The conference, which had its opening ceremonies June 6 and proceedings all day June 7, was the first meeting of the new Rational Feminist Alliance of CSICOP. The Alliance was founded last year to explore issues arising from the irrational impulses of feminism.

The conference was also the first official event sponsored by the new Center for Inquiry-Rockies, a new regional center of CSICOP. (Cosponsors were the Rocky Mountain Skeptics, the UC Boulder anthropology department, and CSICOP.) This Center will be under the directorship of Bela Scheiber, founder of the Rocky Mountain Skeptics and a member of CSICOP’s Executive Council, and Carla Selby, proven skeptical activist. Scheiber and Selby also served as conference co-chairs. The Center for Inquiry-Rockies joins other regional centers in Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as the CSICOP headquarters in Amherst, New York (Center for Inquiry-International), and a center in Moscow, Russia. The primary objective of the new Rockies center will be to actively promote critical thinking and rationality in the region through conferences, informal meetings, workshops, and interaction with the media.

Opening remarks were made by Barbara Vorheis, chair of the UC Boulder anthropology department, and Paul Kurtz, CSICOP founder and chairman, whose address was read in his absence. Kurtz applauded the efforts of the conference organizers for bringing the topic of gender politics and the relationship between feminism and science into an open forum for discussion. He expressed his agreement with the basic feminist critique of society, but also bemoaned the “frontal assault on science” of many radical feminists. Kurtz said we cannot lose sight of the “rigorous and objective standards” of the scientific methodology — standards that transcend gender — and that men and women must work together to extend the frontiers of knowledge.

The first session addressed “Misuses of Therapy.” Gina Green, a behavior analyst specializing in autism and other developmental disabilities and Director of Research at the New England Center for Children, spoke on the “disability politics” of facilitated communication (FC). FC is the controversial technique whereby a child with a severe communication disability is held at the hand or arm by a person called the “facilitator” and, with the facilitator, points to sequences of letters to spell out messages that are supposedly the child’s own.

Green said that, despite its utter failure in controlled tests and having been dubbed a “classic example of pseudoscience,” FC has succeeded as a “social movement.” Proponents of FC claim that autistic people don't actually have cognitive and communication deficits and are “trapped inside uncooperative bodies.” Those who are critical of FC are seen as “negative” and “narrow-minded” and as denying impaired persons their “right to communication.”

Debbie Nathan, a freelance journalist based in El Paso, Texas, and coauthor of Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, spoke on the cultural assumptions behind the phenomenon of false ritual sexual abuse accusations.

In our culture, said Nathan, it is assumed that children are innocent, pure, asexual; that sex is evil; that the worst thing that could happen to a child is to be defiled by sex; and that children don't have adult motivations, such as revenge, for false accusations. Thus, a child who is questioned about sex is incapable of lying about it. Nathan claims that empirical studies of childhood behavior have shown these assumptions about innocence and asexuality to be false. Also, sexual abuse is assumed to be much more horrific than physical abuse and emotional neglect, but the latter are, in fact, far more prevalent and have more devastating long-term effects. By focusing on the sexual abuse component, researchers often ignore other variables in abuse cases, such as emotional neglect, physical abuse, general family dysfunction, and poverty.

Nathan speculated that feminists have supported paranoid sexual-abuse social movements because such problems as wife beating and rape are harder to get attention and outrage for. They have linked themselves to these causes to get support for less popular women’s issues. Child sex abuse, said Nathan, “stands for an array of feminine complaints.”

Barbara Eisenstadt, psychologist, clinician, and international trainer in the fields of addiction, women’s treatment, and group therapy, spoke about our “culture of addiction.” She warned that society is programming people to become addicted and promoting addictive behavior. She believes this is politically based because of the money to be made in keeping people addicted and convincing them they need treatment for their addiction. Many psychologists are furthering this by labeling people and pathologizing all kinds of behavior.

Archaeologist Linda Cordell, professor of anthropology at UC Boulder and director of the University Museum, opened the second session, devoted to the “Misuse of Archaeology.” Cordell gave an example of the often subtle gender biases that can exist in archaeological research. She showed how research into gender roles in past cultures has actually revealed, in at least one case, certain gender biases and possible political agendas on the part of the archaeologists, men and women alike, doing the research.

Carla Selby’s talk was rooted in her personal experiences as a graduate student in anthropology in the late 1960s at UCLA, working under the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Gimbutas advanced the notion of an ancient, all-encompassing, goddess-worshipping, matrifocal culture, extending throughout the entire continent of Europe from 40,000 years ago up to Greek and Roman times. Selby said that in the mid to late 1960s, Gimbutas’s myth of the all-encompassing goddess culture served as a powerful rationale for women’s empowerment and gave “the emerging feminist movement a mythological underpinning without peer.”

Speakers Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and Hazel Barnes. (Photo: Huntley Ingalls)

Speaking on multiculturalism in archaeology, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, professor of anthropology at Wayne State University and author of Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition, examined the theory accepted by many African-Americans, that black Nubian rulers of the twenty-fifth dynasty in Egypt came to the New World in 700 B.C. and were responsible for most of the great cultural achievements in Mesoamerica, including the calendar, mummification, pyramids, crops, and arithmetic.

This theory, claims Ortiz de Montellano, is being taught in schools, particularly in urban areas with high African-American populations, despite the fact that not one genuine African or Egyptian artifact has ever been found in the New World and that the arguments and evidence of its proponents are seriously flawed. Ortiz de Montellano sees the theory as politically motivated by the desire to establish a black presence of influence in the early history of the New World.

Conference speakers Carol Tavris, left, and Eugenie Scott. (Photo: Huntley Ingalls)

Carol Tavris, a social psychologist, CSICOP fellow, and author of the book The Mismeasure of Woman, delivered the keynote address with a unique combination of wit and incisiveness.

Tavris said that in the early days of the feminist movement, the politics of feminism was not at odds with science. In psychology, for example, feminists wanted to achieve equality for women in the profession and in society, and to correct the pervasive male bias that existed in the field — in its methods, theory, and findings. These goals served the aims of science.

Before long, however, science and feminist politics began to conflict and two trends emerged: cultural feminism, which claims that women are not just different from men, but better; and the rise of antiscientific attitudes and “subjective ways of knowing.”

The appeal of the “woman as superior” stereotype is understandable, said Tavris, for anyone who has experienced the “woman as inferior” stereotype. (She related the story of a female friend who entered college in 1970 in physiological psychology. On the first day of class, her male professor announced, “I will not teach this course with a pair of ovaries in the room,” and left.) But studies of actual men and women show that human qualities, bad and good, are evenly distributed across the sexes. She sees the antiscience trend as the result of a misunderstanding of the original feminist critique of science. From the fact that there were biases in science, many feminists jumped to the conclusion that science is altogether biased and must be thrown out wholesale as a way of obtaining knowledge.

According to Tavris, the grassroots feminist therapy movement, which began as a corrective to male biases in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, has become, in some quarters at least, a “vested interest with its own unmistakable female bias.” And in the name of feminist therapy, “the scientifically illiterate perpetrators” of satanic ritual abuse and recovered memory syndrome, for example, have become “just as tyrannical as any of the males they have overthrown.”

Kicking off the third session, Elizabeth Loftus, professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law at the University of Washington, Seattle, spoke on the repressed/recovered memory controversy. Loftus, who has testified in numerous court cases as to the malleability of memory, described the general repressed/recovered memory scenario. Typically, a woman goes to a therapist with a set of symptoms. She is told by the therapist that everyone he or she has seen with those symptoms has had a history of sexual abuse, and “I wonder if you do too.” The therapist proceeds to “ferret out” the past abuse.

The victims of false “recovered” memories are many, said Loftus. Patients are diverted from their real problems and real solutions, families are torn apart, the reputation of the mental health field is hurt, and large sums of money are spent. Finally, false accusers trivialize the experiences of real victims and cause them greater suffering.

Bela Scheiber presented on therapeutic touch (TT), which he said grew out of the “human caring” movement among nurses in the 1970s. Nurses at that time felt they were being marginalized in the health care profession and becoming obsolete. They sought to create a profession with “its own truths.” In opposition to scientific medicine, which was cold and impersonal, the theory of human caring emerged as nursing’s own unique contribution to the health industry.

TT is the one element of the human caring paradigm that “presents itself as scientific,” said Scheiber. He warned that if TT is established as “scientific,” it will open the door for other forms of alternative medicine predicated on “energy fields” to gain public approval, and “causality can be thrown out.”

In the final session of the conference, Paul Shankman, associate professor of anthropology at UC Boulder, spoke about cultural relativism and its evolution from a powerful anthropological research tool, which asked researchers to temporarily suspend moral judgment in order to understand cultures on their own terms, to its “lapse into moral relativism and epistemological relativism.” If each culture has its own way of knowing and its own completely unique set of values that others cannot understand, cross-cultural understanding is rendered impossible, said Shankman. Also, extreme relativism overly romanticizes culture and assumes that all cultural practices deserve respect simply because they are “out there.”

“Used properly,” concluded Shankman, “relativism can lead to better understanding and possibly greater objectivity. Misused, it can lead to moral paralysis and an end to a rational approach to cultural differences and similarities.”

Eugenie Scott, physical anthropologist and director of National Center for Science Education, as well as a CSICOP fellow and Executive Council member, addressed the audience on the misuse of scientific evidence by creation scientists. An expert on the creation/evolution controversy, Scott said her concern is not with religious beliefs per se, but rather when people involve science to support their beliefs and misuse science in doing so. Then, scientists must speak out.

Creation scientists often use old, out-of-date scientific facts that "support” their theories, ignoring new evidence that has come since. And they use selective facts, taking them out of context. For creation scientists, concluded Scott, ideology is considered superior to evidence.

After dinner, Hazel Barnes addressed conference attendees. Barnes is a professor emerita of classics at UC Boulder and noted translator of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

Barnes stated that, male or female, we are all human, and human and humanity are meaningful terms. In the midst of gender battles, we must remember our humanity — but not in the sense of a predetermined human nature, but in Sartre’s sense of “humanity making itself.” She also cautioned skeptical inquirers to remember to keep the “inquiry” part right, saying we want to “install reason where there is irrationality,” but not to reject truth because it is embedded in a context that we feel is not truth.

If one complaint could be made about the conference, it is that many of the topics (at least half) did not deal with the stated theme: “the gender politics of science.” There were talks on disability politics, multiculturalism, creation/evolution politics, and others, which, while important, fascinating, and thoroughly enjoyed by conference participants, were far off from the stated purpose. Anyone looking specifically to discuss gender politics in science may have been, at the very least, a bit confused. However, this did not seem to concern either participants or speakers. In fact, “complaints” were practically nonexistent. The first conference of the Rational Feminist Alliance of CSICOP was deemed by all to be a success, with many participants and speakers standing up at the final open forum session to testify to their satisfaction and their commitment to attend future conferences.

That is preposterous which puts the last first and the first last. . . . Valuing knowledge, we preposterize the idea and say . . . everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion.

— Jacques Barzun¹

There is, to be sure, a lot of misinformation about, and that is, certainly, a problem. But what concerns me is a deeper and more disturbing development: a rising tide of irrationalism, a widespread and increasingly articulate loss of confidence in the very possibility of honest inquiry, scientific or otherwise.

A hundred years or so ago, C. S. Peirce, a working scientist as well as the greatest of American philosophers, distinguished genuine inquiry from “sham reasoning,” pseudo-inquiry aimed not at finding the truth but at making a case for some conclusion immovably believed in advance; and predicted that, when sham reasoning becomes commonplace, people will come “to look on reasoning as merely decorative,” and will "lose their conceptions of truth and of reason.”²

This is the very debacle taking place before our eyes: genuine inquiry is so complex and difficult, and advocacy “research” and politically-motivated “scholarship” have become so commonplace, that our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, inquiry has been loosened. I want to talk about how this disaster came about, and the role played by the phenomenon Barzun calls “preposterism” in encouraging it.

Pseudo-Inquiry; and the Real Thing

A genuine inquirer aims to find out the truth of some question, whatever the color of that truth. This is a tautology (Webster’s: “inquiry: search for truth . . .”). A pseudo-inquirer seeks to make a case for the truth of some proposition(s) determined in advance. There are two kinds of pseudo-inquirer, the sham and the fake. A sham reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to make a case for some immovably-held preconceived conviction. A fake reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to advance himself by making a case for some proposition to the truth-value of which he is indifferent.

Neither sham nor fake inquiry is really inquiry; but we need to get beyond this tautology to understand what is wrong with sham and fake reasoning. The sham inquirer tries to make a case for the truth of a proposition his commitment to which is already evidence- and argument-proof. The fake inquirer tries to make a case for some proposition advancing which he thinks will enhance his own reputation, but to the truth-value of which he is indifferent. (Such indifference is, as Harry Frankfurt once shrewdly observed, the characteristic attitude of the bullshitter.)³ Both the sham and the fake inquirer, but especially the sham, are motivated to avoid examining any apparently contrary evidence or argument too closely, to play down its importance or impugn its relevance, to contort themselves explaining it away. And, since people often mistake the impressively obscure for the profound, both, but especially the fake reasoner, are motivated to obfuscate.

The genuine inquirer wants to get to the truth of the matter that concerns him, whether or not that truth comports with what he believed at the outset of his investigation, and whether or not his acknowledgement of that truth is likely to get him tenure, or to make him rich, famous, or popular. So he is motivated to seek out and assess the worth of evidence and arguments thoroughly and impartially. This doesn't just mean that he will be hard-working; it is a matter, rather, of willingness to re-think, to re-appraise, to spend as long as it takes on the detail that might be fatal, to give as much thought to the last one percent as to the rest. The genuine inquirer will be ready to acknowledge, to himself as well as others, where his evidence and arguments seem shakiest, and his articulation of problem or solution vaguest. He will be willing to go with the evidence even to unpopular conclusions, and to welcome someone else’s having found the truth he was seeking. And, far from having a motive to obfuscate, he will try to see and explain things as clearly as he can.

This is not to deny that sham or fake reasoners may hit upon the truth, and, when they do, may come up with good evidence and arguments. Commitment to a cause, desire for reputation, are powerfully motivating forces which may prompt energetic intellectual effort. But the intelligence and ingenuity that will help a genuine inquirer to figure things out, will help a sham or fake inquirer to suppress unfavorable evidence or awkward arguments more effectively, or to devise more impressively obscure formulations.

Nor is this to deny that genuine, disinterested inquirers may come to false conclusions or be led astray by misleading evidence or arguments. But an honest inquirer will not suppress unfavorable evidence or awkward arguments, nor disguise his failure with affected obscurity; so, even when he fails, he will not impede others’ efforts.

Of course, real human beings do not conform neatly to the three types I have distinguished; their motives are generally pretty mixed, and they are capable of many degrees and kinds of self-deception. A good environment for intellectual work will encourage genuine inquiry and discourage the sham and the fake; and will enable mutual scrutiny among workers in a field, so that the contributions to knowledge that sham and fake reasoners sometimes make despite their dubious motivation get sifted from the dross. Honest scrutiny is best; but scrutiny even by other sham or fake reasoners with different axes to grind may be effective as a way of exposing error, confusion, and obfuscation. A bad environment will encourage sham and fake inquiry, and/or impede mutual scrutiny.

The environment will be hospitable to good intellectual work insofar as incentives and rewards favor those who work on significant issues, and whose work is creative, careful, honest and thorough; insofar as journals, conferences, etc., make the best and most significant work readily available to others working in the area; insofar as channels of mutual scrutiny and criticism are open, and successful building on others’ work is encouraged. The environment will be inhospitable insofar as incentives and rewards encourage people to choose trivial issues where results are easily obtained, to disguise rather than tackle problems with their approach, to go for the flashy, the fashionable, and the impressively obscure over the deep, the difficult, and the painfully clear; insofar as the availability of the best and most significant work is hindered rather than enabled by journals and conferences bloated with the trivial, the faddy, and the carelessly or deliberately unclear; insofar as mutual scrutiny is impeded by fad, fashion, obfuscation, and fear of offending the influential.

I don't see how to avoid the conclusion that the environment in which academic work is presently conducted is an inhospitable one. I think this is true for all disciplines; but I shall focus, henceforth, primarily on philosophy — the discipline I know best, and the discipline in which disillusionment with the very idea of inquiry has been most overtly articulated.

A Preposterous Environment

“Everybody shall produce written research in order to live"; Barzun exaggerates, but not much. Everybody aspiring to the tenure-track, tenure, promotion, a raise, a better job, or, of course, academic stardom, had better produce written, published, research. “[A]nd it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion"; again, Barzun exaggerates, but, again, not much. It is pretty much taken for granted that this explosion of publications is a good thing, that it represents a significant contribution to knowledge.

Yet much of what is published is, at best, trivial stuff, putting me in mind of that observation: “Rubbish is rubbish, but the history of rubbish is scholarship.” Seriously, though: few if any of us will have a truly original idea every few years, let alone every few months; genuinely important philosophical work usually takes years of frustration and failure. Nevertheless, we not only half-pretend that this written research that everybody must produce in order to live is mostly worthwhile; we breathe an atmosphere of puffery, of announcements in paper after paper, book after book, that all previous work in the area is hopelessly misconceived, and here is a radically new approach which will revolutionize the whole field. How did this atmosphere of preposterous exaggeration come about?

It is no longer possible to do important scientific work with a candle and a piece of string; ever more sophisticated equipment is needed to make ever more recherchë observations. Research in the sciences has become very expensive; a culture of grants-and-research-projects has grown up; and science has become, inter alia, big business. The consequences for science itself are not altogether healthy: think of the time spent “writing grants,” not to mention attending seminars on “grant writing,” of the temptation to shade the truth about the success or importance of one’s project, or of the price paid in terms of the progress of science when a condition of this or that body’s supporting the research is that the results be withheld from the rest of the scientific community. But when disciplines like philosophy, where serious work requires, not fancy equipment, but only (only!) time and peace of mind, mimic the organization of the sciences, when the whole apparatus of grants-and-research-projects becomes so ordinary that we scarcely notice how extraordinary it is, when we adapt to a business ethos, the consequences are far worse.

Why worse? In part because in philosophy the circumpressure of facts, of evidence, is less direct; in part because there is no real analogue of the kind of routine, competent, unexciting work that gets the scientific details filled in; in part because in philosophy the mechanisms of mutual scrutiny are perhaps more clogged and probably more corrupted.

In part because it is so intellectually impressive, in part because it is so useful, and in part, no doubt, because it is so expensive, science enjoys enormous prestige, in which the rest of us would dearly like to share. And, inevitably perhaps, in consequence of universities’ having become such big businesses, many university administrators have become enamored of a business management ethos which values “entrepreneurial skills,” i.e., the ability to obtain large sums of money to undertake large research projects, above originality or depth, and which encourages conceptions of “efficiency” and “productivity” more appropriate to a manufacturing plant than to the pursuit of truth.

In disciplines like philosophy, feeling ourselves the poor relations in such a culture, we have adapted as best we could. Our adaptation has encouraged a kind of philosophical entrepreneurship which often diverts time and effort from real work, and is sometimes, to speak plainly, nothing more than philosophical hucksterism: centers for this and that, new journals for the legitimation and promotion of the latest fad, projects requiring secretaries, research assistants, or, better yet, more expensive and powerful computers or, best of all, a laboratory.

This adaptation damages the fragile intellectual integrity demanded by the genuine desire to find out how things are. It is part of the meaning of the word “research” that you don't know how things will turn out. Yet the whole apparatus of grants-and-research-projects, and the conception of productivity and efficiency it fosters, discourages candid acknowledgement that one may work for years at what turns out to be a dead end, and constitutes a standing encouragement to exaggeration, half-truth and outright dishonesty about what one has achieved. In principle, you might fill out the application explaining what important breakthroughs your work is going to achieve, and fill out the report, later, explaining what important breakthroughs your work actually did achieve, without your private estimation of the worth of your work being affected. In practice, inevitably, intellectual integrity is eroded.

It has been a poor adaptation which significantly affects what kinds of work get done, channeling effort into those areas likeliest to attract funding. This is surely part of the explanation of the popularity of interdisciplinary work, especially work which allies philosophy with more prestigious disciplines such as cognitive psychology or artificial intelligence or medicine, etc.

Nor is it unduly cynical to suspect that it also significantly affects what kinds of conclusion are reached. Where effort is directed by the hope of large grants into, say, the border territory of epistemology with cognitive science, the probability rises that the conclusion that will be reached is that long-standing epistemological questions can be quickly resolved or as quickly dissolved by appeal to this or that work in cognitive science; where effort is directed by the hope of large grants into, say, the relevance of feminism to philosophy of science, the probability rises that the conclusion that will be reached is that feminism requires us, as Sandra Harding preposterously puts it, to “reinvent science and theorizing.” (Challenged, nearly a decade later, to say what breakthroughs feminist science had achieved, Harding replied that, thanks to feminist scientists, we now know that menopause isn't a disease. Gosh.)⁴ No one is so naive as to imagine that large grants might be forthcoming to show that cognitive science has no bearing on those long-standing epistemological questions, or even that its bearing is (as I believe), though real enough, oblique and undramatic; or to show that (as I believe) feminism has no relevance to the theory of scientific knowledge.

The psychological mechanisms here are quite subtle. Simple, downright dishonesty is the exception; some degree or other of self-deception is the rule. And this is likely, naturally, to leave a residue of ambivalence, such as one can hear in this plea for the psychologization of epistemology: “[a] return [to a psychologistic conception of epistemology] is especially timely now, when cognitive psychology has renewed prestige. . . .” The relevance or otherwise of psychology to epistemology is a hard meta-epistemological question: on which, needless to say, the prestige of cognitive psychology has no bearing.

Still, all the puffery, the attempts to promote oneself or one’s area, approach, or line, this academic boosterism, might be only a waste of time if, eventually, it all came out in the wash of mutual scrutiny and criticism. The waste of time, talent, and energy is significant; what real work might have been done by those who feel obliged, instead, to point out the absurdities of the latest fad? But, instead of efficient mechanisms of communication and mutual scrutiny, we have a mind-numbing clamor of publications, conferences, meetings, of “empty books and embarrassing assumptions,”⁵ making it close to impossible to hear what is worthwhile.

The director of Rutgers University Press admits that “[w]e are . . . part of the university personnel system and . . . often publish books whose primary reason for existence is the author’s academic advancement, not the advancement of knowledge.”⁶ The new editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly writes that publishing in the journals has become less a way to communicate significant ideas than a form of professional certification, and that being adequately informed in one’s field of course no longer requires that one actually read all that stuff.⁷ Even more startling than the candor of his observations about the real role of the journals is the blandness of his assumption that publication-as-professional-certification is perfectly OK. But it isn't perfectly OK; it gets in the way of — what is more than ever urgently necessary in a culture that positively encourages sham and fake reasoning — the mutual scrutiny that might separate the worthwhile from the dross.

Between 1900 and 1960, about forty-five new philosophy journals were founded in the U.S., Canada, and Britain; between 1960 and 1990, about 164. Inevitably, it has become impossible, except by sheer luck, to find the good stuff; inevitably, championship of a simple, startling idea, even, or perhaps especially, an egregiously false or an impressively obscure idea, has become a good route to reputation and money — as has the self-serving variation on a fashionable party line. Inevitably, too, finding referees with the necessary expertise, time, patience, and integrity has become harder, the power of editors to make or ruin careers has grown, and once-idealistic young philosophers begin to say to themselves, “they like controversy in their journal, so why bother spelling out the qualifications?". . .

And, inevitably, as it becomes harder to make oneself heard in the journals, one has to publish a book; and, as that book-published-by-a-reputable-academic-press becomes a requisite for tenure, we face the ever more bloated publishers’ catalogues filled with ever more exaggerated descriptions and endorsements. And, inevitably, once again, it becomes impossible, except by sheer luck, to find the good stuff, and . . . But I won't bore you by writing the previous paragraph all over again!

It is not unheard of to find that the book of which a review has just appeared, having sold the few hundred copies which, these days, philosophy books typically sell, is already, a couple of years after publication, out of print. Better, then, from the point of view of sheer self-preservation, let alone of impressing Deans, etc., with one’s “scholarly productivity,” not to spend too long writing a book. How absurd, after all, to spend ten years writing a book which, if you are lucky, five hundred people might read, and the life of which, if you are lucky, might be four or five years.

It used to be an important role of the academic presses to publish significant books too specialized to be economic. Increasingly, however, as subsidies from their universities have shrunk, university presses seek to publish books they believe will make money. This too is discouraging, to put it mildly, to the investment of effort in difficult problems. Better, from the point of view of making oneself heard, to write the kind of book that might interest a trade publisher, or at least the kind of book that will get reviewed in the non-academic press. And this too, inevitably, favors the simple, startling idea, even, or perhaps especially, the startlingly false or impressively obscure idea. . . . But I promised not to bore you by writing that paragraph all over again!

Like books and journals, conferences might be, and occasionally are, important channels of communication. But we are all familiar with the reality that your home institution will pay your expenses if you give a paper; with the conference announcements which discreetly let it be known that, so long as you pay the large registration fee, your paper will be accepted; with the stupefying programs of day after day of umpteen parallel sessions; with the twenty-minute, the twelve-minute, even, of late, the ten-minute presentation; with the extent to which conferences have become less a matter of communication than of "contacts,” of “exposure,” and, of course, of expenses-paid trips to agreeable places. We have adapted to these realities, in part, by self-deceptively over-rating the usefulness of what we like to call "stimulation,” and under- rating the need for time, peace of mind, mature reflection.

I am reminded of Santayana’s character-sketch of Royce: an “overworked, standardised, academic engine, creaking and thumping on at the call of duty or of habit, with no thought of sparing itself or anyone else.”⁸ Preposterism can only too easily turn the best of us into just such overworked, standardized, academic engines — and can only too easily turn the worst of us into purveyors of philosophical snake-oil.

The Perils of Preposterism

Thus far it may seem that the perils of preposterism are much the same for philosophy as for the humanities generally. But philosophy is the discipline to which it falls to inquire into inquiry itself, its proper conduct and necessary presuppositions. And that responsibility exposes us to a particular peril.

Recent philosophy manifests two tendencies, on the face of it radically opposed to each other, which both result in part from our adaptation to a “research ethic” more appropriate to the sciences than to the humanities: scientism, i.e., linking philosophy too closely, or inappropriately, to the sciences; and radical critique of the sciences as no more than ideology masked by rhetorical bullying in the form of appeals to “rationality,” “objectivity,” and so forth. The former is the effect of envy, the latter of resentment, of the success of the sciences.

One manifestation of science-envy is the mathematical or logical pseudo-rigor with which much recent philosophical writing is afflicted. This, to speak bluntly, is a kind of affected obscurity. Not that recourse to the languages of mathematics or logic never helps to make a philosophical argument or thesis clearer; of course, it does. But it can also stand in the way of real clarity by disguising failure to think deeply or critically enough about the concepts being manipulated with impressive logical sophistication. And it has come to be, too often, what Charles Sykes calls “Profspeak” — using unnecessary symbols to convey a false impression of depth and rigor.

Science-envy is manifested also by those who — hoping to enhance their prestige by close association with the sciences — contort themselves in attempts to show that this or that philosophical problem can be quickly settled by some scientific result, or to displace philosophical problems in favor of scientific ones. The result is at best a covert change of subject, at worst a self-undermining absurdity.⁹ No scientific investigation can tell us whether science is epistemologically special, and if so, how, or whether a theory’s yielding true predictions is an indication of its truth, and if so, why, and so on; yet, unless these were not only legitimate questions, but legitimate questions with less-than-skeptical answers, it is incomprehensible how one could be justified, as the most ambitious style of scientism proposes, in doing science instead of philosophy.

Now one begins to see why the revolutionary scientism encountered in contemporary philosophy often manifests a peculiar affinity with the anti-scientific attitudes which, as I conjecture, are prompted by resentment, as scientism is prompted by envy, of the sciences. Both parties have become disillusioned with the very idea of honest inquiry, of truth-seeking. One hears from Paul Churchland, on the scientistic side, that, since truth is not the primary aim of the ceaseless cognitive activity of the ganglia of the sea-slug, it should maybe cease to be a primary aim of science, and even that talk of truth may make no sense; from Richard Rorty, on the anti-science side, that truth is just what can survive all conversational objections, and that the only sense in which science is exemplary is as a model of human solidarity. One hears from Patricia Churchland, on the scientistic side, that “truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost"; from Sandra Harding, on the anti-science side, that “the truth — whatever that is! — will not set you free.” One hears from Steven Stich, on the scientistic side, that truth is neither intrinsically nor instrumentally valuable, and that a justified belief is one his holding which conduces to whatever the believer values; from Steve Fuller, on the anti-science side, that good scholarship is a matter simply of “who[m] you are trying to court in your work.”¹⁰

Remember Peirce on what will happen if pseudo-inquiry becomes commonplace: “men come to look upon reasoning as mainly decorative. . . . The result of this state of things is, of course, a rapid deterioration of intellectual vigor. . . . [M]an loses his conceptions of truth and of reason. If he sees one man assert what another denies, he will, if he is concerned, choose his side and set to work . . . to silence his adversaries. The truth for him is that for which he fights.”¹¹

I can match neither Peirce’s prescience nor his eloquence, only add a little circumstantial detail to his diagnosis. Preposterism encourages sham and fake reasoning. In the humanities, it also encourages envy of science, and thus scientism and a certain kind of irrationalism, and resentment of science, and thus an only-slightly-different kind of irrationalism. Within philosophy, furthermore, as the discipline to which the task of articulating the nature and goals of inquiry falls, the ubiquity of sham and fake reasoning has induced a factitious despair of the possibility of attaining truth by investigation — the despair revealed in the astonishing outbreak of sneer quotes with which so much recent philosophical writing expresses its distrust of “truth,” “reality,” “facts,” “reason,” “objectivity,” etc.

When sham and fake reasoning are ubiquitous, people become uncomfortably aware, or half-aware, that reputations are made as often by clever championship of the indefensible or the incomprehensible as by serious intellectual work, as often by mutual promotion as by merit. Knowing, or half-knowing, this, they become increasingly leery of what they hear and read. Their confidence in what passes for true declines, and with it their willingness to use the words “truth,” “rationality,” etc., without the precaution of scare quotes. And as those scare quotes become ubiquitous, people’s confidence in the concepts of truth and reason falters, and one begins to hear (from Richard Rorty): “I do not have much use for notions like . . . ‘objective truth',” “‘true' [is] a word which applies to those beliefs upon which we are able to agree,” or (from Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar): “a fact is nothing but a statement with no modality . . . and no trace of authorship,” or (from Steve Fuller): “I don't see any clear distinction between ‘good scholarship' and ‘political relevance.'”¹²

The inference from the true premiss that what passes for truth, objective fact, rational argument, relevant evidence, etc., is often no such thing, to the false conclusion that the notions of truth, objectivity, rationality, evidence, etc., are humbug, is obviously invalid. But it has become so ubiquitous that it deserves a name; I call it “the ‘passes for' fallacy.”¹³ The “passes for” fallacy is not only fallacious, but self-defeating; for if the conclusion were true, one could never have grounds for accepting the premiss from which it is supposedly derived. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to read (in Stephen Cole): “Given that facts can easily become errors, what sense does it make to see what is at Time 1 a ‘fact' and at Time 2 an ‘error' as being determined by nature?", and then, a few pages later, “the most important evidence in favor of my position is the fact that . . . ,”¹⁴ or (in Ruth Bleier): “[I criticized various studies] for their sloppy methods, inconclusive findings, and unwarranted interpretations,” and then, a few pages later, “there must be an irreducible . . . distortion or biasing of knowledge production simply because science is a social activity performed by human beings in a specific cultural . . . context.”¹⁵

Sad to say, this last quotation is quite typical of much recent “feminist scholarship.” The vast recent literature of feminist approaches to this or that area of philosophy — ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, lately even logic — is a particularly striking manifestation of the consequences of preposterism. Reading in this vast literature, one can hardly fail to notice how endlessly it is repeated that feminism has radical consequences for this or that area, and how often those radical consequences turn out to be trivial, or obviously derivative from some male philosopher, or manifestly false; by how determinedly practitioners avert their attention from serious criticisms, and how lavishly they praise the work of others of their own persuasion. Pondering on how this came about, one can hardly fail to think how many reputations and careers, how many centers, programs, conferences, journals, depend on the legitimacy of appealing to the feminist perspective on this or that. And one’s darkest suspicions are confirmed when, in a moment of remarkable candor, Sandra Harding tells us that “[m]en who want to be ‘in feminism' . . . can teach and write about women’s thought, writings, accomplishments. . . . They can criticize their male colleagues. They can move material resources to women . . . .”¹⁶

My point isn't that the feminist-philosophy bandwagon is peculiarly awful; I don't know that it is peculiarly awful, and in any case my point is not to pick on the feminists, but to articulate how the epidemic of sham and fake reasoning encouraged by preposterism has loosened our grip on the concept of inquiry. The perception among these radical feminist philosophers that their profession is profoundly corrupt is, at worst, exaggerated; their profession is rife with pseudo-inquiry, and publication, promotion, stardom, etc., are cut loose from merit. And this perception of the ubiquity of pseudo-inquiry has encouraged the despair of the possibility of honest investigation ubiquitous in philosophy today.

Such a “factitious despair” is bound, as Francis Bacon eloquently put it long ago, to “cut the sinews and spurs of industry.” (And all, as he observed, for “the miserable vainglory of having it believed that whatever has not yet been discovered and comprehended can never be discovered and comprehended hereafter.”)¹⁷

But unbiased investigation is not impossible; only difficult, demanding, painful — and of almost incalculable value to us humans. Which is why I end this lay sermon with a text, from George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical:

Truth is the precious harvest of the earth.
But once, when harvest waved upon a land,
The noisome cankerworm and caterpillar,
Locusts, and all the swarming, foul-born broods,
Fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws,
And turned the harvest into pestilence,
Until men said, What profits it to sow?

Notes

1. Jacques Barzun, The American University, Harper and Row, New York, 1968, p. 221.
2. Collected Papers, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1931-58, 5.520 (c. 1905), 6.6 (c. 1903), 1.128 (c. 1905). References by volume and paragraph number.
3. Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit,” in The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 117-133.
4. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1986, p. 251; Chronicle of Higher Education, April 27, 1994, p. A15.
5. Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.645 (1898).
6. Kenneth Arnold, “University Presses Could Still Become the Cultural Force for Change and Enlightenment They Were Meant to Be,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 29, 1987; cited in Charles Sykes, Profscam, Regnery Gateway, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 129.
7. Gary Gutting, “The Editor’s Page,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 31.1, 1994, p. 87.
8. George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States; With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1920, p. 98.
9. See Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, chapters 6, 7 and 8.
10. Paul M. Churchland,” The Ontological Status of Observables” (1982), in A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science, Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.; Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Harvester Press, Hassocks, Sussex, 1982, p. 165, and “Science as Solidarity,” in John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald McCloskey, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wis., 1987, p. 187; Patricia Smith Churchland, “Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience,” Journal of Philosophy, LXXV.10, 1987, p. 549; Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1991, p. xi; Stephen P. Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason, Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1992, pp. 118ff.; Steve Fuller, e-mail message, May 4, 1994.
11. Collected Papers, 1.57-9 (c. 1896).
12. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Common Knowledge, 1.3, 1992, p. 141, and “Science as Solidarity,” p. 45; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Sage, London, 1979, p. 82; Fuller, e-mail message, May 4, 1994.
13. Susan Haack, “Knowledge and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist,” Partisan Review, Fall 1993, 556-64; reprinted in Our Country, Our Culture, eds. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips, Partisan Review Press, Boston, 1995, 56-65.
14. Stephen Cole, Making Science: Between Nature and Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, pp. 12, 50.
15. Ruth Bleier, “Science and the Construction of Meanings in the Neurosciences,” in Sue V. Rosser, ed., Feminism Within the Science and Healthcare Professions: Overcoming Resistance, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1988, pp. 92, 101.
16. Sandra Harding, “Who Knows? Identities and Feminist Epistemology,” in Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow, eds., (En)gendering Knowledge, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1991, p. 109.
17. Francis Bacon, The New Organon (1620), Book I, aphorism LXXXVIII.

©1997 by Susan Haack.

Bible Code: The Book

A new book entitled The Bible Code (Drosnin 1997) came out last June and has occupied the bestseller lists since then. It is written by journalist Michael Drosnin, who claims that the Hebrew Bible contains a very complex code that reveals events that took place thousands of years after the Bible was written. Drosnin contends that some foretold events later happened exactly as predicted.

The book has been reviewed widely and has stimulated pieces in Newsweek and Time. Drosnin has also been making the rounds of the talk-show circuit, including the Oprah Winfrey Show in June. Time said that Warner has reportedly bought the movie rights (Van Biema 1997).

Drosnin’s technique is heavily based on that of Eliyahu Rips of Hebrew University in Israel, who published an article entitled “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis” in the journal Statistical Science (Witztum, Rips, and Rosenburg 1994). Like Rips, Drosnin arranges the 304,805 Hebrew letters of the Bible into a large array. Spaces and punctuation marks are omitted, and words are run together one after another. A computer looks for matches to selected names or words by stepping to every nth letter in the array. One can go forward or backward; and for each value of “step distance,” n, there are n different starting letters. Drosnin’s match for “Yitzhak Rabin” had a step value n equal to 4,772.

Both Rips and Drosnin work with the original Hebrew characters, which are said to have been given by God to Moses one character at a time, with no spaces or punctuation, just as they appear in “the code.” The code is considered to exist only in the Hebrew Bible and not in translations or any other books. The code concept, however, can be easily demonstrated with English characters. Consider the following verse from the King James Version (KJV) of the Book of Genesis:

31:28 And hast not suffered me to kiss my sons and my daughters? thou hast now done foolishly in so doing.

If you start at the R in “daughters,” and skip over three letters to the O in “thou,” and three more to the S in “hast,” and so on, the hidden message “Roswell” is revealed! This message has a step value of 4, as shown in Figure 1.

When Drosnin finds a name or word match for a given step value n, he then rearranges the letters into a huge matrix (which he calls a “crossword puzzle”). The matrix is n letters wide, and inside this puzzle, the letters for the “hidden message” line up together vertically. (Sometimes, a slightly different procedure is used to make the hidden word run diagonally, every other row, and so forth.) The analyst or the computer can then look for more keyword-related “hits” around the given hidden word. Secondary matches can be picked off vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Drosnin found the word “Dallas” (connected with keywords “President Kennedy”) in one of his puzzles by starting at a D, and then picking the next letters by moving one space over to the right and three spaces down several times.

An example of such a matrix for the “Roswell” mention in KJV Genesis appears in Figure 2. The letters of “Roswell” now appear vertically at the center of the puzzle. The actual matrix of unique letters is only four characters wide here (dashed box), but I took the liberty of showing extra letters for context. A companion hidden message — “UFO” — is indicated within circle symbols. This “UFO” is itself a hidden message with a step value of 12. Drosnin accepts any such messages, even words running horizontally (i.e., the actual words of the Bible strung together). If either “Roswell” or “UFO” had been found encoded in the Hebrew Bible, Drosnin would not have hesitated to use words from the direct text as a “match” (for example, the words “thou hast now done foolishly.”)

The unusual pairing of “Roswell” and “UFO” is shown in linear form in Figure 3. This match is as stunning as any described in Drosnin’s book — yet none claim that the Bible code would have translated gracefully over to the KJV Genesis.

Drosnin claims mathematical proof that “no human could have encoded the Bible in this way” (Drosnin 1997, 50-51). He says, “I do not know if it is God,” but adds that the code proves “we are not alone.”

Hidden Messages

Most of the data cited in favor of the purported intelligent alien construction of the “Face on Mars” is based on mathematical relationships among various Martian structures and locations. For example, author Richard Hoagland finds the “Cydonian” ratio (the “face” lies on the Cydonia plains region of Mars), e/p, in the tangent of the face’s latitude of 40.868 degrees north, in the ratios of angles of the D&M; Pyramid, and in numerous other places (Hoagland 1992). Does that mean the “face” and “city” on Mars were “designed” for the express purpose of spreading that very message? Hoagland emphatically says, “Yes!” My inner skeptic says, “Not so fast!”

In my research into such phenomena, I have found numerous instances of Hoagland’s Martian ratios on objects we know were not designed or built by aliens, such as the U.S. Capitol rotunda (Figure 4). Does that prove that Martians built this structure? Or is this phenomenon related mainly to the determination and skill of the person looking for a special message? Any special message?

There are dozens of books about Nostradamus. In one (Hewitt and Lorie 1991), the authors find hidden predictions by scrambling the seer’s quatrains (in French, no less), and then decoding according to an extremely complicated and mysterious formula. The back cover prominently displays one such unscrambled prediction: “1992 — George Bush re-elected.” (Wrong.) The authors should have known that it’s much safer to find hidden predictions of events that have already happened.

Some critics of Drosnin say the journalist is just “data mining.” Mathematician Brendan McKay of Australian National University and his colleagues searched Hebrew texts besides the Bible. They found fifty-nine words related to Chanukah in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace. But McKay doesn't think someone engineered this remarkable feat for his or anyone’s benefit. Since then, McKay has responded to the following challenge Drosnin made in Newsweek:

< >“When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them” (Begley 1997).

McKay found assassination “predictions” in Moby Dick for Indira Gandhi, Rene Moawad, Leon Trotsky, Rev. M. L. King, and Robert F. Kennedy (see http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html). Eliyahu Rips himself has denied Drosnin’s implication that they worked together, and has said, “I do not support the book as it is or the conclusions it derives” (Van Biema 1997).

Hidden Names in KJV Genesis and Edwards v. Aguillard

One would expect that special biblical messages hidden in the Hebrew Bible would simply not make it into the King James Version, much less into Edwards. And since the Hebrew alphabet doesn't include vowels, it should be much harder to find matches in the English texts, because an additional character match is required for each vowel.

Drosnin’s control was the Hebrew text of War and Peace. Drosnin claims that when they searched for words (such as “comet,” “Jupiter,” etc.) in the Bible, they often found them there, but not in War and Peace.

I picked a set of names carefully. The list contained five names of four letters, five of five letters, five of six letters, five of seven letters, and five of either eight or nine letters. I was more whimsical in my choice of subjects and chose talk show hosts, scientists, and just plain folks as well as political or historical figures. I found thousands of hidden occurrences of these names in both Genesis and Edwards. The results appear in Table 1.

It is striking that tens of thousands of hidden occurrences were found for the twenty-five names submitted, for both Genesis and Edwards. More matches were found in the former, but it does have 50,000 more letters to work with. Another important observation is immediately apparent in Table 1 — short names like “Leno” or “Reed” were found much more frequently than long names like “Gingrich” or “Matsumura.” ("Matsumura” is, of course, Molleen Matsumura of the National Center for Science Education, in Berkeley, and “Romero” is Albuquerque boxer Danny Romero). “Martin Gardner” was found hidden in Edwards, much as Gardner anticipated could happen in his discussion of gematria and the work of Rips and his colleagues (Gardner 1997).

The results are clear and compelling, and certainly not surprising. It is much easier to find short names than long names. There might be thousands of occurrences of the four-letter name “Rich,” for example. But matching “Gingrich” is much harder, since few or none of the thousands of instances of “Rich” will be preceded by “Ging” at exactly the right step locations. But there are 2,554 hidden occurrences of “Newt” in KJV Genesis, so one could imagine that the Speaker of the House is certainly mentioned copiously.

There is, of course, another factor in the success of hidden word searches. Simply put, some letters are more common than others. Figures 5a and 5b give the relative frequencies for the letters in Genesis and Edwards.

There is, of course, another factor in the success of hidden word searches. Simply put, some letters are more common than others. Figures 5a and 5b give the relative frequencies for the letters in Genesis and Edwards.

The charts show that certain letters (such as A, D, E, H, I, N, O, R, S, and T) appear more often than others. Obviously, words made with these “hot” letters (such as “Reed,” “Deer,” “Stalin,” or “Hitler”) have a better chance of being found than words containing any “cool” letters like J or Q. “Rosie” had 202 Genesis matches, more than the 49 for “Oprah” — but “Oprah” contains a cool P. (I also searched for “Harpo,” which is just “Oprah” backwards, and found 62 hits).

When I performed a separate search for “Roswell” in KJV Genesis, I only found one hidden match for this seven-letter word. But I found 5,812 matches for “UFO,” 187 for “disk,” 5 for “MOGUL,” 4,798 for “NYU,” 2 for “weather,” 1,552 for “gear,” 77 for “crash,” 4 for “dummy,” 295 for “alien,” and 2 for “saucer.” I couldn't find “Roswell” in Edwards at steps of 1,000 or less, but I did find most of the others, and in similar numbers.

How Unusual Are Paired Messages?

Drosnin and others sometimes admit that finding isolated hidden names or messages can be the product of random chance. But they claim that finding linked pairs or triples of names or words is so improbable that doing so proves the supernatural, divine, or alien origin of the "message.” In Drosnin’s words,

Consistently, the Bible code brings together interlocking words that reveal related information. With Bill Clinton, President. With the Moon landing, spaceship and Apollo 11. With Hitler, Nazi. With Kennedy, Dallas.

In experiment after experiment, the crossword puzzles were found only in the Bible. Not in War and Peace, not in any other book, and not in ten million computer-generated test cases. (Drosnin 1997, 26)

Perhaps there was a bug in Drosnin’s computer program. Or perhaps he didn't really want to find hidden message pairs outside of the Hebrew Bible. All I know is that I was able to easily produce complex hidden messages in all the texts I worked with.

I developed a computer program that takes various words already located as hidden codes (such as “Hitler” and “Nazi”) and plays them against each other to find the best-linked pairs. The starting letters and equidistant steps provide all the necessary information, provided one learns how to manipulate it.

I then used this approach to develop the puzzles shown in Figure 6a (Genesis, step = 500) and Figure 6b (Edwards, step = 157), both with direct coded linkages of “Hitler” and “Nazi.” These puzzles are striking counterexamples of Drosnin’s claims.

In response to Drosnin’s challenge, I decided to look for “Hitler” and “Nazi” linked in Tolstoy’s War and Peace as well. I found an English translation of the epic novel on the Internet, and downloaded the first twenty-four chapters of Book 1, giving me about 167,000 characters. By the time I got to steps of just 750, I already had found more than half a dozen excellent puzzle linkages of “Hitler” and “Nazi.” The best appears in Figure 7: this entire puzzle text spans just five paragraphs of Chapter 2 of Book 1 of Tolstoy’s novel.

Drosnin uses many methods to improve the odds of “impossible-by-chance” linkages. For one, he uses horizontal words taken directly from the original text. For example, when Drosnin found “Clinton” linked to “president,” the word “president” was just the Hebrew word for “chief,” taken from its actual context in the original Bible. Secondly, Drosnin found some hidden dates referring to the Hebrew calendar; for example, Gulf War activity on January 18, 1991, was found in the words “3rd Shevat.” But, he found other dates referring to the Gregorian calendar, such as that of the Oklahoma City bombing, which was linked in the Bible by the hidden date “Day 19,” and interpreted as a reference to both April 19, 1995, the date of the bombing, and April 19, 1993 (Waco). And finally, Drosnin takes full advantage of the eccentricities of the Hebrew language, in which words can be condensed and letters occasionally dropped.

My study generated several other examples that are just as spectacular, and just as unlikely (if not more so), than most of Drosnin’s matches. Now, Drosnin and his colleagues would probably say that the “Roswell/UFO” connection in KJV Genesis was just a lucky break and couldn't happen again. But I found 5,812 hidden “UFO’s” in Genesis, and dozens of these happen to be flying right around and through the hidden word “Roswell.” As the puzzle step is changed, linked matches appear and disappear with astonishing frequency. Three such examples appear in Figure 8, for steps of 88, 589, and 753. Hoagland claims multiple discoveries of the same hidden message are indicative of “redundancy” used by the code-maker to assure us the message is real (Hoagland 1992). But all that is really happening here is that codes can be engineered — made to happen. You just have to know how to harvest the field of possibilities.

Figure 9 is another striking linkage I found in KJV Genesis, 42:18 through 45:21. Here, the name “Regis” appears at a step distance of 808, but also at a step of 810, which makes a nice “X” pattern if the puzzle step is 809. (Perhaps someone should notify Regis Philbin and agents Mulder and Scully).

If you work at any given puzzle for a while, large numbers of unexpected names and words invariably turn up. Consider the puzzle of Figure 10. This text is a contiguous rendition of Genesis 41:38-46. This particular puzzle is easy for the reader to verify manually, since it has a relatively small step of 40. The puzzle itself is 41 characters wide, so the rightmost column is a repetition of the leftmost. I used the computer to find several diagonal messages here: “Deer,” “Regis,” “Nazi,” “Leno,” “Dole.” Many vertical messages were simple enough to be found just by poring over the puzzle: for example, “Oprah,” “here,” “Leia,” “Hale,” “sent,” “nude,” “pure,” “hate,” “data,” “Roe,” “Reed,” “Meg,” “hood,” “pins (snip),” “Deion,” and “lone.” “Newt” is in there too, but at an offbeat step that makes for a jilted arrangement. And then, there are all those horizontal words too!

I suspect that with diligence, one could find enough matches to make almost all of the characters in the puzzle parts of hidden words. The puzzle below is literally dripping with additional hidden surprises. Rips himself appears in “spirit” read backwards. “Pour,” “Alan,” and “sash” run vertically. And diagonal messages of varying complexity lurk everywhere. Can you find the “apes” swinging between “data” and “Reed"? “Love” intersecting with “nude"? How about “Ares,” “reel,” “deft,” “lion,” “dogs,” “pony,” “hard,” “diet,” “trace,” “card,” “Poe,” and “wart"? They are all in there — and more.

There are dozens of linked messages in the puzzle above. But how are we to know which words are linked by the secretive author? Is the “real” message “Nazi sent pure hate here,” or is it “Deion pins nude Oprah?” All of these hits are authentic, encoded names that have lurked inside the text of the King James Version of Genesis for hundreds of years. But the whimsical combinations they appear in show that these surprises are simply lucky breaks, and not authentic messages from above.

What Are the Odds, Really?

But their core conclusions are based on severely flawed probability arguments. Drosnin’s formulation of the improbability of the occurrence of linked pairs is implicitly based on the assumption that you have only one opportunity to get the match. But, with the help of the computer, Drosnin gets to take advantage of billions of opportunities.

Let’s look at Drosnin’s approach with a lottery analogy. The probability of winning a lottery with a single ticket is very small, and Drosnin says the probability of getting an improbable match (such as “Clinton” and “president”) is also very small. But what happens if you buy more than one ticket?

In the New Mexico “Daily Millions” lottery, the odds of winning the $1 million jackpot with just one ticket are about ten million to one against. With two tickets, the odds plummet, to about five million to one. If you buy one million tickets, your odds drop to only about ten to one against. And if you invest $10 million in tickets, the odds become approximately two to one in your favor! Most people can't afford to buy millions of tickets. Those who do have that kind of money usually don't dump it on the lottery, because you almost always end up losing.

But in Drosnin’s game, you don't have to win more than you lose. You don't even have to break even. All you need for success is to win every once in a while. And, you can have what amounts to millions of “free lottery tickets” simply by running a computer program, or poring over crossword-puzzle printouts. Drosnin routinely tests billions of letter sequences for matches to selected words or names, and goes to steps of many thousands. By using steps lower than 1,000 only, I limited myself to using only about 3 percent of the potential of Genesis or Edwards. Brendan McKay (in personal communication) showed me how to find hidden words much more efficiently, and a search of KJV Genesis at all possible steps for my list of twenty-five names came up with over one million additional matches. These include six hits for “Clinton,” fifteen for “Gardner,” three for “Hillary” and “Einstein,” and two for “Kennedy.”

Conclusion

The promoters of hidden-message claims say, “How could such amazing coincidences be the product of random chance?” I think the real question should be, “How could such coincidences not be the inevitable product of a huge sequence of trials on a large, essentially random database?”

Once I learned how to navigate in puzzle-space, finding “incredible” predictions became a routine affair. I found “comet,” “Hale,” and “Bopp” linked in KJV Genesis, along with “forty” and “died,” which could be interpreted as an obvious reference to Heaven’s Gate. I found “Trinity,” “Los Alamos,” “atom,” and “bomb” encoded together in Edwards, in a section containing references to “security,” “test,” and “anti-fascist.” And I found “Hitler” linked to “Nazi” dozens of times in several books. When I set out to engineer a “hidden code” link of “code” and “bogus” in KJV Genesis, I was able to produce sixty closely linked pairs. And every single one of these pairs could fit inside a reasonably sized puzzle.

The source of the mysterious “Bible code” has been revealed — it’s homo sapiens.

Now somebody go tell Oprah.

References

• Begley, Sharon. 1997. Seek and ye shall find. Newsweek, June 9, pp. 66-67.
• Drosnin, Michael. 1997. The Bible Code. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Gardner, Martin. 1997. Farrakhan, Cabala, Baha'i, and 19. Skeptical Inquirer 21 (2): 16-18, 57.
• Hewitt, V. J., and Peter Lorie. 1991. Nostradamus: The End of the Millennium. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Hoagland, Richard C., 1992. The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books.
• Van Biema, David. 1997. Deciphering God’s plan. Time, June 9, p. 56.
• Witztum, Doron, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenburg. 1994. Equidistant letter sequences in the Book of Genesis. Statistical Science 9 (3).