Yaro,
Thanks for the tips. It was good to re-read Simon's report, which gets closest any to being sensible. But, I think that was written 6 years ago, and since then, there have been other studies. Moreover, Simon's main point, that the significant results exist because of "wiggle room" and the existence of subjectivity in making choices, is rationalization, as I understand it.
The underlying hypothesis predicting the Codes is that the Bible is a subjective document, where the subject is God. Jahn and his colleagues at PEAR are dealing with the "Science of the subjective." meaning basically the idea that science can study subjectivity objectively. Psychology has long held the position that this is possible.
The question is, how did the authority who was asked to provide the names of the Rabbis come up with a list of names that produced such implausible results? That the results were improbable rules out "lucky guess." So, either the man was a Seer, with prophetic insights of an ESP sort, or God directed him to God's subjective choice of names. Or, he was in collusion with Witztum et. al. in some sort of scam, as Simon begins his article by suggesting. (Later denied, of course).
But Simon never asks this question, only suggests the answer, and leaves it rattling around in your head while you read the rest of his report. But we are human, aren't we. We would naturally wonder. I think that the Bible elsewhere asserts that "all authority is from God." tells us which answer is most consistent. If the hypothesis that produced the Bible Code prediction is correct, we would predict that authorities asked to "guess" which names of Rabbis would show up in the codes would, by divine guidance, come up with improbably successful codes.
But let's move on, given these insights, as scientists, not rationalizers. Ok, let's repeat the study, this time getting "God approved, prayed for authorities" to come up with lists of whatever, and compare the probability of the resulting codes with lists produced by chance, and by atheists. After all, the hypothesis being tested, that this Person, Jehovah is really out there, and that the self-description of who He is in the Scriptures is a trustworthy report, is being tested by many other sorts of studies. Theomatics, Ivan Panin's Gematria, prayer studies, NDE studies. Let's do the proper scientific thing, and bring to bear all that we are learning from all these efforts. We know prayer changes things. So, let's get prayer into the Bible Code studies, and see whether prayer can get us more consistent results.
So, there's my homework. Your turn.
Stephen