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195 of 231 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
C'mon people, let's THINK here!, December 12, 2001
This review is from: The Bible Code (Paperback)
A christian friend of mine challenged me to read this book. Apparently, he thought I would run straight to church upon completing it. Well, I skipped over the boring parts (which was most of it) and went straight to Drosnin's amazing discovery. I knew there was something wrong with Drosnin's code, but not being a mathematician or statistician, I was unable to quite put my finger on it. It seemed to me as if the people using the code were manipulating it to yield the results they wanted. Like a street hustler would in a shell game.
So, I used the same computer technology that "enabled" Drosnin to discover the extant of the "prophetic" powers of his code to find rational antidotes to this obvious hogwash. I got on the world wide web and found several good and rational refutations of Drosnin. Keith Devlin, Dean of Science at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California was the nicest and most generous of Drosnin's opponents.
Despite the fact that Drosnin has claimed that mathematicians have verified that he is onto something he cannot name one. I then tried to prove his point for him and found nothing to support this claim. To the contrary, what I found was mathematicians who said that it is no surprise that the Hebrew Bible spells words when you use a rather rudimentary and common encryption technique known as the "equal letter skip" It works like so: you start at the letter skip a fixed number of letters until you spell a word. Start with the first occurance of the letter "t" (rather the hebrew equivilant) in genesis, skip 49 letters and you come to an "o", skip another 49 letters and you come up with the letter t another 49 and you get h. Marvel of marvels you have the Hebrew word for Torah spelled out in the Hebrew bible. Suprising? Not really. In fact, it is to be expected. Just as mathematical probability says that if you flip a coin enough times, you are going to get 3 heads in a row, or 4 tails in a row. It just isn't surprising or even interesting: when you are allowed to pick the number of letters you can skip and you search through all of the thousands of verses of the Bible for pronouncable words, you are far MORE likely to find words, by several orders of magnitude, than you are to NOT find words.
The paragraph above is paraphrased from Devlin's interview on NPR the year after The Bible Code came out. According to Devlin, the odds are "extremely high" that Drosnin would find apparent messages in the OT, just as he and other mathematicians found the exact same messages imbedded in Moby Dick and War and Peace. An engineer friend of mine (you may be aware that engineers have to take math and stats classes ad nauseum) said that the only way that this would be a newsworthy event is if they DIDN'T find pronouncable words and phrases in the Torah. In that case, they would have beaten astronomical odds.
Drosnin wrecked his credibility by challenging skeptics to find seemingly prophetic words in other works of literature, and they did. Moby Dick revealed all of the same things, and other things that the Bible did not. They used Drosnin's software on an issue of the Wall Street Journal in which the word "Torah" appeared over 15,000 times. They also ran the Old Testament through Drosnin's software and found that the Bible states that the "CODE IS BUNK" and "DROSNIN FRAUD". The Hebrew Torah also yeilded "DARWIN WAS RIGHT" (my personal favorite).
The final nail was hammered into the coffin of Drosnin's credibilty when he appeared on NPR saying that he didn't even believe in God, but rather believed that extraterrestrial aliens put the encoded predictions and prophecies in the Hebrew Bible.
Please.
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49 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The BIBLE CODE, December 29, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: The Bible Code (Paperback)
Nothing but BUNK.... Back in 1995, five writers from Israel claimed that by performing statistical analyses of the Bible, they were able to uncover secret prophecies that predicted events in modern times, such as the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. These writers claimed to use scientific statistical techniques, but all they really did was play the childish game of taking the Bible and taking letters out every so often, seeing what kinds of words might come out of the mix. They claimed that they found their prophecies as a result, and this book was written to explain them. How well do the claims of this book hold up to scrutiny? Not surprisingly, they're easily shown to be completely false. Don't take my word for it, though. Listen instead to the experts in statistics who exposed the Bible Code hoax. Researchers Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, Gil Kalai and Brendan McKay published an article in the journal Statistical Science, edited by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in which they proved the Bible Code to be non-existent. There is no single, agreed-upon original Bible. Even the oldest version of the Bible varies from one another. Therefore, any attempt to pick out, for example, every 5th word would be different for each Bible. Besides, even these versions of the Bible are not the original texts, but highly edited versions of more ancient works. - The procedures followed by the Bible Code team were not in compliance with scientific standards because they were repeatedly changed with the goal of finding a code. Such statistical tuning can eventually find a few apparently meaningful codes in any long book, but for every such coherent fragment there is a huge amount of gibberish. The focus on the tiny bit of apparent coherence to the detriment of the huge amount of nonsense is a biased attempt to interpret white noise into a supposedly divine message. Basically, what the researchers are saying is that if you let a two-year-old bang away on a keyboard for long enough, some words that appear to have meaning will be accidentally typed. That doesn't mean that there is any secret keyboard-banging code that the two-year-old was trying to get out. The Bible Code team started out trying to find patterns of certain kinds but not of others. For example, they tried to find the birth and death dates of famous rabbis, but didn't do the same for other figures in popular culture, like the Beatles. By starting out with the goal of forcing these particular names out of the text and not giving up until the goal was achieved, the Bible Code team missed a huge amount of other coincidental wordings that would by far drown out the supposed prophecy. With enough work, a person could find a so-called code to find prophecies about Big Bird and Snuffleupagus in the Bible. In sum, a huge majority of scientists and mathematicians agree that the Bible Code is nonsense. Why would you go out and buy this book knowing that it doesn't measure up to even the most basic professional standards of reason and logic? Well, it might be because you really want to believe that the Bible has some kind of secret divine message for you. That's telling, because it's exactly the same motivation that led the writers to concoct their ridiculous scheme. This book is an exercise in blind faith in religion. It's not science. If you want to read religion, go look in the religion section, but leave this piece of bunk where it belongs.
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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not Credible, February 15, 2003
This review is from: The Bible Code (Paperback)
The first thing you must know about this book is that the author - while claiming to be a journalist (he makes this claim many, many times, as though insecure about his credibility) - cites *no* sources for any of the "research" he quotes claiming that this Bible Code is real. There are no footnotes; no references to any published documents; no journals or page numbers to cross-check. This alone should raise tons of red flags among any sensible and intelligent reader. Secondly, Drosnin contradicts himself many times throughout the book. Here's only one example. On page 55 he states that "Atomic Holocaust" apprears only once in the Bible code, and he links it with the dates 1995-1996. On page 126 he agains cites reference to "Automic Holocaust", stating this occurance is the "only time it is encoded inthe Bible", yet he cites it with a completely different date, 2006. First, why are there two seperate references to "automic halocaust", if there is only one occurance? Secondly, how can either be credible if there is more than one reference to a date? And since the same Hebrew letters are used for both text and numbers, couldn't you pull *any* date out of the text if you really want to? This is frightening stuff, not because the Bible has a hidden code, but because so many people are duped by this. We want desperately to know what will happen in the future, without regard for our own personal consequences or our own personal relationship to God. Hal Lindsay proved the gullibility of society in the 70s with his "Late Great Planet Earth" nonsense. He even went so far as to predict the Second Coming of Christ (something the Bible is VERY clear cannot be known by anyone except the Father - even Jesus doesn't know the date, so how did Hal get it??). Lindsay's legacy in the church is still being felt: self-centeredness, abandonment of missions, fixation with quasi-science rather than concern for lost souls. (And Hal is still pedalling his garbage today, much to my amazement.) Mr. Drosnin's book belongs in the circular file. His writing is atrocious, and his journalistic integrity is nil. The Bible has alot to say about the human condition and God's remedy for our sin - read it. The Bible Code is science-fiction. If that's all you're after, go out any buy some Asimov. Isaac may have been hopelessly humanistic, but at least the man could write.
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