bill@twg.bc.ca (Bill Irwin) (11/17/90)
I'm hoping that someone will be able to help me locate this excellent book I read several years ago, then lost during a move. I don't recall the author, but the subject of the book was the work of a Dr. Panin. Dr. Panin was an American citizen who lived most of his life in Canada studying old and new testament scriptures for their Hebrew and Greek numerical values. He discovered that, because each letter of the two languages alphabets had an assigned numerical value, that each word could be given a value as well. Likewise, sentences and verses had numerical relationships that were intricately linked to each other in patterns that were far from coincidental. The statement of the book is that God chose the words that were penned in the scriptures with great care so that they would form these mathematical relationships in such abundance that it would be impossible for man to duplicate, and thereby protect the scriptures from intentional fraud and accidental errors during transcription. If anyone knows of any way I would be able to get a copy of "The Seal of God" again, I would be very grateful. I once checked with a Christian bookstore which told me it was out of print. I find this hard to understand because the book proves the authenticity of the bible as having been authored by God by demonstrating that the statistical probability that it wasn't is less than one in thirty-three quintillion. Dr. Panin spent years trying to get "the authorities" to disprove his theory, but they merely ignored him. It would also be interesting to hear what others think about this theory of scripture authentication. -- Bill Irwin - The Westrheim Group - Vancouver, BC, Canada ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ uunet!van-bc!twg!bill (604) 431-9600 (voice) | UNIX Systems bill@twg.bc.ca (604) 430-4329 (fax) | Integration [Methods of this sort have been used for centuries by Jews, and have been applied by some Christians as well. I'd be very wary of an author who shows no sign of knowing this background, and claims to have invented it for himself. I recall a year or so ago seeing some articles by a group in Israel that was using computer technology to raise this sort of analysis to far higher level of sophistication than in the past. Based on their summaries, they were finding some really remarkable patterns. This isn't an area I'm very knowledgable in. Perhaps one of our readers could give us more information (even if it's just a copy of one of the old postings -- I think from sci.crypt, of all places), and suggest some references. I have real qualms about the sorts of statistics you mention, because they are all after the fact. That is, we look at the text, find some obscure pattern, and observe that the probability of that pattern is one in 10**200. But if the text were something else, there'd be some other obscure pattern, and that would have a similarly low probability. You've got to know what you are doing if you want to be sure your statistics actually mean something, and most of these guys don't. (I should note that these problems are not limited to religious texts. Many of the statistical studies in macroeconomics have exactly the same problem. Some of the common computer statistical packages have options that are almost guaranteed to produce impressive but meaningless results, and unfortunately these options are used fairly commonly.) However the studies I mentioned seemed to have found patterns that might actually be significant. --clh]