The bible code at first look seems quite astonishing. How could the bible possibly contain all these secret messages about the future without being written by god himself? Looking at the accuracy of the predictions in the bible code, it seems highly unlikely that these will appear by chance.
This is all true. It is highly unlikely that one short excerpt of text will contain accurate hidden messages. The thing is, the bible has a lot of short text excerpts. Using the bible code's system there are millions, probably billions of places to look for hidden messages. As the bible code is very loose about the size of matrix and the skip (distance from the end of one line to the start of the next in the text), it is easy to see how small pieces of text can have huge numbers of ways of being written. For example, the above paragraph could be written as
skip=5
start character=1
thebiblecodeatfirs
seemsquiteastonish
wcouldthebibleposs
ontainallthesesecr
sagesaboutthefutur
or
skip=7
startcharacter=6
blecodeatfirstlo
quiteastonishing
dthebiblepossibl
nallthesesecretm
aboutthefuturewi
As you can see, these two completely different blocks of text were both generated from one very small paragraph. Using this system with the bible, which is several hundred thousand words long, there would be a massive number of places to look for hidden messages.
Even so, you may say that only the bible will contain words in the same block which all have relevance. One of the bible code's key supporters, Michael Drosnin agreed. He said,
"When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them. "
Unfortunately for him, his critics did just that. In Moby Dick they found references to the assassinations of Ghandi, JFK and Trotsky, among others. Also found in Moby Dick was references to the death of Princess Diana. You can get examples of these people's assassinations at http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html