The Bible Code and Terrorism
Note: I rarely comment on current events and the Bible code. However, after 9/11, a flood of traffic on my web site and a number of email requests from anxious readers prompted me to make an exception. I sent out this article on the Bible Code and terrorism to the readers of my free Bible Code Newsletter on 9/16/01. It is still relevant today.
September 16, 2001 As we all know, last Tuesday, terrorists hijacked four commercial jets and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The fourth jet crashed in Pennsylvania. This is a national disaster, the worst in many years.
A number of people have already asked me, "Does the Bible code predict this tragic event?"
For those of you who don't have time for details, the short answer is "almost certainly not".
The long answer is also "almost certainly not". For those of you with a bit more time, I will now give an explanation for the long answer.
First let me point out that there are two kinds of prediction:
- An actual prediction of the events before they happen.
- A postdiction of the events after they happen, but using a source that was written before the events.
Most people interested in the Bible code have rejected the idea that one can make predictions of type (1). Michael Drosnin is a notable exception. In his 1997 best-seller, The Bible Code, Drosnin wrote at length of his "prediction" of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and made a number of other predictions, some of which have failed. Please note that the Rabin assassination was a plausible guess even before it occurred -- that's why Drosnin went looking for a "code" predicting it in the first place. The fact that he mistranslated the Hebrew quite badly has never seemed to bother him. But the only sensible conclusion is that he made an educated guess.
For the coming decade, Drosnin predicts earthquakes in LA and Japan, global economic collapse, and nuclear war. These, of course, are things that plenty of people worry about, so it's not at all clear that one needs a Bible code to tell us that these are possibilities. And that's all they are, even for Drosnin -- possibilities. He believes that the future is not fixed, and that the Bible code predicts all possible outcomes. Which makes it not much of a predictive tool, but again, he seems not to mind this very much. If you are laying bets based on Drosnin, you had better be willing to bet on all possible outcomes.
The vast majority of Bible-coders believe that it's simply impossible to predict events before they happen, using the Bible code. For some, the reason is theological -- this would amount to divination, which the Bible forbids. For others, the reason is practical -- they recognize that the "codes" found for various events tend to be both ambiguous and scattered among a large number of "non-codes". Before an event happens, it's impossible to pick out which "codes" correspond to which event.
However, all Bible-coders that I know of believe that predictions of type (2) are possible, and in fact are common. As an example, the famous "Great Rabbis Experiment" paper by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, published in the journal Statistical Science in 1994 presents evidence that the book of Genesis contains information encoded about the dates of birth and death of some dozens of rabbis who lived and died many centuries after Genesis was written. The paper sketched out what appeared to be a rigorous scientific study of the evidence. Five years later, Brendan McKay and collaborators published an article in the same journal pointing out a large number of flaws in these claims. Some of the flaws were tiny, some enormous.
My own opinion (and the great majority of scientists agree with me) is that the Great Rabbis Experiment is fatally flawed. However, I do agree that the approach of using the scientific method to test claims for Bible codes is essential. We scientists are just not going to accept the validity of Bible codes unless the evidence is there. (That's what you pay us for, right? To make decisions based on evidence, not wishful thinking.)
The Great Rabbis Experiment is the most prominent of a very large number of claims for encoded material on a huge variety of subjects -- Jesus and the crucifixion, the Holocaust, and the Y2K "catastrophe" have been long-standing favorites.
You'll note that the Y2K "catastrophe" has gone out of favor, for one simple reason. Nothing happened. There was no catastrophe. So nobody is making much of a fuss over it anymore, although the "codes" predicting it are as strong as ever. More correctly, as weak as ever. And that's the point. The evidence never was any good. But it was a hot topic in the news two years ago (remember?) so people looked for Y2K codes. And found them. Scads of codes, all worthless.
The moral of the Y2K codes is that you can find codes on just about anything you look for, if you look hard enough. But they don't necessarily mean anything. The code-searchers tend to be very quick to publish their discoveries, but very slow to present real scientific evidence. The great majority of Bible-coders either reject the need for using the scientific method to study the codes, or they're not competent in the use of the scientific method. Or both.
One major exception is Prof. Robert Haralick, who continues to look for the codes using rigorous scientific methods, and continues to urge code-searchers to use these methods. To my knowledge, Haralick has not actually published any solid evidence for real codes yet. Recently, it was announced that he has such evidence, but we are still waiting for a real publication. I am not holding my breath.
I agree with Haralick on the requirement for solid scientific evidence. And the real problem right now is that there isn't any. That's right. After a good fifteen years of looking for Bible codes, nobody has produced acceptable scientific evidence for real codes.
Now getting back to the question that started this discussion: Are the tragic events of September 11, 2001 predicted in a Bible code somewhere?
Almost certainly not. Why? Because long searching has failed to find solid evidence for codes on any other subject. So why expect our recent disaster, horrific as it was, to be the exception?
Rather than searching for some hidden prediction of this disaster, I would suggest that you read the simple message of the Bible. You'll find more comfort there than in any number of "codes", bogus or otherwise.
Best regards to you all,
Randy
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Note added June 16, 2002: I wrote the above last September. Since then, I've seen a plethora of alleged "codes" about the terrorist acts. Some of these "codes" are 40, 50, even 60 letters long, and they are purported to reveal details about the terrorists. Some of these "codes" even make predictions of one sort or another. These "codes" have been widely disseminated by a variety of nice (or not-so-nice) people, all of whom mean well. These "codes" all have one thing in common: ambiguity, poor grammar, and downright silliness. OK, that's three things in common. My apologies.
So let me be blunt. Not one of these "codes" shows any signs of coming from an intelligent entity. Furthermore, not one of the folks finding these codes has made any kind of attempt to find similar "codes" in a scrambled version of the text. This is a basic and elementary self-check that any scientist would make before publishing such results.
For those of you who might think there is something to these "codes", here is a simple test. Apply the "Explanatory Filter" defined by William Dembski in his books on Intelligent Design. You will find that the codes fail Dembski's Explanatory Filter. Dismally.
