Re: The Torah Codes, Cracked OK, so maybe God didn't write the Bible.

George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Fri, 08 Oct 1999 15:25:38 -0400

Moorad Alexanian wrote:
>
> The Torah Codes, Cracked
> OK, so maybe God didn't write the Bible.
>
> http://www.slate.com/Features/codedebunk/codedebunk.asp
>
> By Benjamin Wittes
> Benjamin Wittes is an editorial writer for the Washington Post. Posted ..............................
> But the Torah codes' time is finally up. In the current issue of
> Statistical Science, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay and three
> Israeli colleagues have convincingly debunked them, and the former editor of
> Statistical Science who published the original paper has endorsed their
> rebuttal. .............................
I appreciate somebody else expending the labor to do this, rather as I would
a detailed demolition of an elaborate and superficially plausible cube duplication.
.............................
> To test whether the Genesis ELS were intentional, Doron Witztum and
> co-authors Yoav Rosenberg and Rips used a computer to search Genesis for ELS
> containing the names of famous rabbis and their dates of birth or death. .............................
Of course that would be the most important & unambiguous information God could
communicate through such a code! Why don't any of these things ever give data like
the teams & final scores of all the games of the 2000 World Series?
..............................

> But for the true believers, of course, the phenomenon was always more
> than a mere "puzzle," and they are not about to roll over. Rips was
> sufficiently enraged by Statistical Science's acceptance of the rebuttal
> paper that he retained a lawyer, who advised the journal that "the
> accusations in the article about to be published ... are untrue and libelous
> of Dr. Rips." Rips sought a delay in publication and the chance to respond
> to the critique in the same issue. .............................

I love this! Threatening to bring legal action against a scholar who disagrees
with you in a refereed journal is just one intellectual step above refuting your
opponent's argument by punching him in the mouth. It reminds me a bit of one of the
fringe guys at an APS meeting who had copyrighted his wave equation.

Thanks for the laughs -
George

George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/