[geocentrism] Re: "Biblical Numerology"
- From: "philip madsen" <pma15027@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 06:47:42 +1000
Jack. When you talk of this mumerology, would it not only apply to the
original language and format of the writing. Surely the translation into Greek
or Latin or English et al would destroy any format, even though the conceptual
message remains.
Curious.
Philip
----- Original Message -----
From: Jack Lewis
To: geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 2:31 AM
Subject: [geocentrism] Re: "Biblical Numerology"
Dear Neville,
I'm a little disappointed that inspite of writing the caveat, shown in red,
twice in consecutive e-mails, you have still ignored it and lumped what I was
saying in with your conceptions.
However I do attach a warning to much of what is on the web generally as it
is seen by some as a 'band-wagon' to be climbed on. Some discernment will be
necessary when surfing the web!
So let me say yet again that the numerical phenomena that I was talking about
has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BIBLE CODES YOU DESCRIBE, PROPHECIES,
MOBY DICK, ISLAM OR ANY OTHER KIND OF CODIFIED CONTORTIONS CLAIMED THAT
ASCRIBES OTHER MEANINGS WITHIN THE BIBLE PASSAGES USED.
The following is taken from a small book that I have just read in which the
author disassociates himself from the bizarre exercises that some people have
indulged in. These have been sensationalized to the point that they would try
to override the ultimate meaning of the Bible. The two examples that I included
in my first posting are taken from this book but there are many others and many
that were not included since it was only a small book.
At the end of the book the author asks, 'Well, what do you think of it all?'
He then goes on to state: (in blue)
'You will notice that skip sequences (ELS's) in the examples of the names of
Yeshua hidden in the text of the Hebrew are not large ones.'
'You will notice that I have not made reference to obscure discoveries.'
'You will notice that no attempt has been made to predict the future.'
'You will notice that we have limited the search only to those verses that
clearly have a Messianic meaning, and without a doubt have their application in
the person of Yeshua.'
'You will notice that we have not searched for any word or name that pops up,
but have exclusively identified one single word - YESHUA.'
'Such a discovery, given the nature of the limitations placed upon the
search, and the conclusion that can be drawn, mean that the chances of such a
happening would be, in the natural, simply IMPOSSIBLE.'
The author concludes by advising: 'not to go looking for hidden messages in
the Bible. There is sufficient amount of information in the plain meaning of
the Bible (just as Martin pointed out) to ensure that the honest, open-minded
seeker for the truth, (could this be you Neville?) will discover the truth that
leads to everlasting life. Do not waste your time trying to find irrelevant
hidden meanings in the Bible Codes, but devote your time to getting to know the
God of the Bible and the truth contained within it.'
With this statement the author is clearly distancing himself from the
improper study of this phenomena. Regarding the level of authority that is
associated with these numbers, he says they are no more than a 'watermark' to
the authenticity of the Bible just as a watermark on a banknote attests to its
authenticity. The water mark on its own has no value just as a banknote WITHOUT
the watermark also has no value.
So quoting from my original e-mail:
'The O.T is full of these numerical phenomena in such a way as it cannot
possibly be accidental, therefore it is safe to assume the same applies to the
N.T. This phenomena cannot be of man's origin. You couldn't begin to find this
in any other book. There is no 'jiggery-pokery' or 'hocus-pocus' in this
observed phenomena. It's there and cannot be ignored. Both Hebrew and Greek
have numerical values to their letters. This is how the Hebrew scribes made
sure that the copies of the scriptures they wrote were accurate both literarily
and numerically.'
The association between Hebrew characters and numbers is all part of their
culture and acrostics were a normal feature of their writing. This is not
something that we can appreciate from our own culture. Attempts have been made
but they simply do not work. On looking at the link you offered and although
this was not what he set out to do, Brendan McKay proved this by his own
experiments! I doubt very much if he could come up with or devise something
that would debunk the precise numerology that I was talking about. However I am
open to consider any possibilities.
Regards to all
Jack
----- Original Message -----
From: Dr. Neville Jones
To: geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 11:38 PM
Subject: [geocentrism] Re: "Biblical Numerology"
Jack Lewis <jack.lewis@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As I see it Neville's problem is likely to be that the phenomena appears in
those scriptures that he has rejected.
Wrong again, Jack.
For your information -
Brendan McKay is a mathematician from Australia, and one of the most vocal
and tenacious critics of the Bible Codes. He has been notably successful in
reproducing the "code" phenomenon in works other than the Bible. As just one
example, McKay was the one who found the now infamous assassination predictions
in Moby Dick. The cornerstone of Drosnin's book The Bible Code is his finding
of the supposed prediction of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. In a Newsweek
interview, Drosnin made the claim that if anyone could find assassination
predictions in other works besides the Bible, he would, essentially, shut up
about the Bible Code. McKay responded by finding no less than nine similar
"predictions" in the text of Moby Dick. (So far, Drosnin has not recanted his
faith in the Bible Code.)
McKay has made debunking numerical 'miracles' almost a side profession. His
web site In Search of Mathematical Miracles (see Resources) includes articles
and exhibits related to earlier projects -- debunking the 'miraculous' patterns
of the number 19 found in the Quran, the patterns of 7 and other numbers found
by Ivan Panin in the text of the Bible and various other miracle number claims.
McKay felt that he had seen it all -- and that he had provided what were
distinctly non-supernatural, mathematical explanations. But the "famous rabbis"
experiment was something new. Here was a bona fide claim to a mathematical
miracle, put forward in the language of serious mathematics, even published in
a respected journal, Statistical Science (Witztum et al., 1994).
On the surface, the famous rabbis experiment seems straightforward. The
Israelis Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg took the names of 32 famous rabbis,
matched these names with their dates of death and birth, and checked the text
of Genesis to see if the names and dates were "coded" closely to one another in
the text. In other words, they searched the text to see if the names and dates
appeared in letter sequences spaced at equidistant intervals, sequences known
as ELSs, and how "closely" these sequences appeared to each other (please see
part 1 of this article for a more complete discussion of ELSs). To check their
results, the Israelis ran the same test on 999,999 random combinations of the
data. If the names and dates really were encoded in the text, they reasoned,
the correct name and date matchings would be much closer to each other than the
random combinations.
This simple concept led to an explosive result. In their test, the ELSs for
the correctly matched names and dates were closer to each other than in all but
4 of the random combinations. This indicated a significance level of 1 in
62,500 -- enough, it would seem, to convince even the most hardened of skeptics
that the Israelis were on to something.
In his book, Drosnin reports a confirming 'miracle:' Harold Gans, a senior
code-breaker with the U.S. National Security Administration, decided to check
the results for himself. He took the Israelis' data and added the places of
birth of the rabbis. Then he ran the experiment again, using the Israelis'
mathematical models, but his own computer program. Again, Drosnin reports, the
results were positive. The correctly matched data beat out the random data at
odds of well over random chance.
Nevertheless, McKay was skeptical. Shortly after the publication of
Drosnin's book, McKay, along with several other scientists including Dror
Bar-Natan from Hebrew University in Israel, ran their own version of the
Witztum Rips and Rosenberg ("WRR") experiment. The results, presented in the
same inscrutable scientific format as the original, were negative -- no result.
Where WRR had found results of 1 in 62,500, McKay and company, using almost
identical protocol and methods, found nothing -- only random chance at work.
What was happening here?
McKay's explanation is that the WRR experiment is not as straightforward as
it seems at first glance. From the descriptions of the experiment that appear
in Drosnin's book as well as other sources (including best-selling Christian
author Grant Jeffrey's The Signature of God) it appears that the Israelis
simply took a list of 32 famous rabbis' names, with the corresponding birth and
death dates, and searched for these in the text of Genesis. In reality, the
situation is much more complex. First, each rabbi's name was matched with two
dates, birth and death. Then, each date was entered in three formats, analogous
to representing a date in English as "1st January," "1st of January," "on 1st
January." Then, the number of names used for each rabbi varied from one to
eleven (e.g., using variant spellings and nicknames), so that for the 32
rabbis, there were a total of over 100 names. For each rabbi, they then
proceeded to take all combinations of names and dates, so that the eventual
data set represented hundreds of combinations of names and dates.
The problem is that, with the increasing number of data points, the
experimenters can "fine tune" the data set, perhaps even unconsciously, in
order to produce more and more significant results. To demonstrate this point
as forcefully as possible, Bar-Natan and McKay performed a follow-up
experiment. They took the original set of names and dates from the famous
rabbis experiment, and made a small number of changes (around 30) to names and
dates, all carefully justified in the body of their report. With this newly
fine-tuned set of data, they ran the experiment again on the text of Genesis,
and on the Hebrew text of War and Peace. The results were amazing: in War and
Peace, the famous rabbis were found encoded at significance levels of nearly 1
in 1,000,000! But in Genesis, the results were not much better than random
chance. In reality, Bar-Natan and McKay had cooked their data in the same way
that they allege WRR cooked theirs, but this time in order to "find" the names
in War and Peace. Dr. Barry Simon, IBM professor of Mathematics and Theoretical
Physics at CalTech, comments:
I've no doubt there will be loud arguments on the Internet about the
validity of each change they made, but to me the point is that the fact that
they can make this list of simple changes and turn the results of [WRR] upside
down shows that the Famous Rabbis example is totally dependent on the
particular choice of names used in a way that makes me doubt the validity of
the enterprise (Simon, 1997)
After McKay is through with the famous rabbis experiment, it seems as
though the cornerstone of Bible Codes research has been very seriously
undermined, and the whole building is starting to sway.
From
http://www.scp-inc.org/publications/newsletters/N2203/Bible_Codes_part_2.html
as at 22.05.2007.
Regards,
Neville.
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