From: Chris Ho-Stuart <>
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Is the Bible Code a legitimate Christian thing?
Date: 29 Oct 1998 00:09:26 GMT

SFW <> wrote:
> If Dr. Rips' research was deeply flawed, and thus invalid, why was it
> allowed to be published in ANY refereed scientific journal?  I notice
> Dr. Kass, the Editor of Statistical Science, isn't on your list, neither
> is Dr. Harold Gans.

Gans has no doctorate. He is not in fact even eligible to be on the
list, since the list is not not just an arbitrary list of people
with an opinion. Gans lacks the necessary qualifications.

The paper was published as a PUZZLE -- as your own quotes show.

As the editor of the journal where the paper was published, it
would probably not be appropriate for Kass to add his name to
the mathematicians statement.

Code supporters sometimes cite the following, as you have done...

> From "Cracking the Bible Code" http://www.quantgen.com/
>
> [Quote]
> "Our referees were baffled. Their prior beliefs made them think the Book
> of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful references to modern
> day individuals, yet when the authors carried out additional analyses
> and checks the effect persisted. The paper is thus offered to
> Statistical Science readers as a challenging puzzle." 
>
> -- Robert Kass, Ph.D., Editor of Statistical Science and Chairman of the
> Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University 
> [End quote]

Observe -- it was presented as a puzzle.

It is widely asserted by people who are not familiar with the full
story that publication of the original article gives credibility
to Witznum's conclusions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The article was originally published as a puzzle for readers, and
the puzzle has been solved.  In a futile effort to stop people
misrepresenting what has occured, Kass later made a public
statement as follows.

    Some people seem to think that the publication of the Witzum,
    Rips, and Rosenberg article in Statistical Science served as
    a stamp of scientific approval on the work. This is a great
    exaggeration. Statistical Science publishes a wide variety of papers
    of general interest to statisticians. Although the referees thought
    carefully about possible sources of error in the work, no one tried
    to reanalyze the data carefully and independently to try to uncover
    the presumed flaw in the logic.

    The very few public statements I have made seem to have been
    misinterpreted to lend support to the notion that there may be some
    scientific basis for the findings of Witzum, Rips, and Rosenberg. My
    personal belief is quite the opposite: the authors' work did not
    go far enough to make me seriously think, even for a moment, that
    their results were anything other than coincidental, and likely
    due to a subtle flaw in their methodology. As I said in the preface
    to that issue of the journal, the paper was offered to our readers
    as a challenging puzzle. We published it in the hope that someone
    would step forward and do the careful analysis required to solve
    the puzzle, and that the discipline of statistics would be advanced
    through the identification of the logical errors in this kind of
    pattern recognition.

    For additional information on this subject I recommend Brendan
    McKay's website.

Professor Kass' statement is available on-line at
http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/~kass/biblecodes/

At this point I would like to add a disclaimer. Nothing in the above
is a refutation of the value or significance of the Torah, nor is it
a refutation of the belief of many people in its divine origin. All
that is refuted are assertions about codes in the Torah. The distinction
is important. Much of the most vocal opposition to the codes rubbish
comes from Orthodox Jewish believers who are dismayed at having their
holy book linked to such an obvious fraud.

Here is a selection of such opinions. ALL of these are from devout
Jewish believers.

Alex Lubotsky, professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
    http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/lubotsky.html
Barry Simon, IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech
    http://wopr.com/biblecodes/
A. M. Hasofer, Emeritus Professor of Statistics, University of New South Wales
    http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/hasofer.html
Jeffrey H. Tigay , the A.M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages
and Literatures at the University of Pensylvania
    http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jtigay/codetext.html

Finally, I also include the page by Gil Kalai, of the Institute of
Mathematics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His home page makes no mention
of his beliefs, so I cannot claim him as a definite believer. His paper is
of interest because it is in my opinion a careful and damning accusation
of deliberate fraud on the part of the original codes researchers.
    http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~kalai

And a final point -- the codes, if valid, endorse JEWISH views of
the bible, not Christian views, since the encoding is of Jewish sages
not Christian leaders.

Cheers -- Chris Ho-Stuart