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The Short Story of Bible Codes

I've had a couple people ask me about Bible Codes at YouTube, but YouTube -- the arbiter of all that is acceptable to say or think -- keeps removing my reply. I hope the people who have asked the question will find this. 

"I've tried three times to answer but it doesn't remain. I thought I'd try again with some changes.

"The Jewish sage, Vilna Gaon once said that all that was, is, and will be is encoded in the Torah. There was a paper on this in the 80's by the mathematicians Eliyahu Rips, Doron Witztum, and Yoav Rosenberg. They had found several codes in the Torah and took their work to Statistical Science magazine. It was the most respected magazine on statistics in the world. The magazine had agreed to publish the paper but then pulled back because they worried about ridicule. However, they agreed to publish if Professor Persi Diaconis, the head of the department of statistics at Stanford University, would approve the paper. Diaconis was considered to be the number one statistician in the world. He was also an atheist and a founding member of American Skeptics Association. He had them perform many tests and none of them revealed anything statistically significant in any other texts except the Bible. 

"After having them jump through several hoops, Rips wanted to know how many experiments Diaconis wanted. He wanted one million experiments. If they could find nothing of any statistical importance in any other text, he would approve publication. It took over three years to run the one million experiments. In the end, Diaconis approved the paper. It was entitled, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis." It covered the great "Rabbis Experiment". That was a list of 34 rabbis whose names and dates of death or birth were found encoded in Genesis. In the end, the statistical confidence level on the experiment turned out to be 1 chance in 1,694,000 that they just got lucky. There were skeptics who said wait a second and then published a paper in Statistical Science that showed how they had twisted things to get results that looked similar. Even though the skeptics admitted they had manipulated things, and that their results were not truly statistically significant, it was enough to question the legitimacy of Bible Codes. Their reasoning was that since they believed the proponents had manipulated their experiments, they could manipulate theirs too. The proponents had not rigged anything though, and their protocols were clearly outlined."

I have done several videos on this and written about it. Here are some of those videos and blogposts.

This first one is goes over the math on a series of codes I did, and it shows the impossible odds of it happening by chance. The video is entitled, "Bible Code Math, the Ultimate Proof of Divine Authorship?"


The next one covers the odds of the prophecies in the Bible occurring by chance. It is entitled, "Impossible! Bible Prophecy Odds with ChatGPT 4"


This next one is entitled, "Yes, Doubting Thomas, there is a Bible Code." It covers the history and numerous codes found in the Bible.




This next one is entitled, "New Bible Codes Video for Skeptics and Non-Skeptics."





This next one is entitled, "Bible Code Proof in One Minute."



This next one is entitled: "Shocked by the Bible Code in less than One Minute." I have included the information in the description of the video at YouTube. It is below the video.



I decided to ask ChatGPT 4 to help me with this experiment. Here is the question I asked: 
 
Me: Can you tell me anything about the statistical significance of an event with a standard deviation of 384,011.50? A standard deviation of 5 was set as being statistically significant. A priori, the event was given a zero percent chance of occurring by chance alone, yet it occurred once during the experiment.
 
ChatGPT 4: To evaluate the statistical significance of an event with a given standard deviation and context, let's break down the information provided:

Standard Deviation: The event's standard deviation is 384,011.50.

Significance Threshold: A standard deviation of 5 is set as being statistically significant.

A Priori Probability: The event was given a 0% chance of occurring by chance alone. 

Occurrence: The event occurred once during the experiment.

Statistical Significance: In statistical terms, a "standard deviation of 5" typically means that if an event falls 5 standard deviations away from the mean, it is considered highly unusual and statistically significant.

Calculation: Given that the event's standard deviation is 384,011.50, let's consider how far away from the mean the observed event is: 
 
Z-score=X−μσ\text{Z-score} = \frac{X - \mu}{\sigma}Z-score=σX−μ​
 
Where:

    XXX is the value of the event.
    μ\muμ is the mean (which we don't have directly, but can infer some information).
    σ\sigmaσ is the standard deviation, 384,011.50.

However, the critical piece of information here is the comparison with the threshold of 5 standard deviations.

Significance in Context

To determine the significance of the event that occurred once, we'll compare the given standard deviation (384,011.50) to the threshold of 5:

    Convert the threshold to the same unit:
        Threshold in terms of event's standard deviation: 5×384,011.50=1,920,057.505 \times 384,011.50 = 1,920,057.505×384,011.50=1,920,057.50

    Interpretation:
        An event that is 1,920,057.50 units away from the mean (or 5 standard deviations in this context) is statistically significant.
        The fact that the event was given a 0% chance a priori means it was considered practically impossible.

    Occurrence:
        Despite the a priori probability, the event occurred once. This could suggest that the occurrence was due to a highly unusual or unforeseen factor. (Me: That unforeseen factor is God.)

Conclusion

The occurrence of the event with a standard deviation of 384,011.50 and a priori zero percent chance of happening, yet it happening once, implies it might be an extraordinary outlier. Given the comparison with the threshold (5 standard deviations), this event falls significantly outside the expected range, suggesting it is indeed statistically significant. This means the event is not likely due to random chance, considering the parameters provided. 
.
This next video is entitled, "Bible Codes and ChatGPT." However, this is ChatGPT 3, and it is not as reliable as ChatGPT 4.



This last one is entitled, "A person has to be willfully blind to not see that the Bible is encoded." I hesitate to include it because I was quite sick when I recorded it, and I was losing my voice. I was also very upset at the time.






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