What rigid coping mechanisms people deploy. Curiously, some fundamentalist Christians shudder at the thought that new truths might be unearthed from their sacred book. If they believe that God wrote the Bible, wouldn’t they also have confidence that God controlled whatever codes might exist within it?
Rigidity isn’t limited to the religious right, however. The intellectual elite of our age have a gut jerk reaction to anything that hints that the Bible might be more than a revered collection of myths. What if some of the codes were so outrageously improbable that we are left staring at the inescapable conclusion that some of them must be intentional? Perish the thought! Surely such an affront to the wisdom of this age must lack all substance. Who needs to test such a hypothesis? It cannot be true. Isn’t that self-evident? Therein the enlightened dogmas of the elite show forth their bulldog tendencies.
Many suspect there must be an infinite number of codes that could be extracted from any text. Therefore, you can find as a code whatever you are looking for. This is a neat way to take a leap of intuition and land squarely on your assumptions. In reality, the number of codes that can be extracted from the Bible is very much less than infinite—large though it is.
Whatever happened to the honest search for truth? Even though scientific testing of this phenomena is very straight-forward, there is only dogma-serving rhetoric. What differs is the breed of dogma. Is it religious or enlightened?
In the past three years books by atheists, Jews and Christians have been published on the controversy. Some Jews use the codes to “prove” that Jesus was a false messiah while some Christians use other codes to “prove” the exact opposite. This leaves the impression that Bible codes could buttress any perspective. If we limit ourselves to those few codes that are astonishing, however, this seeming contradiction disappears. When we do that, we find that many codes that have been characterized as amazing are highly likely to be coincidental—the kind you could find in about any book in any language. There is no point wasting time studying such things.
What has totally astonished me, however, is that many clusters of codes are so improbable that there is no way that all of them could be coincidental. This is my conclusion as a professional mathematician. It is also that of other mathematics professors. We aren’t talking here about opinions, but about cold, hard calculations and readily available evidence.
When something is a one-in-a-million long shot, we can still argue that long shots do happen. When the odds are less than one in a trillion times a trillion, and there are several clusters that are far more unlikely than that, coincidence fails as an explanation.
Do you believe in a Bible Code?
Originally Posted by Oh GAWD the Smell!
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