J6: Codes

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No Logical Future

Drosnin's book The Bible Code (Weidenfeld and
Nicholson), goes further than claiming the
prediction of Twentieth Century events. He states that the Bible code can be used to predict the future. This claim has been attacked in a Jerusalem press conference by Rips and Witztum. They accused Drosnin of using faulty statistics and of not following scientific procedure.

Why is it logically impossible to try and predict the future ? Dr. Harold Gans, a mathematician, separates the facts from the fripperies.

Drosnin shows (as Rips had done) how words with a significant historical link appear in close proximity to each other. He then, however, claims that ANY group of words found in close proximity to each other necessarily HAVE to be significantly linked. This makes no sense. For example, we can say that gold glitters, but at the same time the statement will not automatically be true if turned around: all that glitters is not gold. Just because words that are significantly related to each other are found in close proximity, as we have seen in our examples, it does not mean that all words occurring in close proximity have a significant relationship. If one makes enough reasonable predictions, you are likely to guess right sometimes - but that is all a 'future' prediction is: a lucky guess.

Added to this is the point we made above about context : if we know the context, it is easier to determine whether we are dealing with a code, but if we do not, we could be getting excited or worried about a pure coincidence. The success of the Bible code book must partly be due to "millennium fever": people have all sorts of anxieties and anticipation as we approach the millennium and a book claiming to predict the future feeds naturally into this.

Other Problems with the Code

Dr. Michael Weitzman points out other problems with the Drosnin book:

1. The future predictions are completely 'framed'. In other words, Drosnin claims that they do not only tell what will happen but also what might happen. They can therefore not be falsified. For example, Drosnin admits that he found two sets of codes predicting a "Holocaust of Israel" and an "atomic holocaust" in the Hebrew year 5756 (1995 - 1996). Neither happened, of course, but Drosnin explains that they MIGHT have happened and that something else (also in the code) prevented them from happening.

2. Dr. Weitzman is also uncomfortable with what he calls Drosnin's "queasy mixture of modern and ancient Hebrew". Not only are both used, but Drosnin also uses obscure alternatives, for example 'Ariel' instead of 'Jerusalem' or 'L.A.Calif.' instead of 'Los Angeles'.

3. Looking for codes in Hebrew is also easier than in English, because the Hebrew alphabet consists only of consonants, so that one can play around with the vowels. Besides, points out Weitzman, there are other striking coincidences to be found in other texts, for example in the Authorised version of the English Bible, the 46th word of Psalm 46 is 'shake' and the 46th word from the end is 'spear'.

What do you think now ? Certainly enough to keep you arguing for a while...

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