Posted on 12/12/2004 3:07:51 AM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
It is not contradictory, but rather open-ended. The lone premise that God orchestrated evolution does not of itself identify the degree of randomness he ordained it to exhibit.
PS. As for the "moron" stuff, the word of God is rarely coy in the scripture, especially when describing his audience..
Hebrew is His first language?
I'm not saying God shouldn't use the word "moron". I'm saying we here in FR shouldn't use it. Especially in reference to each other. Remember, the RATS consider everyone here a moron. We don't want to echo their sentiments, do we?
If it was that obvious, you wouldn't have so many people questioning it, and so many of it's defenders screeching about how the only reason it's questioned is because of religion.
This is a great read on the subject - Code Breaker
ARTICLE EXCERPT FOLLOWS:
Deciphering the Yeshua Codes
At Isa 53:12, 67th letter, with a skip of -20, the following 16-letter sequence occurs:
Translation = I desire/lust after treachery/fraud, Jesus is my violent name
The Significant Index for the above is 1/439,482,767,272,900 (one chance in 439 Trillion)
The word * * "I desire/lust" It is the 1st person common singular Polel imperfect of the Biblical Hebrew word * * [BDB, p. 1003].
* * = *ma'al*--(noun) "treachery, embezzlement, deception, fraud" [Alcalay, 1420; BDB, 591].
* * = *Yeshua'*--Jesus
* * = *shemi*--"my name"
* * = *'az*--(adjective)--"strong, powerful, mighty, fierce, violent, courageous" [BDB, 738; Alcalay, 1875].
In Gen 40:5 beginning with the 44th letter, Skip distance = -5556, Dr. Price found:
Translation: "God (is) an abomination and a diviner."
Significant Index = 1/31,518.30 (one chance in 31,518)
* *--"God" (the one true God of Israel) [BDB 42]
* *--noun masc. sing. "detestation, detestable thing" [BDB 1054]
* *--"and"
* *--"diviner" [BDB 890; cf. Deut 18:10]
These above finds took Dr. Price a very short time to locate and I have no doubt that he could find many more positive and/or slanderous ELS phrases if he thought it was required.
He has now shown the ELS Phrase phenomenon to be a random occurrence that happens in all literature. There is nothing special about the mathematical significant occurrences in the bible good or bad.
The Famous Rabbi's Experiment
We have one last item to look at: The famous Rabbi's experiment that started off modern interest into this topic
In 1994, a team of Israeli mathematicians found in ELS 64 names of the most famous Jewish Rabbis and Sages from between the years 1 AD and 1000 AD. They also found the date of birth or the date of death for each one in ELS in a compact area of the original Hebrew text of Genesis. This data was published in the Journal of Statistic Science 1994, Volume 9, No. 3, 429-
The mathematicians calculated the chances that this would happen were less than one chance in two and a half billion.
Dr. Price ran a search on an 800 Hebrew letter string in the original text in the book of Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12. He programmed his computer to search for 9,060 Hebrew words with at least 3 letters or more per Hebrew word within the 800-letter string. When the computer finished the search it found 5,903 of the 9,060 words he was looking for with many words appearing more than once. When all of the 5,903 words plus all the duplicate ELS finds were added the computer found a total of 160,650 Hebrew words in ELS within the 800 letter Hebrew string.
Dr. Price's Isaiah experiment:
In the 15-verse segment of Isaiah (52:13 to 53:12) I ran an exhaustive search of all the words in the Hebrew Bible at least 3 letters long. The following is the result:
Number of verses--15
Number of words--202
Number of letters--800
Total number of words searched--9060
Number of different words for which at least one ELS was found--5903
Total number of ELS's found 160,650
All the ELS's were totally confined within the 800-letter matrix, so the maximum possible skip distance was 265. Thus this segment contains ELS's for 65% of all the words in the Bible.
All 58,738 completely fit within the matrix of 459 letters. So the maximum possible skip would have been 153.
This reminds me of Sagan's only work of fiction, "Contact", in which he used pi for just this purpose. Imagine! Sagan, from Ithaca!
I'll bet his novel caused billions and billions of scratched heads cosmos-wide. (Admittedly, Douglas Adams' work may have cause even more.)
Unfortunately, the question of the universe was "What is 6 times 9?" so the answer is wrong! ;-)
Nope. It's 7 ....... Big Ben.
This has been around for quite some time. It was discovered by some scholars in Israel who were studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. They ran the texts--Hebrew letters correspond to numbers-- into a computer and found geometric matrices all over the text, like a 'word-find' puzzle. The matrices change depending on how many figures yoo assign to a particular row. It sounds far fetched at first, until you start to run the probabilities. Then, the chances of random occurrence become too lopsided to ignore.
These matrices include Messianic references threaded throughout books such as Isaiah and the Psalms. It's real.
As far as concrete proof, that's going a little far. Concrete proof won't happen until Jesus comes again. It's a pretty clear slap on the face to the more analytical among us, though.
I will warn you, that if you Google this subject, you will find lots of flaked out goofiness along with the legit. Plus lots of skeptical crap.
That about sums it up for me too. I hear His voice everyday through prayer and reading His Word in my own language. I don't see what the big deal is about some codes, even though I think they're real.
Well, I was merely attempting to adopt the typical tone of the scripture. Here is a deconstruction of my phrasing:
1) "Evolution": The presumption is that God would prophesy the contemporary term, in order to underscore his omniscience.
2) "is obviously": Being that this is a revelation passage, God would underscore the self-evident clarity of the pronouncement.
3) "real": Ahhh, but here we have some characteristic ambiguity. What precisely does "real" mean? Does it mean it really happens, or just that it was made to appear real, or some other quality of realness altogether?
4) "you morons": God frequently underscores the limitations and insubordinacy of his audience, usually in the bluntest of terms. Of course this would probably translate more along the lines of "oh ye foolish children" or something like that. This would presumably be intended to amplify the general point that believers should not distract themselves with frivolous digressions at the expense of more imperative concerns.
5) "and I planned it": Well, this one's fairly obvious. He is of course crediting himself with the totality of existence. More importantly, he is conveying that there is a reason for everything, even if you can't figure out and think that there's a much less convoluted means to his omnipotent ends.
6) "that way!": Ahh, but here's the rub, again. What exactly is "that way" and what does it signify. The same dilemma we face at interpreting "real" .. it's not an accident, OK, but what is it really!
Yes, that is true, but if God made such a statement it would be patently obvious to him. In case you haven't noticed in the scripture, God routinely states things to be absolutely self-evident that to us do not appear that way in the slightest..
That's pretty interesting. I'll check that out. I certainly don't want to advocate something and attribute it to God if it isn't. There's plenty of other stuff that I KNOW is from God.
Is it Ecclesiastes that says something like "there is nothing new under the sun"... when, in fact, there is. The progress of scientific explanations of the universe is, in fact, "new under the sun".
And I'm not talking about cars or tall buildings (which can possibly be inferred from vague hints in Nostradomus and elsewhere) but to actual new scientific ideas and formulations, such as this:
Matter tells space how to bend; space tells matter how to move.
(To use another example.)
Nope it'a 21. Julius Jones. ;o)
Absolutely. He's pretty bold about it too. When I'm confronted that way, I find that I had better presume my ignorance rather than His inaccuracy. Over time, I eventually find the deeper truth and see it from His perspective.
Bible Code is pure BS and nothing more. Just a way for someone to make a ton of money.
Not if he was the Anti- Christ (sort of kidding)
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