Mathematics bombshell: God 'confirmed in Bible'

World Net Daily ^ | December 12, 2004

[The Loan Arranger]

For a lot of people, the Bible and mathematics are dry subjects, but not for Edwin Sherman – he believes he's found how the two fit together.

Sherman, founder of the Isaac Newton Bible Code Research Society and a professional mathematician, is convinced that the Hebrew Bible contains coded messages that are evidence of God's authorship of the Bible. His book, "Bible Code Bombshell: Compelling Scientific Evidence that God Authored the Bible," describes numerous examples of encoded phrases and sentences that are both lengthy and relevant to the text where they were found.

[Quix]

Yes, I think faith will always be required for a RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD in our dimension.

And the surface text key word crossing by key words in the Codes is AWESOME. Then there's the BEAUTY--the esthetic as well as mathematical BEAUTY of so many of the authentic Codes.

Wonderously awesome. imho.

There's NEVER BEEN ANYTHING REMOTELY CLOSE to such beauty, complexity, quality found in ANY other long HEBREW TEXT.

[Quix]

Yes, it's at the BCD site.

I don't know if it's readily accessible or not. I think I've posted their summary or more on a thread on FR but I don't recall the title. Might be searchable. They require subscription for access to some of their docs. But it's a minimal donation sort of sub. They tend to do things on a shoestring.

[Quix]

Yeah, please ping me, too.

[Quix]

The Moby Dick quackery has been thoroughly shredded.

It's a proven straw dog.

The Moby Dick codes are far below the criteria currently.

And, if I have my studies remembered right, the joker professional mathematicians invovled with that study have shown themselves to be little better, if better at all than charlatans.

[Quix]

No, The Old Testament is also God's Word.

And He took very special care of it. And Genesis is an incredibly unique compilation of Hebrew text with absolutely no parallel in many statistical terms ANYWHERE ELSE in Hebrew literature.

[papertyger]

"Jesus is the LIVING WORD." Amen to that, but bible codes are based on the old testament - a book of myths and fairy tales

How do you extoll Jesus, yet call the very basis of His claims myths and fairy tales?

[guitfiddlist]

Note the number 42. 42 months in Jesus' ministry, 42 sojourns in the desert, (Numbers 33), 42 children eaten by the bears when they told Elisha to "go up!" Great stuff!

Any Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fans out there?

The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, given by the supercomputer Deep Thought to a group of mice, is "forty-two". According to the Guide, mice are 3-dimensional profiles of a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings. They built Deep Thought, the second greatest computer of all time and space, to tell them the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. After seven and a half million years the computer divulges the answer: forty-two.

"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?" "I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

[monkeyshine]

Yeah that seemed a really incongruous thing for him to say. I'm sure he has his reasoning but it seems to be irreconcilable.

[puppetz]

I'm not saying its 'corrupted', I'm saying there was a synod where the Hebrew priests sat down and decided what was even going to be INCLUDED in the Talmud and some tracts were left in, some out, some edited, some revised, etc. etc. I don't mean the intent was corrupted, I'm saying its gone through literally hundreds of revisions, editions and copies, maybe thousands. Which version are they checking for their secret code? Does it work with all of them? Its just ludicrous what some people are saying that some of these 'coincidences' are found in the KJB, which is notorious for mistranslations and errors, undisputed by scholars.

[puppetz]

Misinterpretation of God's meaning is not the same as Him being ambiguous.

And as to my "leaving this thread", in the vernacular of the playground, why don't you make me.

[monkeyshine]

Don't confuse the Talmud with the Torah. The Talmud is the oral law written down, with commentary. It was written because they feared the oral law, which was supposedly also handed down with exactitude (no proof of this) would get lost due to war and death of those who knew it before they could hand it down to the next generations.

The Torah is the written law and so far, the notion that it has been handed down exactly verbatim is supportable - at least, there is evidence of it, while there is no evidence of any significant changes. They are, in most cases, exact replicas even including the shapes of the hand written letters. (all Torah scrools are hand written)

[puppetz]

Well you are welcome to your opinion, but this "Bible Codes" tripe is as silly as Wiccan, relics of the Holy Cross sold by midieval merchants, cults who believed the Bible fortold Rapture in the year 2000 and other trivia, and is actually a bastardization and blapheme against the true Scripture. I think the perveyors of this hoax are mistreating and defiling a truly Holy and inspired book and misleading gullible 'miracle seekers' in an effort to sell books. There's more profit than prophet in this crock, and they are laughing all the way to the bank.

You want God's secret message from the Bible: Try reading it straight up, like millions before have done and not found it lacking in messages, without the benefit of this 'magic decoder rings'.

[monkeyshine]

Yes it is possible it is not the whole work, or a compilation of works, but whatever it is it has pretty much been copied again and again, by hand, with exactitude for thousands of years.

[monkeyshine]

I think the perveyors of this hoax are mistreating and defiling a truly Holy and inspired book and misleading gullible 'miracle seekers' in an effort to sell books

Leaving the hoax part out, what you say is true to a degree. I don't think this is the way to go about evangelizing and I'm not sure it's proper to try let alone even possible to "prove" His existence.

[monkeyshine]

You want God's secret message from the Bible: Try reading it straight up, like millions before have done and not found it lacking in messages, without the benefit of this 'magic decoder rings'

If you are a believer then you believe God made us in His image. So it is only natural for us to want to become as omniscient has He. That's why I'm not hostile to the research efforts.

[stands2reason]

RIP DNA

[puppetz]

The primary objection advanced against Bible codes of the Drosnin variety is that similar patterns can be found in books other than the Bible. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is low, there are so many possible starting points and skips that many such words are expected to appear. Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that only the Bible could yield ELS, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay found many ELS letter arrays in Moby Dick that contain ELSs related to modern events. Other people, such as US physicist Dave Thomas, found other examples in many texts. In addition, Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to wrench out the desired meaning.

==GTFTG==

[puppetz]

Essentially the way that the code works is the author takes all the words in the bible, removes all spaces between the words and punctuation, then using a computer he looks at every (*)th word. He then strings these words together to try and find some connection to events that have already happened, called retro-fitting. Using this code you can find hidden messages in any book, Drosnin's critics claimed, in which he retorted " when my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them." One of his critics, Brendan McKay took up the challenge to find that message and not only did he find it, a reference to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, she also found messages about other assassinations of; President Rene Moawad, Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King, the assassin Sirhan Sirhan, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and the list goes on. But David E. Thomas dealt the final death blow came when he found the saying "The code is bogus" 60 times in the book of Genesis. What was the reason behind this book? Well in my opinion if Drosnin really did find the hidden code put their by god or some extra terrestrial he should have made it known to the world for free, but instead he wrote a book and charged people for it. This goes to show you what kind of person he is, in my opinion, and I lump him in with all the other con artists who are trying to make a buck selling their pseudoscience wares to the gullible of our society. What really caught my attention is how quickly the christian groups soaked all this crap up, I guess it is just one more desperate attempt to prove to the world that they are right and the rest of us are all going to hell. I have included some links below to give you a more indepth look at another phenomena that should have never made it off the drawing board. Go to Google, there are literally thousands of reputable statisticians who debunk this crock. Its not even worth debating, its tinfoil hat stuff, its bad as astrology and probably as harmless, except it concerns misusing the Bible and making bogus claims about it. People with so much time on their hands might start by studying the ACTUAL words of the Bible instead of trying to make them up.

[concretebob]

"old testament - a book of myths and fairy tales."

Please explain exactly what you mean by that grouping of words.

[papertyger]

I'm saying there was a synod where the Hebrew priests sat down and decided what was even going to be INCLUDED in the Talmud and some tracts were left in, some out, some edited, some revised, etc. etc... Which version are they checking for their secret code...

A little intellectual "bait and switch?" The text under discussion is the TORAH, not the Talmud.