lying on their backs on a hillside, they stare at he clouds floating over them. the Clouds are big and puffy and white as they slowly drift by. One of them points up at a formation. 'Look a Bunny' the other glances over and sees the bunny shaped cloud. He looks over at another formations and points, 'that one is a unicorn' the other looks over at the unicorn cloud. 'No, it looks more like a turtle'
I was watching a show last night on the Bible code. for those of you not familiar with it here is a brief synopses of it. Some people claim that there is a code Embedded in the bible that predicts world events. the assassination of JFK, Lincoln, WW2, and even 9/11. The code is a skip code, in this type of code you skip letters then look for words for the letters you end up with. So lets use 10 as the skip, you would count from the beginning and just use every 10th letter you find, then you create a grid and use it like a seek & find game to try and find words. using this, the have found Kennedy, Killed, By, Assassin. Also Twin, Towers, Airplane and other proof that the bible is the true work of God. They point out that the odds of this being coincidence is astronomical. they were even able to foretell future events in that the code showed the assassination of the President of Egypt (forget name) before it happened. The code has been talked about for hundreds of years, but since the code is so hard it is just now with the help of computers that they have been able too find them.
'Are you daft? clearly it is a unicorn.' He looks again at the cloud drifting by. 'Still looks like a turtle to me.'
In case you haven't figured it out already, I'm skeptical about this so-called proof of God. I think it is interesting, but what are they not telling us? The program (and I'm sure the books on the Bible code too) seemed to tell an almost one sided story. They did have a skeptic on there, but only briefly and almost jokingly. They presented him along with theories on aliens having created the code, sort of putting him in the same category as this outrageous alien theory, and quickly dismissed. So let's look at it deeper, let's see what they don't tell us.
1) How big are the grids? In the show they showed a small grid, maybe 20x20 and they highlighted a few words they found, but these were not the actual grids, just a reenactment. The bible has hundreds of thousands of words, that means that there are several hundreds of thousands of letters in the bible, maybe billions. how big is the grids that these predictions are on? if the grids were 20x20 then that would be a good indication that maybe there is something to the code, but if the grid is 1000x1000 or bigger then there isn't as hard as they suggest. If you have ever played boggle, then you know words will appear in just random letter grids, otherwise boggle wouldn't work as a game. The bigger the grid the more words you will find.
2) What other words were found? Taking the Kennedy Assassination as an example, if they found Kennedy, assassin, killed (not sure what words were actually found), and Dallas, What other words were found? even on a small grid, and finding words with 4 or more letters, there will be lots of words to be found. did they all relate to Kennedy? I doubt it. They didn't mention any words that don't relate to what they wanted to see. if the grid had 100 words and only three or so are Kennedy words, what are the other words doing here? It is a code is it not?
3)Language differences? The code is done on a hebrew bible because that is the language it was written in. In english, assassin is a long and hard word, with 4 s's it would be difficult to get that randomly in a letter grid, but how is it in hebrew? is it an easy four letter word? Are there several ways to say it, several spellings. If it is a short word with common letters then it would appear more often then the english equivalent would, and if several words can be considered for it, the chances increase. The same holds true for all the words, I don't know about hebrew, but some languages have words with subjective meanings. If I tell you something is bad, do I like it or hate it? Are any of the words they found this way? What about names? are they looking for the english or hebrew spelling of kennedy? is there a hebrew spelling and what is it? do the letters in kennedy have hebrew equivalents? Lots of unanswered questions here.
4) What version of the bible? Not all bibles are exactly alike, what version are they using and why? If they use the wrong bible we might be missing something!
5) What did they search for? The way they found these codes was by searching with a computer. They give it a word and it would do letter skips until it found the word. If they give it Kennedy, it searches till it finds it, if they search for assassin it does the same, and if they told it to search for kennedy & assassin that is what it would look for. As I said earlier, depending on how easy those words are determines how many times it finds them.
6) Were there any bad searches? did they find Kennedy on any letter grids that didn't have any other meaningful words? If they found kennedy on say a 7 letter skip code, but none of the other words found had any relation to the Kennedy's, would they tell us? They point out the matches, but are there any non matches and how many? this at least would give us a way to determine how easily Kennedy appears in the letter grids. this goes for other names and events.
7) Paradox? They pointed out the assassination they foresaw. (hmm, a middle eastern leader assassinated, go figure!) They informed him he was in danger to try and prevent his death but wouldn't that screw up the prediction? Here is a case of win/win for them, if he didn't get assassinated, they would claim victory of the code in saving his life or as the case was, claim victory because he was assassinated like they said.
These are just some of the more obvious questions, I could go on but let's look at what the skeptic said and how he did similar with Moby Dick.
Looking at Clouds - part 2
So here we have FINAL PROOF of the existence of God, all we have to do is blind ourselves to the unanswered questions and throw out only a laughable 'aliens' theory and there it is, clear as day, a mostly very foggy day at least.
On the program they had one skeptic up against at least half a dozen believers, some bible scholars and church heads mostly. The skeptic had found the death of Princess Diana foretold in Moby Dick using the same kind of code, a skip code. but after offering this out to the watcher, the program went back to the believers who quickly dismissed it as a hoax or flawed. They didn't give any reason why they thought it was a hoax or how it was flawed, just that it was. I guess we should just take them at their word!
So the egyptian president was assassinated and what did the bible code people do? They smugly asked 'let's see them find that in Moby Dick.' So with challenge in hand the skeptic went out and did just that. He found several different predications in Moby Dick, challenging the validity of the code. So once again they interviewed the believers and once again the skeptic was criticized, yet again with no real information on why? If they think that he is faking his results or that they are flawed, then tell us why they think that. If they are so sure of the code then why not help him work on Moby Dick? They have written special programs to search the bible, I doubt that they gave him access to that software, but they should. Wouldn't turning the skeptics into believers be the best proof of all? Why not run the bible and Moby Dick through the exact same program with the same searches. to be even fairer, translate Moby Dick into hebrew. I seriously doubt they would be willing to do this, it might prove to work against them.
The bible code team has been working on the code for years, they started in the early '80. The skeptic they showed hadn't worked as long on it, so I would think if he can find those code in Moby Dick, then it's just a random code. I would also think that it may be harder for him because he is using english, if there are language differences, that may effect the outcome of what he finds. I also think that the Bible code team has put a lot more work into the project then he has, so of course they would have found more matches then he did. It is also in their best interest to limit the outside interference, they want to believe in the code, they don't want to be proven wrong. I would also like to know why they only had one skeptic on? I'm sure there are more then that.
All in all, the program was way to skewed in favor of the code for me to be anything but skeptical. I need more information, I may buy one of the may books out on the code, but I may find them just as skewed, I'll have to look into that.
'In clouds you see what you want to see, look for a unicorn and you'll find it'