Bible code: Encyclopedia II - Bible code - Criticism

Bible code - Criticism

The primary objection advanced against Bible codes of the Drosnin variety is that similar patterns can be found in books other than the Bible. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skips that many such words are expected to appear. Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that only the Bible could yield ELS, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay found many ELS letter arrays in Moby Dick that contain ELSs related to modern events. Other people, such as US physicist Dave Thomas, found other examples in many texts. In addition, Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to wrench out the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran worked successfully with McKay to look for evidence of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire.

Code proponents respond by claiming that the ELS letter arrays appearing in the Bible are better in some way than those appearing in other books. They also like to hypothesize and investigate new types of codes to stay ahead of criticism. However, in the absence of an objective measure of quality and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the "scientific" claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans.

In 1999, McKay, together with mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel, published a paper in Statistical Science which they claim provides an adequate refutation of the earlier paper of Witztum and Rips. Their main points were:

• The data used by Witztum and Rips was a list of rabbi names in Hebrew. The Hebrew language is somewhat flexible as far as name spelling goes, and each rabbi has several different appellations (aliases and nicknames), so special care should be taken as to how to choose the particular names searched for. So their result could be explained by claiming the data was not collected properly. From the paper: "...the data was very far from [being] tightly defined by the rules of their experiment. Rather, there was enormous "wiggle room" available, especially in the choice of names for the famous rabbis".
• There is indirect evidence that the data were not, in fact, collected properly; that is, the choice of names and spellings was somehow biased towards those supporting the codes hypothesis.
• Attempts at replicating the experiment failed to achieve the same result. From the paper: "A technical problem that gave us some difficulty is that WRR have been unable to provide us with their original computer programs. Neither the two programs distributed by WRR, nor our own independent implementations of the algorithm as described in WRR's papers, consistently produce the exact distances listed [by WRR]".

There has been a continuing debate on these claims. (See the web pages cited below.)

The experiment of Gans has also received critical attention. Several attempts at replicating it, designed by mathematician Barry Simon, gave negative results. Finally, a committee at the Hebrew University, comprising both codes proponents and skeptics, ran two replications using outside experts to compile the data. Both replications failed to find the phenomenon that Gans' original experiment claimed to find.

As of 2003, there are still a few university scientists who support the codes. The main two are Eliyahu Rips (see above) and Robert Haralick (an electrical engineer at the City University of New York). The overwhelming majority of scientists who have looked at the claims reject them.

The ELSs are very sensitive to single-letter insertions. Jeffrey Tigay attacks the notion that there exists a single text in which to search for ELSs by pointing out the long history of scholarship on variations in the Hebrew bible text. The significance of ELSs would seem to diminish in the face of hundreds or perhaps thousands of spelling drifts (mostly taking the form of letter insertions) in the text over time.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Criticism", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki