h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Thank you for the welcome. I am not an atheist and I do strongly believe in the Creator. If you took a handful of gears and belts and tossed them over your shoulder, do you think you'd end up with a clock? Or would you have a better chance of ending up with the clock if you took the gears and belts, sat down at a table, and went about assembling them using your intelligence?"

Oook, pain and suffering hearing those words...

I feel it should be almost needless to say, but your postulated intelligent creator is surely more complicated and otherwise incredible than the complicated things which we can observe. It provides no explanation; merely delaying the question.

Meanwhile, I would really really recommend having a go at one of Richard Dawkins' books. Even if you don't like his criticism of religion, he is damn good at explaining the biology bit.

My sympathies, Thorn! I know the feeling...

Welcome to the thread Len (Snowie) Baynes. We are now on post 25863 and between post 1 and this post we have covered just about every subject under the sun.


alji

Jungle_Stud

A very similar thing has been done with the novel Moby Dick (as mentioned above). It proves that you can write a computer program to give the results you want. Nothing more.



Well, obviously but the program was written to fit to the torah.



Whoopie doo. A man-made program mentions God AND hints at other intelligent life forms not of this Earth. So do many of the books on my bookshelf



Now, hang on. He has shown that a computer program is ‘contained’ within the Torah and yet he remains an atheist. Does that not strike you as strange? Or is he just tapping into a gold mine of deluded fools who will grasp at anything to hold up their ancient belief system.



Oh dear. THAT old chestnut. I strongly suggest you google something called ‘e-vo-lu-tion’ and ‘nat-u-ral se-lec-tion’ . This will explain that ORGANIC things do not suddenly jump into existence. A clock is NOT organic. There is no watchmaker.

Please leave your 18th century theology at the door. It became outdated 150years ago.

Welcome, Len and Jungle_Stud!

<>

Gears and belts aren't all that makes a clock. Genetics are a lot more complicated than that. Life is complex, but there's a complex scientific process for dealing with that.

I highly recommend Michael Drosnis's Bible Codes I & II. Drosnin tells of a computer code found in the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament. This code was discovered AND proven by a mathematician named Eli Rips. Rips, along with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, submitted an experiment titled "Equidistant Letter Sequences In The Book Of Genesis" to a leading American math journal, "Statistical Science." Robert Kass, the journal's editor and a professor at Carnegie-Mellon, emailed Rips "Your paper has passed the third peer review. We will publish it." Harold Gans, a senior code breaker at the National Security Agency also proved the code in a 440 hour experiment. Sir Issac Newton was convinced of the existence of the code and spent the last half of his life trying to crack it but he couldn't because he didn't have a computer. The reason I'm saying all of this is because IF the code is real (and it is) then an intelligence far beyond anything we could imagine created it. And since the hidden code in the bible contains historical events written thousands of years before the events happened, then does this not mean the plain text of the bible is also true? If so, then God is proven by this code. Like I said before, don't take my word for it, read Drosnin's books. Or get a copy of Statistical Science 1994, Vol. 9, No. 3, 429-438. God exists and

You couldn't write a computer program to fit the torah and get those kinds of results without changing the torah. And by the way, I wasn't sarcastic or snide in anything I said. When someone starts using such tactics in an arguement it smacks of elitism and I thought this was supposed to be a friendly website. Anyway, some of the odds of things being encoded together to make a coherent statement are like 3000 to 1. And does your Moby Dick statement have documented proof published in a scientific journal and has it passed an unprecedented three peer review? If you can't back up what you are saying with facts that I can check, then that makes me think you're tossing things out randomly because you really have no true arguement to offer. If you can point me to proof so I can see it myself I'll be the first to say I'm wrong and you 're right. And I gave my sources and you CAN look them up for yourself but I bet you won't. A closed mind is like a parachute with no rip cord: useless.

Thread-forum Tagging.
-worthy? Hardly.
The masked-ding, *Has struck again!*
bum-duhduh,-buh-duh duh, dum,daht-dah!

Jungle-stud: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/F3826750?thread=2486212 I suggest you chenge 'elitists' to 'people who over the past few years have seen creationists come and go'. Just because your comments have had some robust criticism does not mean we are elitist - I suggest having a look around at other non-religious threads as well. This IS a fun site but we also take our discussions seriously. I suggest looking at the various entries on Creationism vs evolution on the site they are well worth it.

Hi Jungle Stud,

Just for amusement I did a similar analysis to your passage above ("You couldn't write... ...rip cord: useless") as was done with the Bible Code. I removed all the punctuation and spaces then starting with certain letters and taking every 4th, 5th letter as described below came up with sequences of words. You can easily do this yourself:

Starting at the 3rd letter, every 4th letter gives "we as tin so win me ape hoe nun tools hires"
From the 2nd letter every 5th letter gives "neice is bee I can go in so"
From the 3rd letter every 6th letter gives "eat in soil sat heir let art pub".

I did a few more and got five to ten valid words in each case (and lots of nonsense words of course). With only 783 characters to play with none of these 'sentences' turn out to be very coherent but since the Torah has something like five million characters (and Moby Dick probably near a million) it is not surprising if a similar analysis with those turned up some intriguing coincidences. My personal favourite from your passage is "salt not as my tram nut". (3rd and every 7th)

F

Jungle_Stud

Or get a copy of the same journal from 1999 that casts doubt on the original article.

http://www.themodernreligion.com/comparative/christ/bible_code.htm

"Now the same journal, published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics based in Hayward, Calif., is offering an article challenging the technique it reported in 1994. The article will be published in the quarterly next week."

And,

http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html

Or in fact just do what I did and type "Debunking bible code" into google.

I look forward to locking horns with you on some non-religious topic soon.

I don't think the original Torah was written in Hebrew, I seem to recall that this language wasn't established until many years later. If we take it for granted that vitually all modern Torah scrolls are exact duplicates of one another we still have a problem-since the original Torah isn't available for comparison the point is moot. All you have is a single analysis of a finished product, but the analysis was done with a conclusion already in mind.

And isn't 'the original Torah' simply the one that they decided enough is enough. Lets stop rewriting it and just leave it as it is?

Fathom!

*waves*


az

i think all religion is bollocks!!!!
im not sayin god dont exist but im saying he did not give us religion to live life, and if he did the ones we know are not them.
christianity aint evan a real religion, jesus story is fiction with no hard evidence he actually ever exsisted, and if so why is his story the same as krishna and buddha? and others in history that we are not told about?
religion is a way of controling the human mind, and its the most powerfull of all manipulation.. and plus how can a man who was a satan worshipper and phoedophile decide what gets written in the bible? im not gna get too deep but unless u can show me hardcore evidence to proove that god gave us these religions and these so called 'word of god' stuff then bring it!!!!
dont jus say yes to religion cos sum scholar tells u sum crap about heaven and hell and all that marlarkey, study history,humanity and civilisation
and you mite find tha answers your looking for that no religion can ever answer....
think about and if u think im wrong well boi good luck to u!!!!!

Can anyone tell me if they actually read the books I've mentioned? And so far no one has pointed me to any real scientific proof of what they are saying, so I can't really take what you say seriously.The results in the experiment I mentioned by Eli Rips & co were derived by taking the names of 32 great sages, wise men from Biblical to modern times,& determining whether their names, and the dates of their birth and death, were encoded in the first book of the Bible. They looked for the same names and same dates in the Hebrew translation of War And Peace, and in two original Hebrew texts. In the Bible the names and dates were encoded together. In War And Peace adn the two other books they were not. And the odds of finding the encoded info by RANDOM CHANCE were ultimately found to be 1 IN 10 MILLION. And as I said before, this is DOCUMENTED and PROVEN. Where are YOUR references, IF you take your discussions so seriously? If you can't back up what you say with facts instead of heresay, then this isn't, as you say, a 'serious' discussion at all! And to attack what I said about the parachute was ridiculous. Attack my facts with your facts (with references) but to attack a stupid saying that I posted as a reminder to keep an open mind just goes to show you'd rather make fun of me or my intellect rather than genuinely challenge my argument. Oh yeah, FYI, AGAIN, you can reference MY facts in Statistical Science, 1994, vol 9, No 3, 429-438.

yes the original Torah WAS written in Hebrew w/ no spaces between words or punctuation.

I was very skeptical in the beginning, but to have the proof right there in front of me really hit it home. I suppose if you have your mind made up that its BS then no amount of proof I put in front of you is going to change your mind. And if you look at the articles that challenge the original experiment you will see that what they say is just like some other things posted in this discussion: unproven and hypothetical. Where's the proof guys? As athiests you must believe in the truth of math, right? Well that's what this is. It's all based on probabilities. Some say that God is a mathematical formula. Reminds me of a guy I heard of that lives in England. He experiences numbers as shape and texture and color. He can compute mathematical problems up to hundreds of decimal places in his head, and they did a live show where he proved it. But of course, ppl that didn't want to belleve what they saw claimed that he memorized all the answers. Oh well. By the same token, because I DO believe this so strongly, I try to be careful not to be closed minded myself. That's why I will google your "Debunking the Bible Code" and post back with my results. Good day.

: Well, supposing that there's a God, he must not like me very much. Doesn't hate me, exactly,_ but still does not like me very much.

*Makes faces at the sky ... and it makes faces back?*

Maybe He doesn't like you because you don't believe in Him. Seriously though, I do not believe in the God that orthidox catholics go on about. The God that you must worship in church every Sunday and donate to His church if you want to get into His heaven. The catholic church is a bunch of bs as far as I'm concerned. They have taken the glory away from God and bestowed it upon the priests, who play at being God every day. They play God when they hear confession (as if 10 Hail Marys will make up for robbing an elderly woman, for ex), when they say mass (what are they, cannibals? They repeatedly eat the body and blood of Christ daily, which is sick), and the way they are sought after to give advice and solve church goer's problems. I believe God is w/in all of us, that the kingdom is inside of us, not outside. God helps those who help themselves. Amen. Praise Jesus. Etc, etc.