On June 11 we assumed Divinity as a principle of interpretation. Many people, such as Joe Blow, would scoff at the idea of assuming Divinity before the proof. Joe would argue that statements are either contradictory or they’re not; and if so than such contradictions rule out Divinity. Denying said contradictions forces us to accept Divinity as the only way of "explaining" or somehow circumventing them. We can't for example understand the three Persons in one God without waving the mystery flag. Therefore any prior assumption of Divinity invalidates any “proof” of its existence. It’s sort of like the Cartesian argument, “I doubt, there- fore I am.” As soon as Descartes says “I” in the premise he invalidates the proof because he can’t assume the existence of “I” before he proves its existence. Similarly, Joe would argue that we can’t assume Divinity as a principle of interpretation before proving it exists.
But our friend, Joe, doesn't really understand our process, not the philo- sophical aspects. Biblical events as a function of time make our timeline no small pimple on the dark side of the moon; and if we can show that no date conflicts with another—and it's much simpler to find conflict in num- bers than argue over hermeneutics—then we've taken a small but neces- sary step in showing Biblical credibility. In order to validate this timeline we first have to interpret Scripture. But just as one needs the axiom of parallel lines to do plane geometry, we need Divinity as a principle of in- terpretation to calculate our calendar. That doesn't mean we claim Divin- ity—not yet—no more so than someone in a math class professes parallel lines in the space we live in. The math student deals with abstractions where logical form alone determines truth values, not anything going on in the actual world. True, we can't blast off to two distant galaxies, meas- ure the interior angles with our own, and see if we get 180 degrees. But that doesn't mean that because we can't fly out of the universe to see if God is there that we can't make an argument for Divinity after we've figured out the calendar.
Once we calculate the dates, we can look at the factorization of the num- bers between them. We show on February 21 that these factors—e.g., 17, 23, 37, 43—have parabolic meaning that complement the context. On February 23 and 25 we create an inductive argument with these factors of significant numbers popping up too many times for Joe to dismiss as co-incidental. Setting up all these dates from Scripture alone in Part 2 pre- vents Joe from accusing us of tampering. That leaves him with only one counterargument: human authors rigged the numbers. But suppose no one until the latter half of the previous century knew this timeline existed (see March 5); then the more we think about it, the more tenuous Joe's accu- sation becomes. How could they rig the numbers if they didn't know what they were, or that they even existed?
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