Proof of God from Coincidences in Bible and Hebrew

Updated thru 11/5/2015

I was presented with an alleged statistical ‘proof’ that Hebrew or the Bible has encoded information. 

I would urge the reader to be extremely skeptical of claims of codes or coded information in the Bible /Hebrew. Confirmation bias, data mining, coincidence, improper use of statistics, wishful thinking, data manipulation (accidental or otherwise), retroactive fitting, backed into figures or information and other problems can lead to false conclusions. Before we can accept the encoded claims we must have a large group of statisticians, scientists, Bible and Hebrew experts  review the presentation to determine if there are potential flaws. 

I will present an actual example found in the ‘proof’ and  raise a few  significant questions.  But there are many others questions to be resolved - just ask an objective statistician. I will then  provide an English  counter example and an amazing coincidence in English.

Here is a sample example in the ‘proof’: 

Consider a day. It has 24 hours or 24*60*60 = 86,400 seconds. The frequency is defined by the “proof” as  1/(number of seconds) = 0.000011574. The logarithm( using base e) of the frequency is -11.3667

The same can be done for month or year or in fact any period of time. The ‘proof’ uses only  day, month, year.

The  Hebrew word for day is Yom and  can be spelled  yud, vav, mem. Each Hebrew letter has a numeric value per a chosen gematria table.  Using one of the Hebrew gematria tables and adding of the numeric values of Yom gives 56. 

Day - Yom has Gematria value =  56 ,     Frequency = 1.1574* 10^(-5) and  log frequency =  –11.3667

For the Hebrew word for month and year we have these respective  values: 

Yerach (month)     218            3.9194*10^ (-7)         –14.7521
Shanah (year)        355             3.2661* 10^(-8)          –17.2371

The ‘proof’ then uses log (base e) of the frequency as the independent variable and Hebrew word gematria value is the dependent variable. All this really means is find the best  fit of line thru the 3 points. After doing the math it is found the(two tail)  significance level is .0255 and R squared .998. A  high R squared (or rather the square root of R square close to plus or minus 1) means there is a very strong linear correlation between the independent and dependent variable. This can mean, but does not always mean there is a  relationship between the two variables. Often the used  significance cut off is .05 and since .0255 is less we may ‘accept’ the fitted equation as providing some information as long as other statistical validations have been performed.  In the example presented to me they were not.  Nor do I think such validations would be meaningful with only 3 data points.  Also, since the claim is being made for supernatural  we would desire a significant cut off value not of .05, but something much much lower. 

Because there are often different Hebrew words and spellings to represent  a particular thing we are faced with a problem which Hebrew words and spellings to select.  Chadush is the overwhelming word for month used in the Torah, yet for some reason the ‘proof’ uses Yerach. Why ? Why did not the proof also use the Hebrew word for week i.e week, month, year or perhaps day, week, month, or day week month year etc: ? Was  it because only three Hebrew words for day month year and the odd choice of the Hebrew word for month gave the ‘amazing’ result ? Don’t let the facade of Statistics fool you, because it is possible to deceive yourself and others with Statistics.

For my example I will use Day Week Month, a logical sequence. Other than that I use exactly the same procedure as the alleged proof.

This website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology has a table having a correspondence of English 

Letters and numbers as follows.  

1 = A, I, J, Q, Y
2 = B, K, R
3 = C, G, L, S
4 = D, M, T
5 = E, H, N, X
6 = U, V, W
7 = O, Z
8 = F, P

After assigning the numbers to English letters,  add up the numbers to give the English Gematria value.
If I did all the math correctly these are the figures:

Day, Week, Month would give 6,18,25 as the respective English Gematria values.

The respective log frequencies are calculated like the ‘proof’. Day and Month are given in the ‘proof’‘ For week - multiply the  month frequency by four and takes it’s log. Gives -11.3667, -14.7521 , -17.2371 for Day, Week, Month log of the frequencies. 

Performing the exact same calculation as in the example the R square is .998 and this compares very well with the ‘proof’ example’s value.  The significance level is .0296, again very close to the ‘proof’ level.

{eta 11/5/2015 I redid my example using month frequency as one seventh of the day frequency and still calculated a high R square at .996 and a significance of .041, still under .05} 

My example is superior because  the English words are unique, leaving no choice to massage the spelling or letter choices nor the descriptive word. 

I have presented only one example of statistical proof  for English being Divine (tongue and cheek) and there are likely many others such examples. It would not at all be surprising if amazing English Gematrias , coincidences, word relations, ‘amazing statistical findings’ can be found using English or just about any other language.  If one looks hard enough in Hebrew (or virtually any language) you will be able to ‘find’  them one way or another. All the examples that failed are discarded and only the successes are presented. This not only misleads regarding the probabilities but fools the ignorant. 

P.S. The Homosapian has an English Gematria of 46 and they have 46 chromosomes !

Related posts  Proof of God from Gematria Proof of God from Hebrew

Continued here Proof of God from Coincidences in Bible and Hebrew Part 2