Cosmic Codes
A Review Of: Cosmic Codes, by Chuck Missler
Chuck Missler believes in codes. Maybe or maybe not the Equidistant Letter Sequences that make up the usual "Bible code," but certainly other codes -- microcodes, macrocodes, and metacodes.
The central theme of Missler's book is that the Bible is one single unified book, and every detail, every word, every letter, was put there for a reason. Missler acknowledges that good Christians can believe otherwise than he does -- but he also argues his case rather hard.
The book is quite thick -- over 500 pages in the hardcover edition, but it's an easy read. None of the chapters are over-long. Nor over-deep. There lies the main problem with this book. It's a mile wide and an inch deep, to repeat an old cliche.
The topics Missler covers are remarkable for their breadth. Cryptology, including Diffie-Hellman one-way keys and RSA encryption. The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. The anthropic principle. Hyperspace and general relativity. A brief overview of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires. The heptadic structures of Ivan Panin. Gematria. Chinese characters. The Bible code, including a discussion of the work of Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg, Harold Gans, Brendan McKay, Yacov Rambsel, and Michael Drosnin. Kabbalah through the ages. A review of Christian typology in the Hebrew Bible. Christian messianic prophecies as they relate to Jesus of Nazareth. The 70 weeks prophecy of Daniel. Ancient number systems, including Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek and Hebrew. Holograms, Fourier analysis, error-correcting codes, DNA, models of the brain, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, the Bell inequality, Bohm's implicate order, and chaos theory. It sounds exhausting, but it isn't.
Most people would choose one of these topics and write a book on it. Missler rushes through each in a paragraph, or a page, or occasionally a chapter. You don't have time to get bored, because there's always something new. On the other hand, you don't get very well informed. Despite that, I recommend this book, if only for its bibliography. Read some of the books that Missler points you toward. Some of them may take a month or more to work through. Some you may never be able to handle. So what? Many of them are good books; I certainly wish I'd read more of them than I actually have. I also wish I knew as much about all of these subjects as Missler thinks he does.
Here, we're interested in what Missler has to say about the Bible code. Is he a believer or a skeptic? What has he got to say that's new? How does he relate the Bible code to the other "codes" he sees in the Bible and nature?
I was a bit disappointed by his coverage. The Bible code gets only three short chapters. And he has nothing new to add to the debate. Furthermore, he makes a number of mistakes in his presentation.
For example, in chapter 11, he says that every name of a rabbi in the Great Rabbis Experiment was found near the corresponding date of birth or death. This is simply wrong, and grossly wrong. The Great Rabbis Experiment merely claimed to find a statistically significant correlation between names and dates. In a few cases, names and dates were further apart than average. In many cases, they were close. Missler also claims that all the referees of the Great Rabbis Experiment have become believers in the Bible code. This is plain wrong. None of them believe. One, Persi Diaconis, is a well-known opponent who has publicly attacked the codes.
In chapter 12, Missler gives the Yeshua codes of Yacov Rambsel far more coverage than they deserve. Like Rambsel, Missler doesn't give any statistical arguments at all, instead relying on a long string of coincidences that seem to him to point to the hand of God behind it all. He argues that the combination of so many codes makes them "rise above any ambient noise level." Whatever that means.
Chapter 13 covers the dark side of the codes. Here, Missler covers the standard subjects -- kabbalah, mysticism, divinination and the occult. Then he appears to backpedal, with a paragraph notable for its mushiness in a book generally quite sure of itself. I'll quote a couple of sentences so you can get the flavor:
"It would seem that, to some extent, so far they have failed somewhat since the skeptics appear to be able to produce ostensibly equivalent results from profane sources. But simply encountering chance names or phrases are not sufficient or really equivalent."
I count six waffles in that first sentence. The second sentence, I can't even parse. At any rate, Missler goes on to talk about a paradox, which he never explains. Are the codes real, he asks, or an interesting accident? This isn't a paradox; it's a simple question. He goes on to suggest that a solution will be found by going to higher-order equations, or higher dimensions. Kaluza-Klein theories get a nod here, without explanation. The chapter ends in a muddle, and from there, Missler goes skipping on to the next topic, macrocodes.
So does Missler believe in the Bible code? I can't tell. Early in his discussion, it looks like he does. The further in he gets, the more he backpedals, until finally he throws up his hands in dismay and changes the subject.
Don't read this book if you only want to learn about the Bible code. The coverage is too flimsy to do you any good. Instead, read Jeffrey Satinover's book, Cracking the Bible Code. But if you'd like short, readable introductions to twenty or thirty of the most interesting ideas of the modern intellectual community, why then read this book as fast as your mitts can turn the pages. Which will be pretty fast, because it's all presented in a very readable form. Not always correct. Not always logical. But always readable -- except the passage I quoted above on the dark side of the codes.
If that interests you, then go ahead and buy the book. Enjoy your meal. It'll be thirty-five courses, each only a nibble from what ought to be a main course. But unless you're a very dull person, you'll find something here to fascinate you. What could be wrong with that?
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