The Bible Code

So, Mindy and I were watching the History channel last night (I guess that's what happens when you become an old married couple). They had this special on the bible code. It basically had these Jewish mathematicians saying there are hidden messages in the bible, and these messages prove that it was written by God.

The basic theory is, you line up the text of the bible in it's original text into what could only be compared to a crossword puzzle. Next you try to find words and meanings the same way you do in the newspaper. The beginning of this page kinda gives an example.

For those of us living in reality, there is no statistical significance to any word you may find this way in a given text. This page uses the bible code theory on the introductory chapter of the book. Interesting what words they find. It also shows more complete lists of words they find in the examples given in the book.

After some quick online research I found that nobody has really done a quantitative study to show that these findings are truly inconclusive. After a quick conversation with Neal we decided we should devote some time to try it - it is after all nothing more than a simple text parser. Who knows if we'll actually get around to it - this wouldn't be the first project we've decided to do but failed to follow through with.