Shots Across The Bow

The Bible Code II: The Countdown

Michael Droskin has written a comic masterpiece, albeit unintentionally. The Bible Code II is the sequel to The Bible Code, which breathlessly tells us that there is a code hidden in the first five books of the Bible which reveals everything about the future.

For those of you who are unaware of the Bible Code, here's a quick overview. According to Eliyahu Rips, the Israeli mathematician who 'discovered' the code, information about the entire history of the world is encoded in the first five books of the Bible. The code is accessed by using the original Hebrew, removing all spaces, and treating the resulting text like a string. The text is searched for key words, using both standard searches and skip searches (every other letter, every third letter, etc.) When the key word is found, the string is broken into an array, based on the skip pattern. Then, rather like a cross word, the resulting code table is examined for relevant key word associated with the original. Rips obtained some startling results utilizing this process, results which were well beyond the realm of statistical coincidence. I don't have the math to verify his analysis, but the only paper published so far to dispute his claims is seriously flawed, only demonstrating that it is possible to fake the results Rips achieved in his original experiment.

However, whether the code is genuine or not, Drosnin's book is an amusing trip through the mind of a less than rational man. We start with 9/11, and finish with a proposed dig in the desert of Jordon to find artifacts left by the aliens who first seeded the earth with life.

I'm not joking.

Drosnin states over and over that he doesn't believe in God, that he is an atheist. How then does he explain the code hidden in the Bible, the Code that he claims predicts our future?

Aliens, of course.

Yep, aliens from another time or place came and crashed to earth, seeding it with DNA which eventually became man. He uses Francis Crick, the co-imager of DNA to back up this claim. Of course, Crick's claim that life must have been seeded since DNA is too complex to have evolved has taken a beating recently with the discovery of chaos and complexity theory, but Drosnin ignores that bit, and goes so far as to claim that not only is DNA the code of life it is inextricably bound up with the Bible code. He even suggests that part of the key to unlocking the code may be in our DNA.

In fact, Drosnin is so enamored of the idea that aliens came to earth that he claims to have pinpointed the area where they crashed, and hopes to find their ship buried in the desert near the Dead Sea.

With this as background, it is clear that this is a man to take seriously when he predicts the end of the world, coming to you in 2006. from his intensive studies of the Bible Code, he tells us that the final war will start after a terrorist attack in the Middle East.

I'm shocked, truly I am.

According to him, he ran around for a couple of years telling various heads of state this shocking news, and was disappointed when they didn't react with amazement at his ability to divine the future.

To add to the comedy, he claims to have found proof in the Bible that Al Gore actually won the election, and the Supreme Court Stole it from him. I guess the Encoder never checked the recounts from Florida.

Ok, enough with the jokes. This book is a piece of crap from end to end. Wjatever merit the original paper by Rips had is utterly demolished by this slapped together piece of rubbish. Unless you enjoy inadvertant comic relief, avoid it like the plague that will hit Israel in 2005.

You heard it here first.

Posted by Rich at February 25, 2003 11:48 PM | TrackBack