As I flipped through channels over the weekend, I stopped on the History Channel long enough to catch a beginning part of the show about the Bible Code. If you’re not familiar with the idea, the Bible Code is a hypothesis that there are hidden messages in the original text of the Bible.
The people I saw on the show of course were “experts” who apparently claim there are very good predictions, and that the odds of such predictions being present are small enough to justify their hypothesis.
Outside the context of the show, the “predictions” are of course pretty laughable. One, if I recall correctly, was the prediction of the successful 1969 Apollo missions which landed man on the moon. The code “prediction” was “moonlanding… spaceship.”
Seriously, “moonlanding… spaceship” was a “prediction.”
The guy who wrote the book, The Bible Code is quoted on Wikipedia as saying, “I don’t think the code makes predictions. I think it reveals probabilities.” In other words, the “experts” of the Bible Code think up things that could, or already did, happen. Then they run algorithms on their computers until they find “evidence” that supports the possibilities they thought up. Voila! Success!
