Recently I came across (or went looking for) an interesting article about cryptography. The piece talked about a sub-field of cryptography called pseudocryptography. This references the hunting for hidden codes in great works of literature. The practice dates back to the late 1800’s. Among the most common works to look for hidden ciphers are the works of Shakespeare and the Bible. The process begins by taking out different intervals of letters through trial and error. For example, start by taking out every 3rd letter and then every 19th letter and so on and so forth. After you have your group of letters, you then arrange them and try to make sense of them. There is no doubt that using this process will result in some logical outcome, purely by circumstance. Michael Drosnin published an entire book on how the Bible actually contains predictions of past events. Critics point out that, in retrospect, it is easy to find coincidence and twist it into something that fits your theory. Drosnin never sited any examples that predicted future events. This begs the question, why look for codes that we do not know exist for sure. Is this logical? What are the chances of finding something legitimate, or are we likely to see only what we want to see. How does human bias affect our ability to accurately decipher codes?
This doesn't seem logical, as you can take any random sequence of letters and have it make some sort of sense. It doesn't seem like a very methodical way of going about finding codes, and definitely can be twisted to fit what the analyst wants to see.
ReplyDeleteWait, is this article supposed to be about the bible codes? Because they already proved those were fake.
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