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By Root 500 0

must simply live with uncertainties. A scientific theory need not account for every anomaly in order to be viable (this is called the residue problem—we will always have a “residue” of anomalies). It is certainly acceptable to challenge existing theories, and call for an explanation of those anomalies. Indeed, this is routinely done in science. (The “gaps” that creationists focus on have all been identified by scientists first.) But it is not acceptable in science to offer as an alternative a nontestable, mystical, supernatural force to account for those anomalies.

THE BIBLE CODE

A classic example of the misapplication of science in the service of God and religion can be found in Michael Drosnin’s 1997 book, The Bible Code, that skyrocketed up the New York Times bestseller list, received full-page reviews in both Time and Newsweek, was sold to Warner Brothers for a possible television movie, was the subject of an entire episode of Oprah, and is being utilized by the Aish HaTorah’s Discovery Seminars as proof to doubting Jews that God exists and that the Bible tells the absolute truth. Because of its cultural impact and importance, and for how similar its approach is to God and the Bible, it is worth examining its claims more closely to reveal the deeper flaw in all such arguments—the negation of faith.

It turns out God is not a mathematician, physicist, or cosmologist; God is a cryptanalyst and computer programmer. According to Drosnin, a former journalist for the Wall Street Journal, the Bible is actually an encrypted code book filled with meaningful portents of newsworthy events: Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, and John and Robert Kennedy’s too; Netanyahu’s election; comet Shoemaker-Levy’s collision with Jupiter; Watergate; the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh; the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs; an earthquake in California; and, of course, just in time for the soon-to-come millennium madness, the end of the world in the year 2000.

Do not bother dusting off your old King James Bible. You will not find any of these revelations there. You need a Hebrew Bible, specifically, the Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Bible Code is based on the work of Eliyahu Rips, an Israeli mathematician and computer expert who, along with two other authors (Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg), published an article in 1994 in the prestigious academic journal Statistical Science. It is a peer-reviewed journal, but the editors made it clear they were publishing it because it was an interesting statistical phenomenon and “a challenging puzzle,” not because they endorsed it.

Rips eliminated the spaces between all the words in the entire Torah, converting it into one continuous strand of 304,805 letters (which is how the Torah was allegedly dictated to Moses by God). With this strand Rips utilized an equidistant letter sequencing (ELS) computer program: Start with the first letter of Genesis and then enter a “skip-code” program by taking every nth letter, where n equals whatever number you wish—every 7th letter, 19th letter, 3,023th letter, or whatever it takes to find meaningful patterns. If there are none, begin with the second letter, or the third, altering the skip n until a pattern emerges. It does not take long before the computer finds it: “Hitler,” “Nazi,” “Kennedy,” “Dallas,” “Pearl Harbor.” They are all there. How can this be? The only way this ancient text could “know” these future events is if it were the work of the Almighty Himself, thus the code becomes a form of evidence for believers. Is it?

The Bible Code presents a block of Hebrew type allegedly predicting the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas (“Kennedy” is in circles, “Dallas” in diamonds, “to die” in squares). Since these sequences depend on how the letters align themselves vertically, and this in turn depends on the margin width, which has been arbitrarily set by humans, the “divine” nature of the code quickly disappears. This “margins problem” is one of many in The Bible Code.

There are numerous flaws in The