The Bible Code Meets Greek Philosophy
June 30, 2010
By Bryan McCloskey
In Critical Thinking, From the literature, Skepticism in Media
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I was very surprised to see this article on Slashdot claiming that recent numerical analysis of the collected writings of Plato “will transform the early history of Western thought, and especially the histories of ancient science, mathematics, music, and philosophy” (at least their claims aren’t grandiose) — maybe I’m naïve, but I thought Slashdot could generally be trusted to vet their submissions more thoroughly than this. Apparently they aren’t the only ones not bothering to verify their subject before reporting — it was also covered today by the Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Register, Mumbai’s Daily News and Analysis, as well as UPI, Geekosystem, and ScienceDaily.
First a primer on the numerological Bible Code: The premise is that, if you arrange the original Hebrew letters of the Bible in a rectangular array, then every 10th letter, or every 37th letter, or every 15th letter on alternating lines (take your pick) spells out something interesting. Basically, it’s an example of religious literary pareidolia of a pattern-seeking brain: If given enough essentially random noise, any desired pattern (or, at least, some interesting pattern) can be pulled out of it with a sufficient amount of work. And the Bible, when rendered into ancient Hebrew (which doesn’t contain vowels, word breaks, or punctuation) and when arranged in a rectangular grid and read at any arbitrary letter spacing and direction, yields any predictions one wishes to make — the end of the world, the rise of Hitler, the assassination of Kennedy; whatever! Good Math, Bad Math has excellent take-downs of the practice here, here, here, and here, as well as numerous other places.
The Slashdot piece — and the original journal article — is claiming something similar: That Plato, the “Einstein of Greece’s Golden Age” whose “work founded Western culture and science” left a bunch of Da Vinci Code-esque secret messages that “are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.” I’m sorry, but when a university press release makes claims like that about its own researchers, I’ve got to call bullshit. Further:
The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea – the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today’s culture wars between science and religion.
Well, shit! As long as we’re not taking our research too seriously! “It also cures cancer, gets your whites whiter, and freshens your breath!” (OK, I made that last bit up.) But it does also claim that these ground-breaking results were published in “in [a] leading US journal.” Mm-hmm. Let’s just check into that, shall we?
This “study” was “published” in the “journal” Apeiron, which I’ve never heard of, but which is described by Wikipedia as covering “studies in infinite nature” [emphasis in original, and I have no idea what that means], publishing “theoretical and experimental work in a wide variety of fields within physics,” and being “especially noted for publishing alternative theories of cosmology, relativity and quantum mechanics.” Oh shit — alarm bells sounding. Furthermore:
Apeiron is applying a peer review system involving internationally established researchers, most of whom, however, cannot be regarded as mainstream. Apeiron has become a forum for “dissident” researchers and opinions not accepted by the conventional system.
Again, emphasis in the original. I did not thoroughly go through the history of the article, but there were some interesting tidbits in there (for instance, the final clause of that last-quoted paragraph was originally “mostly on the plea of speculation and fringe science.”) Also, this “leading US journal” (seriously, I know the UK has a low opinion of us, but come on!) doesn’t appear on the first page of a Google search for “Apeiron,” and it’s webpage looks like it was designed by a third-grader on GeoCities in 1996. I mean seriously, what credible journal quotes Anaximander of Miletus on its front page? Read: “I couldn’t get published anywhere reputable.” [Note: I've since found out that this article may be published in UT Austin's Philosophy Department journal also titled Apeiron, though I haven't been able to confirm it, as I can't find its articles online.]
Well, OK, let’s not be too hasty in judgement — what does the article itself have to say? Well, first of all, it’s practically impenetrable postmodernist deconstructionist bullshit. Next, it frequently tries to associate its Platonic numerology to Pythagoreanism and the Golden Mean — red flag alert! Next, the article is pretty much nothing but numerological BS about dividing various dialogues into 12ths and deriving some significance from that. It makes lots of mention of the fact that many historical authors included mathematical relationships in their writings. And it’s true that, for instance, Dante’s Divine Comedy had three 33 canto books plus and introduction, to make 100 sections; that each book ended with the word “stars”; and that the work was filled with many other numerical gimmicks and symmetries (as well as hidden literary meanings that couldn’t be safely politically expressed at the time). And Homer, Vergil, Ovid, and Shakespeare used line length (an obvious thing for a poet to do) to “encode” meaning — though I think it would be more fair to say they used cultural shorthand to convey an obvious message to their readers, not that they were secretly trying to get messages out past religious or societal censors. However, how much information do you think could be conveyed if, say, you decided at the age of 25 to have an overarching plan that contained your ultimate meaning in all of your writings for the next 50 years. If, as this paper claims, it’s in vague “meanings’ of each 12th part of each of your works, the answer is: not a whole hell of a lot.
And that’s the most surprising thing about this paper: There are no results! I mean, not a damn one result that accounts for all these grandiose claims! The paper can basically be summed up as saying: 1) Many of Plato’s dialogues can be divided into 12 sections of equal numbers of lines. If you use the right scribal copy (the oldest manuscripts for many of Plato’s dialogues are from 895AD — but that’s OK: I’m sure nothing got corrupted in 1300 intervening years). And translation. And break points. 2) Some of these same-numbered sections in different dialogues have similar themes. 3) Greek music theory used a 12-note scale! 4) Also, Golden Ratio! 5) Therefore Plato was a secret Pythagorean encoding universal truths too powerful to be exposed to the Ancient world.
“This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications.”
Yeah, good luck with that.
Sorry to say, but as a fellow sceptic I am compelled to noting that you are not doing your research here. For starters, you are attacking the wrong journal. It’s published in Apeiron: Journal of Ancient Philosophy and Science, out of University of Texas Austin (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/resources/Apeiron.php).
Secondly: “postmodernist deconstructionism”, and a link to the Sokal affair? Where did you see that?
Lastly I agree that the press release has been sensationalistic to say the least, and I will grant that the article will be controversial (although well within the scholarly pale, in my view). However, if you read it, it doesn’t claim much more than “look guys, we may finally have an interesting clue to figure out something that has been a hunch for decades. Let’s check it further”.
Now, if you are looking for bad history and bad pattern recognition, you should rather be looking at the nonsense that came out of Neoursurgery in May and was backed by SA among others (http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26).
Actually, I had already caught that journal snafu — as my appended note indicates (I had meant to strikeout the text out, too, but that code doesn’t seem to be working). I didn’t see it in the top Google results, and Wikipedia doesn’t make any mention of the second journal with the same name. It was only subsequently when reading later comments to the Slashdot piece that I noticed a full reference.
If my reference to the Sokal affair doesn’t seem relevant when reading passages such as
then I really don’t know what would. Granted, every discipline has its own jargon, impenetrable to greater or lesser extent to outsiders; but, as Sokal demonstrated, even no content can be dressed up in enough jargon to pass as substantive.
Though it seems more credible at outset (and I haven’t looked into it in detail), I agree that the brain-in-DaVinci case appears likely to be more scientific pareidolia. I’d also point out the current trend of overblown fMRI studies (our generation’s dream interpretation or Freudian analysis, perhaps), pointed out by Dartmouth’s recent dead fish study. All of these seem to be cases of “there is no there there.”
Thanks for a great blog posting.
One other problem: “3) Greek music theory used a 12-note scale!” Not true. Try to find one. Every Greek music theorist had different ideas of scales, but no standard one had 12 notes. The Pythagoreans didn’t really think of 12 as an important number, so why they in particular would use such a scale isn’t clear.
Oh, and if you read the article, he doesn’t seem to mean “scale” at all. What he actually does is take all the ratios 1:12, 2:12, 3:12, 4:12, … 12:12, and he classifies them according to whether Greek music theorists classify them as harmonious or not. A 6:12 ratio, for example, is a 1:2 ratio, which is the ratio for a musical octave. But no Greek music theorist ever took the series of ratios 1:12, 2:12, etc. and claimed that it constructed a scale, nor would they be likely to, since the number 12 had minimal importance in Greek music theory.
It’s all nonsense. I can’t believe a reputable philosophy journal would publish it, particularly given that none of the “data” in the article is actually presented — it’s all supposedly postponed to a “work in progress.”
Yeah, right. Postmodernist crap, though? I wouldn’t say so. I don’t see Foucault, Derrida, et al. running around this article. Instead, it’s simple old numerological nonsense… like the Bible Code you cite.