Posted on 01/03/2003 12:02:06 PM PST by Quix
[Q NOTE: Many bolds within paragraphs emphasis added. Red text at the end was in the original]
Rebutting the Skeptics' Likely Criticisms
Let's look at some of the skeptic's likely responses to what we have presented, and consider their validity.
The Hanukah Example Wasn't Intended to be the Result of Exhaustive Searching
While this is true in a strict sense, such a response belies the fact that there is a very serious limit to how many relatively improbable ELSs you can find about one topic in any text if the author of the text wasn't trying to embed them. If the Hanukah researchers were to try to expand their search, they might find a few more ELSs like the ones in their posted example. But only a few. And it is highly unlikely they could find any ELSs much longer than seven letters. And the longer the word, the more unlikely. In general, whenever you locate an ELS that is one letter longer than another, it is roughly ten times less likely to show up by chance. So, a 10 letter long ELS is about a 1,000 times less likely than the longest ELS of seven letters in the Hanukah cluster. And a 13 letter long ELS is about a million times less likely. And so forth.
Bible Code Digest's Citations of "Probabilities" are Invalid
Skeptics may argue that the only context within which a probability has meaning or validity is within a tightly controlled scientific experiment. This is simply not true. Let's start with a very simple example. Take the statement, "The probability that any one flip of a fair coin will result in 'heads' is 50%." That is a true statement where a calculated probability has validity and yet no scientific experiment has been performed. Instead, the probability was based on a priori assumptions that are well known and undisputed.
The probabilities that we calculate regarding any specific ELS when we assign a rating to it are no different in nature than the 50% probability of a fair coin yielding 'heads.'
They are answers to the question, "What is the probability that the given ELS will cross any specific, randomly selected 1,000-letter long section of text in the Tanach?" The only difference is that the math is more extensive. Just like the coin flip situation, all we need to do is apply some basic algebra and probability theory to determine what the chances are that the given ELS will show up. The math used was developed by a veteran mathematician with 27 years of experience, and it has been validated by a statistics professor.
FOR DATA ON THE SCHOLARS--CLICK HERE
[EXCERPTS OF THAT LINK: Who Heads Up the Isaac Newton Bible Code Research Society?R. Edwin Sherman is a nationally known consulting mathematician with 29 years of experience. He is President of the Isaac Newton Bible Code Research Society and Director of Bible Code Digest. The Isaac Newton Bible Code Research Society is dedicated to critically examining the odds that various code findings could appear by chance. Ed is also author of the book, Breakthrough: Encountering the Reality of the Bible Codes .
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Mr. Sherman received a B.A. in Mathematics with Highest Honors in 1971 from the University of California at San Diego and an M.A. in Mathematics with High Honors in 1973, also from UCSD. He passed three of the four qualifying examinations for a Ph.D. in Mathematics, including the one for probability and statistics, before deciding to pursue a career as a financial management consultant.
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Over his career, Ed has served as a consultant to numerous large financial institutions, Fortune 500 companies and government agencies at all levels. He has served as a senior researcher for a major financial institution for three years, as a Principal at one of the three largest CPA firms for seven years and as an independent consultant for ten years. He has written more than 65 articles in professional and trade publications and delivered numerous speeches to a broad spectrum of audiences. He is frequently called upon as an expert witness in major litigation.
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Who Reviews the Correctness of the Hebrew in the Codes We Examine?
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Nathan Jacobi, Ph.D. is a retired college professor with more than 20 years of research, development and scientific computing in applied physics, aerospace and geophysics. Dr. Jacobi received the Ph.D. in Physics from Weizman Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. He received the M.Sc. in Physics and the B.Sc. in Mathematics from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. He has taught atomic and molecular physics, quantum mechanics, college algebra, trigonometry and analysis, analytic geometry and calculus both in Israel and in the U.S.
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Dr. Reider Peterson very recently retired as Professor of Statistics at Southern Oregon University. He has twenty two years of experience as a college professor, specializing in mathematical probability and statistics, experimental design and multiple regression.
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Dr. Peterson received his B.S. at Northern Arizona University (1961), his M.S. from the University of Maine (1965) and his Ph.D. from Montana State University (1974). His Ph.D. thesis is entitled, "Estimation of a Ratio Using the Randomized Response Sampling Method." Dr. Peterson has delivered presentations at national and regional meetings of the American Statistical Association and the Biometric Society.
Bible Code Digest's Use of "Statistical Significance" is Invalid and Misleading
Here the skeptics would be resorting to a narrow technicality that they are trying to incorrectly generalize to all situations. It's more than a bit like a crafty lawyer who gets a hardened criminal off the hook by using a legal technicality. Everyone knows the guy is guilty, but he gets let off anyway.
So what kind of technicality are we talking about? Because we have made a few simplifying assumptions, it is true that the probability we have calculated is not exact. What they won't tell you, however, is that the probability doesn't need to be exact, because all we really need to know is whether the cluster is statistically significant. If your standard of significance is odds of 1 in 1,000 and you can show that something has odds less than 1 in 1,000,000, you have shown its significance. It doesn't matter that we can't tell you exactly what the odds are as long as we can show that the odds are far less than 1 in 1,000,000.
BCD's Findings Should Be Rejected Because They Haven't Reported All of the ELSs They Looked For and Did Not Find.
We have such a list (with 75 ELSs we didn't locate in Isaiah 52-53) and would be happy to send it to whoever requests it. We haven't included it in this document because it is already too long and we don't have a listing of the ELSs that either Yacov Rambsel or Grant Jeffrey looked for and did not locate. In spite of that we included their findings, with some deletions because of marginal Hebrew spellings or usage. What we have done instead is to go way overboard in using excessively strict assumptions when calculating the odds of chance occurrence of a cluster similar to the one we have detailed. We have assumed that for every ELS we did find, that there were 16 others that we didn't find. That's going to an unreasonable extreme because the reality is that we found about 80% of the ELSs that we searched for.
Only Findings Drawn from Scientific Experiments Are Valid.
Visit any good museum and you will see a collection of testimonies that this assertion is not true. Much of science consists of observation, measurement, recording and categorization-without any scientific experiment being conducted. Rocks are weighed, chemically analyzed for their composition, and measured on a hardness scale. Fossil samples are tested for age by various dating methods. No experiment was conducted, and yet science is steadily advanced by these approaches. We are taking the same approach to Bible codes. We assess them in terms of their relative rarity or commonness and also factor all of this into the odds that an entire cluster (or one similar to it) could appear by chance. By so doing, the scientific study of Bible codes is advanced.
Many skeptics would have us believe that the only way to do anything scientific is to conduct an experiment. But experiments are, by their very nature, designed to test the operation of some universal law. If Bible codes are valid, they may well not be the result of some universal law, but rather of intentional, unique placement.
To say that the only way to properly evaluate Bible codes is to conduct an experiment is a bit like saying that the only way to find out whether any dinosaur bones exist is to conduct an experiment. Randomly pick 1,000 different locations and dig pits five feet wide by five feet long by five feet deep, and see if you find any dinosaur bones. That's no way to determine whether any dinosaur bones exist. The way to determine that is to go to a site where someone claims to have found dinosaur bones and to examine those bones and dig for more. That's the kind of research we are doing with codes.
Bible Code Digest's Hebrew is Improper.
Dr. Nathan Jacobi, physicist, Hebrew teacher and 25-year resident of Israel, has accepted the appropriateness of the Hebrew spelling and grammar we use. Dr. Jacobi, a self-described secular Jew, is eminently qualified to opine on these issues.
We Couldn't Duplicate Your ELS Findings.
Our research was conducted using Bible Codes 2000 software, which was produced by Computronic Corporation in Savyon, Israel. This software uses the Koren version of the Hebrew Bible, which is widely considered the most accurate version available today. There are some letter differences between the Koren version and other versions.
If nothing else, a common sense look at the comparisons in this article should overcome these possible technicalities.
Even if you remove some of the pieces of evidence because you don't agree with their appropriateness, or we have perhaps made some error, there is so much evidence remaining that the conclusions are the same. The Isaiah 53 cluster is real.
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