How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  Finally, at the core of the new creationists’ argument is the arrogant and indolent belief that if they cannot think of how nature could have created something through evolution, it must mean that scientists will not be able to do so either. (This argument is not unlike those who, because they cannot think of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, assume these structures must have been built by Atlantians or aliens.) It is a remarkable confession of their own inabilities and lack of creativity. Who knows what breakthrough scientific discoveries await us next month or next year? The reason, in fact, that Behe has had to focus on the microscopic world’s gaps is that the macroscopic gaps have mostly been filled. They are chasing science, not leading it. Also, sometimes we must simply live with uncertainties. A scientific theory need not account for every anomaly in order to be viable (this is called the residue problem—we will always have a “residue” of anomalies). It is certainly acceptable to challenge existing theories, and call for an explanation of those anomalies. Indeed, this is routinely done in science. (The “gaps” that creationists focus on have all been identified by scientists first.) But it is not acceptable in science to offer as an alternative a nontestable, mystical, supernatural force to account for those anomalies.

  THE BIBLE CODE

  A classic example of the misapplication of science in the service of God and religion can be found in Michael Drosnin’s 1997 book, The Bible Code, that skyrocketed up the New York Times bestseller list, received full-page reviews in both Time and Newsweek, was sold to Warner Brothers for a possible television movie, was the subject of an entire episode of Oprah, and is being utilized by the Aish HaTorah’s Discovery Seminars as proof to doubting Jews that God exists and that the Bible tells the absolute truth. Because of its cultural impact and importance, and for how similar its approach is to God and the Bible, it is worth examining its claims more closely to reveal the deeper flaw in all such arguments—the negation of faith.

  It turns out God is not a mathematician, physicist, or cosmologist; God is a cryptanalyst and computer programmer. According to Drosnin, a former journalist for the Wall Street Journal, the Bible is actually an encrypted code book filled with meaningful portents of newsworthy events: Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, and John and Robert Kennedy’s too; Netanyahu’s election; comet Shoemaker-Levy’s collision with Jupiter; Watergate; the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh; the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs; an earthquake in California; and, of course, just in time for the soon-to-come millennium madness, the end of the world in the year 2000.

  Do not bother dusting off your old King James Bible. You will not find any of these revelations there. You need a Hebrew Bible, specifically, the Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Bible Code is based on the work of Eliyahu Rips, an Israeli mathematician and computer expert who, along with two other authors (Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg), published an article in 1994 in the prestigious academic journal Statistical Science. It is a peer-reviewed journal, but the editors made it clear they were publishing it because it was an interesting statistical phenomenon and “a challenging puzzle,” not because they endorsed it.

  Rips eliminated the spaces between all the words in the entire Torah, converting it into one continuous strand of 304,805 letters (which is how the Torah was allegedly dictated to Moses by God). With this strand Rips utilized an equidistant letter sequencing (ELS) computer program: Start with the first letter of Genesis and then enter a “skip-code” program by taking every nth letter, where n equals whatever number you wish—every 7th letter, 19th letter, 3,023th letter, or whatever it takes to find meaningful patterns. If there are none, begin with the second letter, or the third, altering the skip n until a pattern emerges. It does not take long before the computer finds it: “Hitler,” “Nazi,” “Kennedy,” “Dallas,” “Pearl Harbor.” They are all there. How can this be? The only way this ancient text could “know” these future events is if it were the work of the Almighty Himself, thus the code becomes a form of evidence for believers. Is it?

  The Bible Code presents a block of Hebrew type allegedly predicting the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas (“Kennedy” is in circles, “Dallas” in diamonds, “to die” in squares). Since these sequences depend on how the letters align themselves vertically, and this in turn depends on the margin width, which has been arbitrarily set by humans, the “divine” nature of the code quickly disappears. This “margins problem” is one of many in The Bible Code.

  There are numerous flaws in The Bible Code that reinforce the point that humans are pattern-seeking animals who have a remarkable ability to find patterns even when none exist.

  1.

  The Margins Problem. Look closely at the block of Hebrew type that Drosnin claims has special significance—a field of Hebrew letters purporting to show the name Kennedy (in the circles), positioned near the word Dallas (in diamonds), adjacent to to die (in squares). The obvious problem is that the margin widths determine the type flow. Reduce or expand the margins and those alignments would disappear. The row widths, Drosnin explains, were determined by the skip-code n. An n of 10 means each row would be 10 letters long. An n of 4,772 would be 4,772 letters long. But why should this be? What is so special about a margin-skip-code correlation? Nothing. Since it is humans doing the margin and skip-code selecting, not God, this reveals the source of the pattern.

  2.

  The Vowels Problem. Since ancient Hebrew is written without vowels, they are added after the skip-code program is run. If it were English, for example, RBN could be Rabin, or Ruben, or Rubin, or Robin. Bible scholar Ronald Hendel, for example, explained: “The same word may be spelled with a vowel letter in one sentence and without that vowel letter in the next sentence. As a result of these differences, every known ancient Hebrew manuscript of the Bible—including every ancient manuscript of the traditional Masoretic text—has a different number of letters.” This is fatal for a skip-code computer program. Additionally, even though Hebrew is read from right to left, the Bible decoders also look left to right, up to down, down to up, and diagonally in any direction. If you have a name or word in mind ahead of time, just search to find it. Or you can look at the letter sequences and then find a meaningful name or word. Seek and ye shall find.

  3.

  The Falsifiability Problem. One of the tenets of science is falsifiability. In order to determine if something is true or not, there must be a way to test it, or falsify it. Drosnin provided one such test when he told Newsweek (June 9, 1997): “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick I will believe them.” Australian math professor Brendan McKay did just that, finding in Moby Dick no less than thirteen assassinations of public figures, several of them leaders of countries and even prime ministers. The results of the experiment that falsifies The Bible Code are revealed in the Moby Dick code:

  Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984, a bloody deed to be sure.

  Brendan McKay did not stop with Moby Dick. He also found “Hear the law of the sea” in the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea, and fifty-nine words related to Hanukkah in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace, including “miracle of lights” and “Maccabees.” The odds against all fifty-nine, he calculated, are more than a quadrillion to 1. Are we to believe that Tolstoy’s hand was directed by God?

  Similarly, in their book The Signature of God, which predates The Bible Code by two years, authors Grant Jeffrey and Yacov Rambsel report that they found the phrase “Yeshua is my Name” (“Jesus is my Name”) with an ELS n = 20 in Isaiah 53, which some interpret as the prophecy of Jesus’ coming. But others found that the phrase “Muhammad is my name” occurs twenty-one times, and “Koresh is my name” appears no less than forty-three times! Should we have listened to David Koresh’s ramblings more closely?

  4.

  The Biblical Origins Problem. Drosnin claims that “all Bibles in the original Hebrew
language that now exist are the same letter for letter.” All serious scholars of the Bible know this is utter nonsense. Richard Elliott Friedman, in his classic work, Who Wrote The Bible?, traces the multiple sources and authors that went into the construction of the Torah. In his latest research, carefully documented in The Hidden Book in the Bible, Friedman examines the oldest Hebrew documents to reveal that within the cacophony of biblical voices lies a single prose masterpiece that, in the editing process, had been fractured into what we know as the Old Testament. Our Bible is anything but a letter-by-letter transcription from ancient Hebrew. Ronald Hendel adds: “We do not have the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament, and all ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible that we do have differ in the number of letters.” Most biblical scholars now believe that the Torah was written by more than one individual, thus accounting for the different styles, the two different creation stories in Genesis, and other inconsistencies, and that there was a “redactor,” or editor, who coalesced the multiple writings into one tome. Biblical archaeologist Gerald Larue also notes that even allegedly original biblical documents are anything but—quotes may be from memory or a compilation of several sources, errors are faithfully reproduced from one manuscript to another, and Hebrew letters look enough alike that names and words can be easily confused with others that are similar. Concern for accuracy and preserving the original text of the Bible came nearly 1,500 years after the originals were dictated (itself an oral tradition known for generating inaccuracies). All of these problems undermine the belief that the Torah was written by Moses, as inspired by God. Without this foundation, the Bible as an encrypted code of prophecies falls apart, and with it the claim that it provides evidentiary proof of God’s existence.

  5.

  The Translation Problem. In reading Drosnin’s book in English, it is reasonable to wonder what we are losing in the translation from Hebrew. Ronald Hendel points out that the phrase “assassin that will assassinate” near Rabin’s name is more properly translated as “murderer who murders inadvertently.” Can you have an inadvertent assassination? Hendel identifies other translation howlers by Drosnin: “After the death of Abraham” (Genesis 25:11) is rendered as “after the death (of) Prime Minister”; “[Jacob] set it up as a standing stone” (Genesis 31:45) is rendered as “shooting from the military post”; and “Which she [Rebekah] has made” (Genesis 27:17) is rendered as “fire, earthquake.”

  6.

  The Prediction–Free Will Problem. In The Bible Code Drosnin tells the dramatic story that he tried to warn Rabin a year before his assassination. In his claim that the Bible Code predicts such future events, Drosnin has unknowingly wedged himself into an insoluble paradox. Consider the implications: Say Rabin took the warning seriously and changed his schedule and was not assassinated. Would this mean that humans are more powerful than God, or that some statistician can rerun the universe to produce a different outcome? Does this mean that biblical prophecies are self-fulfilling prophecies, or that they are not prophecies at all, but warnings? Drosnin tries to solve this problem through an awkward blend of pop-science, pseudoscience, and hand-waving that is typical of most of the modern arguments for God. In his last chapter—“The Final Days”—Drosnin says the Bible Code predicts that the end of the world will occur in 2000, or 2006, or it will be delayed until a later date, or it might not happen at all. Some prediction! He gets around this problem by applying chaos theory, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Feynman’s quantum physics: “There isn’t just one real future, there are many possible futures.” In fact, he concludes, “the Bible Code revealed each of them.” None of this works. Remarkably, after 178 pages of breathtaking revelations about biblical prophecies, Drosnin confesses that the Bible does not actually predict anything: “It is not a promise of divine salvation. It is not a threat of inevitable doom. It is just information.” Even Rips has cut the tether in a public statement: “I do not support Mr. Drosnin’s work on the codes, or the conclusions he derives. I did witness in 1994 Mr. Drosnin ‘predict’ the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. For me, it was a catalyst to ask whether we can, from a scientific point of view, attempt to use the codes to predict future events. After much thought, my categorical answer is no.” Does the Bible code prove God’s existence? The categorical answer is no.

  THE REAL MEANING OF ARGUMENTS FOR GOD

  All of this emphasis on proving God’s existence is as if to say: “See, modern science supports what we have been saying all along—there really is something unique and special about the Bible.” Is there? There is. The Bible is one of the greatest works of literature in the history of Western thought. It is a book of myth and meaning, moral homilies and ethical dilemmas, poetry and prose. Few works have been so influential to so many people over so many millennia. In an epilogue Drosnin admits: “I’m not religious. I don’t even believe in God.” It shows. Drosnin, like the creationists, has taken a beautiful book of literature and ruined it by trying to turn it into a book of science.

  Science and religion are, at present, largely separate spheres of knowledge divided by, more than anything else, a difference in methodologies. Science is a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation; its “truths” are provisional, fluid, and changing. Religion is the affirmation of a set of beliefs aimed at providing morals and meaning; its truths are final, confirmed by faith. Because we live in the Age of Science and no longer the Age of Faith, temptations abound to use science to bolster faith. Such attempts at reconciling science and religion always fail for the fundamental reason that religion ultimately depends on faith. The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). “For we walk by faith, not by sight” (II Corinthians 5:7). “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

  William Jennings Bryan ended his famous “Address to the Jury in the Scopes’ Case” (published posthumously as it was never delivered during the trial and he died two days later), after pages of text marshalling the evidence for God and against evolution, with a plea to “sing that old song of triumph,” faith:

  Faith of our fathers! living still

  In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword!

  O, how our hearts beat high with joy,

  Whene’er we hear that glorious word:

  Faith of our fathers, holy faith!

  We will be true to thee till death.

  O, ye of little faith. Why do you need science to prove God? You do not. These scientific proofs of God are not only an insult to science; to those who are deeply religious they are an insult to God.

  Part II

  RELIGION AND SCIENCE

  Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, III, 1794

  The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.

  Chapter 6

  IN A MIRROR DIMLY, THEN FACE TO FACE

  Faith, Reason, and the Relationship of Religion and Science

  For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully.

  —I Corinthians 13:12

  There is a certain predictable, expected pleasure in making a discovery that comes at the end of a long and ordered journey, especially when that discovery is the goal of the trek itself. Discoveries made by accident, with no jaunt planned or purpose in mind, also generate their own unique pleasures, reserved for those rare occasions when contingent sequences include us in their wanderings. As a minimalist example of the latter, I once encountered the following coincidence at the home of a friend. During a quiet moment alone I grabbed for the nearest piece of reading material and happened to pull down a 1954 edition of The Story of the Starry Universe, part of the Popular Science Library’s series of illustrated books of science for the general reader. Flipping to the final page to see what pro
gnostications were being made for the future, I read that V-2 rockets were being hurled into space with scientific instruments (instead of the warheads of a decade prior), so that the stars might be studied from above the ultraviolet filter of the ozone layer. The research was so new it was not even published yet, but the authors boldly speculated:

  Scientists are even talking about the possibility of sending rockets completely outside of the earth’s atmosphere and causing them to move in an approximately circular orbit, permanent satellites of the earth for special laboratory studies. It has been estimated that perhaps ten years or so will elapse before such a ladder to the skies will have been perfected.

  My contingent gem came later that day in the same room, when I opened the paper to view the magnificent newly released color photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope—our “ladder to the skies.”

  It may have taken four decades instead of the estimated one, but the prize was well worth the wait. In science, as in most cultural productions, time frames rarely match expectations. But there is no disputing the fact that science changes faster than religion. Compare this 30-year discrepancy to the 360-year abyss between Galileo’s 1633 indictment for the heretical support of Copernicus’s heliocentrism and Pope John Paul II’s acquittal of him in his April 1993 address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission; or the 137-year gap between Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species and Pope John Paul II’s acceptance of evolution as a viable theory in his October 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.