For the code to be scientific it has to pass a certain set of requirements.
An important feature of scientific theory is that it can make predictions.
So can it make predictions about the future ? Rips responded to this as
follows:
"Eliyahu Rips of Hebrew University says it is true that the Bible has
predicted various historical events that have come to pass. But he
disagrees that the code can be used to predict future events. "
"The central claim that you will find in Michael Drosnin's book,
and really the whole basis for the book, is ... the idea of him
predicting Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and the implication is
that you can use this idea, the hidden code in the Torah, to make
predictions of the future," Rips said Wednesday through a translator."
"It is literally impossible to make future predictions based on codes.
Mr. Drosnin's book does have some examples of codes that are
statistically significant, and some that aren't, and the problem is
that any layman reading that book will have no way of making a
distinction."
CNN June 4 1997 (Associated Press)
Drosnin, speaking on CNN, defended his work.
"I am not saying that 'The Bible Code' is a crystal ball. You can not say
'Bible, please tell me the future' and find out anything. You have to know
what you are looking for to find anything at all. "
"And none of us, neither Dr. Rips nor his colleagues, would claim to know
the code well enough, to understand it completely enough, that we can be
certain about what it says about the future."
So while it can make predictions after the fact, it cannot make predictions
before the future has happened. So what about these predictions ? What are
the probabilities that chance can lead to 'revelations' ?
This issue has been discussed on the newsgroups and on websites extensively
Brendan McKay is a critic of the ELS study and addressed some pertinent
issues.
To the following statement by James Garner:
> And sometimes thewe words are pretty short, consisting of 3-4 letters,
> which in an alphabet soup might not be too hard to find. And there are no
> "a priori" words searched for. It's only the target word that must exist.
> Then, anything is fair game. The name, date, any words that are relevant.
> With such an open field, perhaps it's not so unlikely that *something*
> relevant will be found.
Brendan:
Yes, that is a good summary. The absence of vowels makes Hebrew
very flexible in this respect. If you pick some letters at random,
there is quite a good chance you can fit some words to them.
Moreover, the number of places to look is huge. If you have 100
letters in your picture, there are 4704 places to look for a 3-letter
word and 3040 for a 4-letter word. If you have 200 letters altogether,
these numbers jump to 19404 and 12740. And so on (it is approximately
quadratic). A real miracle would be trying every position WITHOUT
finding something you can use.
> On the other hand: The initial Rabin find is astonishing. Even if you do
> not buy the book, look at the cover in the bookstore. According to the
> author, the name Yitzchak Rabin appears in only one combination of skips.
> And that one time it appears, vertically going down, crossing it going
> forward as in normal hebrew, we find the phrase "assassin that will
> assassinate" ("Rozeach asher Yirzach").
> In Hebrew, it looks as follows:
>
> Yud
> Chet Zadik Resh Yud Resh Shin Alef Chet Zadik Vav Resh
> Chet
> Kuf
> Resh
> Bet
> Yud
> Nun
Brendan:
The phrase that you quote is out of context. If you look at the
whole verse you will see that it is about accidental homicide,
not about assassination.
The odds of "Yitzhak Rabin" appearing in the Torah somewhere
is about 10%. Once you have it, you have 8 widely separated
places (one per letter) in which to look for something useful
in the text. If that fails, you can make a matrix and look
all over that for something in proximity (as defined by the
searcher). The chances of overall success are not bad. If
"Yitzhak Rabin" is a failure, you can try "Prime Minister
Rabin", "General Rabin", nicknames, "Yitzhak" and "Rabin"
side-by-side instead of in a line. I guess there would be
20-100 things that would look good. The main ingredient you
need is patience, the rest will follow.
> This is pretty remarkeable. And, a warning *was sent* to Rabin before the
> assassination about this.
Some sort of warning letter, with no date or other details. I expect more
information will come out before long; Drosnin himself is not a reliable
source.
At the time, there was a lot of concern about the possibility of violent
reaction from fanatics opposed to Rabin's policies. Predicting there would
be an assassination attempt did not take the mind of a genius. We don't
know what other things he predicted that failed, either.
About the original Rips study Brendan remarks that:
"At the moment I am not aware of any serious mathematicians
who are supporting Drosnin. There are a few (3-4) who have
been convinced by Rips' work that meaningful patterns appear
more often than chance could account for, but none of them
(as far as I can determine) believe these patterns can be used
to predict the future in the way Drosnin claims. Rips himself
has issued a public statement dissociating himself from Drosnin.
You can see it here: http://www.cybermail.net/~codes/public.htm."
It is worth looking at the actual results of the experiment
that Drosnin claims as the "scientific proof" of his method.
Some set of "appellations" for 32 famous rabbis of the past
were matched against their dates (day+month, no year) of birth
or death. Drosnin says (p22-3) that "the names and dates were
encoded together" in Genesis. Let me tell you what that means:
Out of the 32 rabbis, 4 do not appear in Genesis at all. Of
the remaining 28, 22 appear closer to the dates belonging to
DIFFERENT rabbis than to their own. That leaves 6 getting a
good match (many of them ties with wrong dates). Does that
sound like a good predictive device?
The most that the Statistical Sciences experiment can claim to
show (and even this much I dispute) is a slight statistical trend.
The idea that it justifies Drosnin's game is preposterous.
Some relevant websites I have ran across include:
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~jkatz/Religions/Numerics/chanukah.html
The codes shown there in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace
are MUCH BETTER than any found by Drosnin or anyone else.
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~jkatz/Religions/Numerics/fishcode.html
to see how easy it is to find "codes" whose probabilities appear
to be extremely small. This one in the UN convention on the Law of
the Sea.
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~jkatz/Religions/Numerics/report.html
for the report of a serious experiment that failed to confirm
the scientific claims.
So is there evidence of inspired word of God in the bible in the 'codes' ?
I do not believe that one can presently claim that the scientific method
has proven this.