What the Hell Happened to Nova

Seth asks What the Hell Happened to Nova?

"Then they spent the last twenty minutes talking about how the sizes and proportions of the cathedrals are all based on numbers from the bible. They had a couple of contributors who measured specific cathedrals and then declared that the measurements corresponded to a number they found in the bible. I’ll focus on one of those - Stephen Murray, Professor of Medieval Art History at Columbia University - because he does more inferring about numbers than the others in the episode. The first observation was about the dimensions of the central square at Amiens cathedral, which is fifty feet on a side:

STEPHEN MURRAY: Noah’s ark was 50 cubits. This is 50 feet. And this lies at the heart of the building.

So, out of the thousands of cathedrals in Europe, each with an infinite number of dimensions you could pick (height of towers, length of transepts, numbers of stones in the facade, number of gargoyles with four teeth, etc.) and thousands of numbers in the bible, you’ve managed to find one arbitrary number from one cathedral that is the same as an even more arbitrary number in the bible? And it’s not even the same units? And that’s evidence for what? I think you at home can probably come up with a couple of other reasons for designing something to be a fifty-foot square. Take two and a half seconds right now…"