Possible Signature of Extraordinary Intervention

I have come here seeking the help of people active in and knowledgeable of the debate on origins.For many years I have had a question: Unique among ancient texts, Genesis lists a large number of very datable (or datable in principle) events AND concomitant dating information. Not only that, Genesis dates typically (except for date information in conjunction with the flood event) have three significant digits, as opposed to the rest of the bible, which generally have just two. Yet almost all of the dates are wrong. Why put them in if they're going to be found out to be wrong?So, I devised a protocol to examine the question. I followed the protocol. Very much to my surprise, I got a result.A fairly simple algorithm, using all of the datable events and numbers in Genesis, and only those events and numbers, and with the decryption key in plain text (practically with a neon sign that says "decrypt with me") extracts a steganographic chronology.A condensed description of the algorithm follows:Chronological dating in the Hebrew Scriptures occurs in four separate and distinct time lines. Events mentioned in the scriptures known to have actually happened (i.e. invention of clothing or brick architecture, or the emergence of lactase persistence,) when plotted on the relevant time line, are dated accurately.Correct dates for most of these events could not have been known to a contemporaneous biblical author; this information constitutes an "out of place artifact" within the text of the scriptures; this anachronistic information requires explanation. Since dating the historic events is possible for a "modern" audience, the simplest explanation, should this hypothesis be accepted, is that the information is a "signature" meant to be discovered at a future date.Overview of the Time Lines

• The Historical Time Line - interval scale. Joshua to Chronicles. Events are timed according to reigns of Judges or Kings, and, except for the book of Esther, are externally verified to contemporaneous sources (i.e. Iron and Bronze Ages, attack on the Northern Kingdom by Assyria.). Since events in this time line are "in clear" they will not be analyzed for dating.
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• The Adam-Seth Time Line - interval scale. Events follow the life spans and first parenthood dates of descendants of Adam through Seth, but in a lightly encrypted manor. The transformation from ages in the text to real numbers of years is Age^2/120 for Adam and his descendants through Seth. For Methuselah, for example, instead of living 969 years, a little over 8 times the "age of a man (120 years,) the actual span of time represented is 969 times a little more than 8, or 7,925 years. This dating continues until biblical characters started living 120 years or less. This transformation puts the invention of clothing, for example, at approximately 73,000 years ago, and the earliest use of wine at 8,000 years ago. The actual mapping is as follows: Seth, Adam's son, (and all subsequent descendants,) are assigned a "birth date" of the father's birth date, plus his own adjusted age, plus the listed date of first paternity for the father. The Seth age starts at 0 plus Seth’s adjusted life span, 6,391 years, plus Adam’s paternity age, 130, or 7,061, and lasts 6,391 years. (Obviously, it would have been easier if ages and paternity dates operated in a normal manner, but this is the one combination that matches the events to our current understanding of their dates.) To translate the virtual dates into common calendar dates, we need a stipulated end point of the time line, taken to be 1250 BC as a virtual date of the Exodus event. This results in the following dates: Clothing, 73 KYA. Global Cooling (switch from grass skirts to leather jackets) just after 73 KYA. Last non-Homo Sapiens people, 22 KYA. Post-glacial melt, starting 12 KYA. Wine, 8 KYA. Tall brick structures, 6 KYA. Lactase persistence in Southwest Asia, 4 KYA. Spread of circumcision from Africa to Asia, 4 KYA. Hyksos in Egypt, before 1600 BC. Famine in Egypt (Thera eruption) about 1650 BC. A full table of all events and references is in the complete paper, available as described above, including events for the God and Cain lines.
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• The Adam-Cain Time Line - ordinal scale. Listed events happen in order. For example, clothing and the nudity taboo are invented, an ice age begins, agriculture is invented, settled farmers displace nomadic herdsmen, cities arise, orchestral music appears, polygamy is invented, we have a bronze age and then an iron age. The actual datable events in this time line occur during the Cain and Cain’s Lamech periods. Both of those periods have a multiplier within the text: Seven in the case of Cain, the amount of retribution promised by God to Cain if anyone defies Cain’s mark and harms him; Cain’s descendant Lamech declares himself an additional 10 times the retribution accorded Cain. This allows for numerical scaling of the events, if not actual dating.
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• The God Time Line - ratio scale. Events in the order of creation occur in proportion to the day numbers enumerated. For example, there is a zero time point for our universe, the hypothesis predicts that planetogenesis (of rocky planets) starts at between 2.3 billion years and 4.6 billion years, autotrophic life after 4.6 billion years, and our particular solar system was formed at between 6.9 and 9.2 billion years.
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• Selection rule. Some events, specifically God's interactions with Adam and Cain, occur in multiple time lines. The event will be placed in the line with the best date fit. Some events occur in a time line and also in a "summary list," for example, the blessing given to Adam and Eve upon their expulsion from Eden. The first mention of the event controls the dating.
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• Accuracy and Reliability. An attempt is made to match every event or occurrence in the biblical text to an actual occurrence as long as it doesn't require more than two assumptions to make the connection. Based on an allowance for noise in the signal and the accuracy of our scientific dating methods, dating within 15% would count as a match.
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• Word selection and translation. Biblical Hebrew has a very limited vocabulary. A pit can be a pit or Hell; sky can be sky or heaven, spirit can be breath or wind or spirit. Word meanings and translations are allowed to be selected to be the closest bridge between a textually described event and a known real-world occurrence. For the purposes of this research, traditional renderings in translation for earth and heavens are given a more neutral mater and space. Also, firmament, a spread-out, roundish, hollowish piece of metal, is taken as a protoplanetary disk with sufficient metal content to spawn a more or less solid planet.

All events actually known to have happened (origin of the universe, formation of our particular solar system, emergence of Humankind, inventions of clothing, wine, and tall brick structures, the last stand of non-Human Hominids, and lactase persistence in Southwest Asia, to name a few datable events, all fall into place in the chronology. Events in Genesis clearly pointing to datable events (glacial melt, for example) also fall correctly in place. Events for which we have no consensus dating (first solid-ish planet, for example) fall along pretty good guesses. [Some events achieved dating after I had my algorithm, such as the possible emergence of a Broca's region in Australopithecus sediba) but since it hasn't been published, that doesn't do me any good except for self-validation. The "pretty good guesses" may serve as predictions arising from the project, subject of validation or falsification.]Finding a fairly complete (although concise) and reasonably accurate Cosmological, Terrestrial, and Human chronology inside a Bronze Age book I take to be a signature of an extraordinary intervention of some kind by a person, persons, or entity unknown, and by a manner and for a purpose equally unknown. (This project is completely belief-neutral and should have absolutely no bearing on anyone's religious ideas or practices. It's just an out of place artifact found in a really old book.I am a complete non-academic. The toolkit for my protocol comes from my work as a fraud investigator, and it's almost never been wrong. However, I am completely at sea when it comes to having my result validated or discredited. I would be very happy to have some fine research institution tell me, for example, thank you for your submission, but according to the Lipschitz Decryption Theorem, it just isn't anything special. Then I could move on to something simpler, like dog rescue, cold fusion, or bicycle commuting advocacy. But that hasn't happened.I would be happy to discuss the implications of this result in this topic. But what I would really like is if someone here is an academic math or encryption person with a fair knowledge of the events described in Genesis, or has the resources of such a person available, to tell me if I am wrong, and why, or if I'm actually onto something.I can't actually circulate my paper (Accurate Dating within Early Hebrew Scripture as a Signature of Extraordinary Intervention) publicly because it might still be under consideration at several organizations, although that is not likely. I would be happy to answer any questions, however.Ideally, it would be great of three people from the Evolution side and three people from the Creation side took this up. If you have the resources to move this forward and want a friend for life (not to mention free beer and pizza when you're in New York) please contact me.Before you write this message off, consider this little Pascal's side-bet: what would it be worth if my result actually has some shred of validity, and you got to be a co-author.Thanks for your consideration,Andy GrellEdited by andygee, : request of adminEdited by Admin, : Add some helpful formatting.

Hi Andy, welcome to EvC Forum.You haven't provided any specifics, so I can't promote your thread. If at some point you provide some details then I can reconsider, otherwise people can contact you via PM or email.

Thread copied here from the Possible Signature of Extraordinary Intervention thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

There seem to be quite a lot of problems here.For instance in "word selection" you describe as "neutral" a choice of terminology clearly chosen to favour your argument:

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For the purposes of this research, traditional renderings in translation for earth and heavens are given a more neutral mater and space. Also, firmament, a spread-out, roundish, hollowish piece of metal, is taken as a protoplanetary disk with sufficient metal content to spawn a more or less solid planet.

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I think that "tendentious" would before accurate than "neutral" here.Likewise your choice of dating for the beginning of the universe seems to be based solely on modern scientific sources and not from the text at all. Or if it does there is no clue as to how you derived it.The complex and apparently arbitrary formula for the "Adam-Seth" timeline is another issue which needs to be addressed. Where did it come from ?Finally - for now - if the dating of events appearing on multiple timelines shows a disagreement, simply discarding the "worse" date as you say that you do is not the correct answer. Inaccuracies and inconsistencies are serious problems for your hypothesis and need to be taken seriously.

Why put them in in encrypted form so as to mislead people for 2500 years until you came along to explain it to them?

Not intended for PaulKEdited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Except that it wasn't. 4.57 Ga, yes. Not 1.5 or 2 times that.
Numerology is what every bit of that looks like to me.

My problem with this exercise is that by tweaking enough parameters, we can probably squeeze some truth out of any origin stories. I find your treatment of human ages and birthdays in the Bible to be particularly suspicious. Why shouldn't I dismiss your proposal the way I would dismiss any attempt at numerology.

Hi Paul --Thanks for your comments.If the text wanted to be unambiguous about the creation of the actual Planet Earth, the word would have been "olam." "Aretz" means many things, including dirt and country. I choose to reject the editorial choice of translating it "The Earth" in favor just plain stuff. Similarly, "Shemayim" really just means sky. When you look up at the sky, you are looking at space.The point of the exercise is that knowledge of what we understand to be the "scientific" chronology of the Universe is contained in Genesis. We believe we observe that the Universe started from nothing and from that emerged stuff and space and energy. I'm far from the first person to point that out.Incidentally, my dating of the God line begins at exactly the same place as the text does, at zero. We just observe that today is +13.8 billion years.As for the Seth line, this is the way codes are cracked. In a substitution code, you try out the most frequently used letters in the text with the most frequently used letters in the language, then poke and tweak until you get a coherent message. Clothes, Neanderthals, wine, bricks, circumcision, etc, all line up coherently. It's a single rule which accurately (well, at least according to scientific observation) these events. In the full work, I justify the decrypting of the text using examples within the Bible itself; the clearest one being Sheshek, a rotation code for Babel.As for the multiple time line events, you raise a valid point. But I'm not discarding the worst, my algorithm rule is to choose the best.

Part 2 of the complete work discusses this. But first, I'm not by a longshot the first person to tackle this; there are creation-days as eras schema, general revelation and special revelation schema, etc.My sub-hypothesis for this is that whoever put the encryption in can't or won't give out information that isn't already known. Now we know this stuff, so it is already known at this point. What we get is not new information but the information that someone is authenticating the moral information by supplying this stenographic message along with it. I support this with examples of known "information barriers."

I should have been more clear; 4 creation days from zero, or approximately 4.6 billion years ago. It's annoying that this is such a squeaker and it looks like it really should be in day 5. However, 15 years ago, the age of the universe was 20 billion and it wouldn't have worked out at al and now it's so close. The only justification I have for this is that it's in my margin of error, and that apparently at least one sample moon rock appears to be 5 billion years old. Maybe.

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If the text wanted to be unambiguous about the creation of the actual Planet Earth, the word would have been "olam." "Aretz" means many things, including dirt and country. I choose to reject the editorial choice of translating it "The Earth" in favor just plain stuff. Similarly, "Shemayim" really just means sky. When you look up at the sky, you are looking at space.

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Unfortunately your choice of terms is no better - and arguably worse. The text does not contain any notion of a planet or space as we recognise them. In fact Genesis 1 seems to be in many ways a typical Middle Eastern creation myth where the universe begins as an empty and unbounded ocean from which land is raised. Any translation that works against this view is already departing from at least the surface reading of the text.

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The point of the exercise is that knowledge of what we understand to be the "scientific" chronology of the Universe is contained in Genesis. We believe we observe that the Universe started from nothing and from that emerged stuff and space and energy. I'm far from the first person to point that out.

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But Genesis 1 doesn't have the Universe emerging from nothing. The primordial ocean is there at verse 1, before the creation of the day-night cycle.

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Incidentally, my dating of the God line begins at exactly the same place as the text does, at zero. We just observe that today is +13.8 billion years.

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In other words any claim that there is an accurate dating of creation in the text is nonsense.

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As for the Seth line, this is the way codes are cracked. In a substitution code, you try out the most frequently used letters in the text with the most frequently used letters in the language, then poke and tweak until you get a coherent message. Clothes, Neanderthals, wine, bricks, circumcision, etc, all line up coherently. It's a single rule which accurately (well, at least according to scientific observation) these events. In the full work, I justify the decrypting of the text using examples within the Bible itself; the clearest one being Sheshek, a rotation code for Babel.

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The formula you gave - Age^2/120 - is not a substitution cipher. So I am going to ask how you derived it again.I am also aware of substitution ciphers and frequency analysis. What body of text did you analyse to create your frequency counts ?

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As for the multiple time line events, you raise a valid point. But I'm not discarding the worst, my algorithm rule is to choose the best.

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Which is exactly the same thing.

So, your sub-hypothesis is that the author of Genesis wrote it with the deliberate intention of not telling anyone anything true that they didn't already know.Then two questions come to mind:First, why write it at all? What's the point? I don't write posts addressed to you telling you that your username is "andygee" and that you live in New York. You don't PM me to tell me that my username is "Dr Adequate" and that I've made a lot of posts on this forum. There is no point to communication except to tell people stuff that they don't know already.Second, this practice leads to people being falsely informed, as we know. America is knee-deep in people who think the universe is only a few thousand years old, based on their reading of Genesis and their consequent rejection of scientific evidence to the contrary.So if the author of Genesis knew what effect his writings would have on people, then his intentions were as follows:(a) Not to communicate any truth to them unless they'd already found it out without reading Genesis and knew it to be true without his help.(b) To communicate falsehoods to people which they would never have been inclined to believe unless they'd read Genesis.His intention, then, was to never help people know truths that would not otherwise be known, but often to lead them into believing falsehoods which they would not otherwise have believed.Apparently what he wanted was that reading his words would never put anyone right who might otherwise have been wrong; but he was fine with putting wrong people who might otherwise have been either right or at least neutral on the issue.Well, why didn't he want people to be right? And why did he want people to be wrong? Why did he never want to reveal truth to anyone, but wanted people to be convinced by his words of something we know to be false?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Clearly they were truncating instead of rounding. Numerology always makes me cringe.

Let's take an example, an analogy. Suppose I go about telling everyone that my real name is Vnorov.Some people are deceived by me, they swear by my veracity and insist that my name is indeed Vnorov.Some people point out that this is not a real name, and that this can't be my real name. They call me a liar. They are not sure what my real name is, because all they know is that I must be lying.Then by some independent means someone discovers that my real name is "Philip".Now at that point some ingenious person (like you) might point out that if you move each letter of "Vnorov" six letters back in the alphabet, you get "Philip". My real name was encoded.But this discovery says nothing for my veracity, does it? Some people were deceived into thinking that my name was Vnorov, and other people, who weren't deceived, didn't have any idea what it was. I communicated lies to whoever thought I was truthful, and I did not communicate the truth to anyone who thought I was lying. In order to find out the truth, it was necessary to use other means.Now, your ability, after discovering that I'm really called "Philip", to find out the code I was using, doesn't mean I was truthful, does it? The people who were deceived by my claim were deceived; and the people who knew I was lying couldn't find out the truth by studying my claim. I deceived some without revealing the truth to any. All we can say is that after you found out by other means that my name was "Philip", you could figure out the system I used to lie to everyone.My having a systematic approach to lying about the letters of my name does not make me truthful, does it? The fact that you can retrospectively figure out the system by which I lied does not make me truthful, does it? I have convinced some of lies, I have convinced others that I was a liar but without telling them the truth --- and the fact that after others have revealed that I lied, and how I lied, you can subsequently figure out the system by which I lied, does not make me truthful, does it?---N.B: My real name is not in fact Philip. I lied. If you can figure out the method I used to select that lie, does that make me truthful?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.