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Incalculable number of stars

The Bible
Jeremiah 33:22 I will make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as
countless as the stars of the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore.
This verse is a clearly poetic one with some fairly funky grammatical features along with the very common structure of
parallelism, where the same point is made using two different turns of phrase. The key phrase in this verse as far as this
point is concerned is " s ox :", which very literally means something like "will not count itself" or "will not get counted". n
grammatical jargon, s o is the niph'althird-person masculine imperfect form of s, and one of the functions of
the niph'al is to denote a kind of passive. What is important here is that, understood using the same literal interpretative
apparatus that the Biblical foreknowledge claims rely upon, the verse is not saying that the stars are countless, which is
straightforwardly a quality, it is saying something subtly different: they will not get counted or aren't going to get counted,
which is a plainer predictive statement. This renders verse a lot more trivial, since it's ultimately just saying that the stars
are hard to count, which is relatively obvious. (Understanding it as a "modal imperfect" can plausibly render this as "could
not get counted" or similar instead, but this would require non-literal analysis and is still different from making a scientific
claim of incalculability.)
The Bible is being poetic rather than scientific. The Bible also states here that sand is as equally innumerable as the stars.
However, that idea is clearly absurd as there is only a finite amount of sand on the planet. While difficulties may be found
in defining "sand", a reasonable estimate is 7.5 x 10
18
grains. Even taking into account the rock cycle of sand and stone, it
is very much a finite resource and far from countless. Abstract mathematics does feature "uncountable" numbers, but
that's something different and clearly not alluded to in this Biblical passage.
Science now
Science estimates that, far from incalculable, there are approximately 9 10
21
stars in the observable universe. While it
really is difficult to put an exact figure even on the number of stars in our own galaxy, the number is far from "incalculable"
and just requires a few assumptions and honesty about the potential errors in calculation.
[2]

As far as the number of "descendants of King David", the present population of the earth is less than 10
10
, which is very
small compared to the number of stars. To take the promise in Jeremiah literally, the number of descendants of David
is not "countless" nor "measureless", as well as being far from the number of stars.
Science then
As with most stuff like this, the "1100 stars" thing isn't referenced to anything specific so it is difficult to track down. It is
probably a reference to Ptolemy, who catalogued just under 1100 stars in The Almagest.
[3]
These were just the stars that
Ptolemy said he was able to see and catalogue properly - that there are more than 1100 stars can be shown by even a
casual glance at the sky on a clear night. This is decent enough science, but is quoted very heavily out of context.
The Greek mathematician Archimedes wrote a treatise, The Sand Reckoner, which took off from the concept of counting
the number of grains of sand, not merely "on the seashore" but in the universe, to introduce a notation for very large
numbers rather than just giving up. In brief, the "sand on the seashore" is not "measureless" and such things were thought
of by early mathematicians.

-The number of stars, though vast, are finite (Isaiah 40:26). Although man is unable to calculate the exact number of
stars, we now know their number is finite. Of course God knew this all along He counts the number of the stars; He
calls them all by name (Psalm 147:4). What an awesome God!
-The Bible compares the number of stars with the number of grains of sand on the seashore (Genesis 22:17;
Hebrews 11:12). Amazingly, gross estimates of the number of sand grains are comparable to the estimated number of
stars in the universe.

Since Galileo invented the telescope in 1608, we continued to discover more stars. Up until the last few hundred years until the
discovery of the telescope there were only 6,000 stars seen by the naked eye. A modern telescope of 200 inches estimates 100
billion stars in our galaxy alone. And there are not millions but billions of such galaxies. The Biblical scientific insights were far in
advance of four modern day science. Today, with our technology and high powered telescopes in space and astronomers estimate
that there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy with an additional 20-100 billion galaxies in the universe! Henry Morris says there are at
least 10 million, billion, billion stars! See Gen.15:5, Job 22:12; Isaiah 55:9; 1 Corinthians 15:41 and 2 Peter 3:10.

The giant telescopes of the present day have only begun to reveal the immense numbers and fantastic variety of the stars.
With literally billions of galaxies, and billions of stars in every galaxy, the number of the stars seems to increase almost
without limit. The variety is equally amazingred giants, white dwarfs, Cepheid variables, neutron stars, pulsars, and on
and on!
And so, if you multiply the number of stars in our galaxy by the number of galaxies in the Universe, you get approximately 1024
stars. Thats a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros.
Thats a septillion stars.

Well do I know that I am mortal, a creature of one day.
But if my mind follows the winding paths of the stars
Then my feet no longer rest on earth, but standing by
Zeus himself I take my fill of ambrosia, the divine dish.
-Claudius Ptolemy (Scott Hildreth, ISLS Colloquium - Autumn 2003)

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