!
Take the construct out of the field of mathematics and put it into the dimension of time and you go from infinity to eternity. Now factor in the concept that God is “the beginning” or “alpha” and “the end” or “omega” and that He “always was, is, and always will be”. Everything God created including time (interestingly enough, since God created time, then time came AFTER God, then God must have existed BEFORE time, thus God stands outside of the dimension of time!) is constrained by some limit which, to human understanding–including writers of the Bible–must mean everything God created is constrained by a limit in time, but not God Himself! Since “eternity” also stands outside of time (just as “infinity” stands outside numeration and quantity), ONLY GOD IS ETERNAL because “eternity” in human understanding means “timeless”! Since God also created “hell/hades/sheol/lake of fire”, then all of these definitions used by Christianity for pain, torment, death etc., must stand within some boundary of time and thus ARE NOT ETERNAL! ONLY GOD IS ETERNAL!
Keep this in mind, from the Bible 1 Timothy 2:4, that God “will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” which implies that the ‘eternity’ we think it is may not be the eternity that God knows it is.
Next up in the snippet series–Fantasy.
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