The Bible Code: Fact or Fake?
A Review Of: The Bible Code: Fact or Fake?, by Phil Stanton
Phil Stanton doesn't believe in the Bible code. He tells you that on the first page of Chapter One. The problem is that he defines the Bible code to be what Michael Drosnin preaches. Now, it's certainly true that Drosnin's book is a piece of intellectual puffery. I know of no scientist who endorses Dronsnin's version of the Bible code.
But that leaves two questions: Why doesn't Phil Stanton attack Drosnin based on science? And why doesn't Stanton look at the other approaches to the Bible code, and especially the Great Rabbis Experiment of Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg?
There are any number of grounds to attack Drosnin's ideas based on technical issues. Drosnin's book makes dozens of bold claims with rarely a nod to statistics and Biblical scholarship (and even then he's often wrong). But Stanton says nothing about any of this. Instead, he bases most of his argument on the "fact" that the original Bible had vowels in it, whereas the Bible used by Drosnin has none. Really? Says who? Stanton provides us no evidence to back up this strange claim.
To be sure, Stanton makes other lines of argument. For example, on pages 52 and 53, he takes on Drosnin's claim that quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle back up the idea of many possible futures and indeterminate predictions in the Bible code. Drosnin is being rather goofy here, but Stanton chooses to attack quantum mechanics rather than Drosnin. He argues that if quantum mechanics is true, then Drosnin is vindicated! This is news to the thousands of physicists who understand quantum mechanics (and this reviewer is one of them). All of us believe in the uncertainty principle; none of us believe Drosnin's claims.
Stanton does take time out from Drosnin to consider the work of Yacov Rambsel on pages 59 and 60. He hasn't got a lot to say about Rambsel, though he does manage to consistently misspell his name as "Ramsbel." Also, he gets a little miffed at Rambsel for printing his Hebrew codes with vowels in them, without noticing the logical fallacy of doing so. At least, Stanton sees a fallacy. Nobody else does, to my knowledge.
Stanton sees the Bible code as a grand conspiracy. It's Satan's plan to divert attention from the message of the Bible by promoting a secret code allegedly found in the Bible. There is no more evidence for this conspiracy than the "vast right-wing conspiracy" of yesteryear, or the Illuminati conspiracy of a decade ago, but never mind that. The less evidence for a conspiracy theory, the more that validates the theory in the minds of its believers.
I can't recommend this book. But if you want to buy it, well, it's your money.
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