How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [79]
1.
The Margins Problem. Look closely at the block of Hebrew type that Drosnin claims has special significance—a field of Hebrew letters purporting to show the name Kennedy (in the circles), positioned near the word Dallas (in diamonds), adjacent to to die (in squares). The obvious problem is that the margin widths determine the type flow. Reduce or expand the margins and those alignments would disappear. The row widths, Drosnin explains, were determined by the skip-code n. An n of 10 means each row would be 10 letters long. An n of 4,772 would be 4,772 letters long. But why should this be? What is so special about a margin-skip-code correlation? Nothing. Since it is humans doing the margin and skip-code selecting, not God, this reveals the source of the pattern.
2.
The Vowels Problem. Since ancient Hebrew is written without vowels, they are added after the skip-code program is run. If it were English, for example, RBN could be Rabin, or Ruben, or Rubin, or Robin. Bible scholar Ronald Hendel, for example, explained: “The same word may be spelled with a vowel letter in one sentence and without that vowel letter in the next sentence. As a result of these differences, every known ancient Hebrew manuscript of the Bible—including every ancient manuscript of the traditional Masoretic text—has a different number of letters.” This is fatal for a skip-code computer program. Additionally, even though Hebrew is read from right to left, the Bible decoders also look left to right, up to down, down to up, and diagonally in any direction. If you have a name or word in mind ahead of time, just search to find it. Or you can look at the letter sequences and then find a meaningful name or word. Seek and ye shall find.
3.
The Falsifiability Problem. One of the tenets of science is falsifiability. In order to determine if something is true or not, there must be a way to test it, or falsify it. Drosnin provided one such test when he told Newsweek (June 9, 1997): “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick I will believe them.” Australian math professor Brendan McKay did just that, finding in Moby Dick no less than thirteen assassinations of public figures, several of them leaders of countries and even prime ministers. The results of the experiment that falsifies The Bible Code are revealed in the Moby Dick code:
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984, a bloody deed to be sure.
Brendan McKay did not stop with Moby Dick. He also found “Hear the law of the sea” in the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea, and fifty-nine words related to Hanukkah in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace, including “miracle of lights” and “Maccabees.” The odds against all fifty-nine, he calculated, are more than a quadrillion to 1. Are we to believe that Tolstoy’s hand was directed by God?
Similarly, in their book The Signature of God, which predates The Bible Code by two years, authors Grant Jeffrey and Yacov Rambsel report that they found the phrase “Yeshua is my Name” (“Jesus is my Name”) with an ELS n = 20 in Isaiah 53, which some interpret as the prophecy of Jesus’ coming. But others found that the phrase “Muhammad is my name” occurs twenty-one times, and “Koresh is my name” appears no less than forty-three times! Should we have listened to David Koresh’s ramblings more closely?
4.
The Biblical Origins Problem. Drosnin claims that “all Bibles in the original Hebrew language that now exist are the same letter for letter.” All serious scholars of the Bible know this is utter nonsense. Richard Elliott Friedman, in his classic work, Who Wrote The Bible?, traces the multiple sources and authors that went into the construction of the Torah. In his latest research, carefully documented in The Hidden Book in the Bible, Friedman examines the oldest Hebrew documents to reveal