By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, June 4, 2003

Michael Shermer has an interesting article in the June 2003 issue of Scientific American on probably one of the most pointless book sequels ever -- The Bible Code II which is currently riding the New York Times bestseller list. For those unfamiliar with Michael Drosnin and his first book, The Bible Code, Shermer provides a short summary of Drosnin's method,

According to proponents of the Bible Code--itself a subset of the genre of biblical numerology and Kabbalistic mysticism popular since the Middle Ages--the Hebrew Pentateuch can be decoded through an equidistant-letter-sequencing software program. The idea is to take every nth letter, where n equals whatever number you wish: 7, 19, 3,027. Print out that string of letters in a block of type, then search left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, and diagonally in any direction for any interesting patterns. Seek and ye shall find.

In other words, turn the Bible into one giant word search and then look for words that supposedly prophesied recent events.

Dave Thomas (the physicists not the dead Wendy's founder), has a blistering looking at just how foolish Bible Code-style efforts are. As Thomas notes, this can be done to any text to produce pretty much whatever the person doing the looking wants to see.

Thomas applied that method to The Bible Code itself to produce this message hidden in the text of Droslin's first book,

"THE BIBLE CODE IS A SILLY, DUMB, FAKE, FALSE, EVIL, NASTY, DISMAL FRAUD AND SNAKE-OIL HOAX."

As Droslin notes, this in and of itself is enough to falsify Droslin's claims for the gullible who still believe it (emphasis added),

What does the puzzle above prove? It shows, once again, that detailed interlocking puzzles for ANY desired message can be harvested from ANY text, and not just from the Bible. This directly contradicts Drosnin's false assertion from his first Bible Code book: "Consistently, the Bible Code brings together interlocking words that reveal related information. With Bill Clinton, President. With the Moon landing, spaceship and Apollo 11. With Hitler, Nazi. With Kennedy, Dallas. In experiment after experiment, the crossword puzzles were found only in the Bible. Not in War and Peace, not in any other book, and not in 10 million computer-generated test cases."

Still, I predict that this will hardly stop Droslin from scoring more success with the inevitable Bible Code III in a few years.

Sources:

Codified Claptrap: The Bible Code is numerological nonsense masquerading as science. Michael Shermer, Scientific American, June 2003.

The Bible Code. Dave Thomas, New Mexicans for Science and Reason, undated. Accessed: June 4, 2003.

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