Reddit reviews The Bible Code

Which charity? Happy to donate too.

The whole "Genesis in Chinese" idea is ... for lack of better words, a post-hoc fantasy.

Now if you know chinese, there are 370 000 chinese "words". There are multiple "words" to express a given meaning. Each word can probably be divided up half a dozen different ways. Each component can have half a dozen meanings.

For example, Boat can be written as 船(chuán) and
舩 (also pronounced chuán), while "large boat" can be written as 舸 (gě). In fact, in Chinese there is also specifically a way of writing "Ark" -
方舟 (fāngzhōu).

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hanzi_of_Genesis

An example of using Chinese inappropriately like "Genesis in Chinese" (thanks /u/tendeuchen) -

> The Chinese for 'god' is 上帝.

> 上 = 'above'

> When you break down 帝, you get:
> 亠 = 'head'
> 丷 = '8' which represents '∞' (infinity)
> 冖 = 'cover'
> 巾 = 'turban'

> So, combined you essentially get 'the one above with a head covered by a turban for infinity'. This proves that ancient Chinese characters predicted Islam and that Allah is the one true God.

This whole Genesis in Chinese reminds me of the Bible Code fiasco. When you have a humungous dataset, there are many possible ways you can misuse the large dataset. (And perhaps, one inadvertently proves by analogy the ability of evolution by random mutation and natural selection to find "useful" amino acid sequences!).

The TED talk 4am in the morning shows how easy it is for humans to make a conspiracy-

https://youtu.be/ORYKKNoRcDc

ADDIT:

In fact, Ethel Nelson demonstrated how easy it is to fudge Chinese characters into whatever Ethel wanted;

> Ethel Nelson's previous book on this subject, "The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of Genesis Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Languages" was based on modern Kaishu forms, which are often totally different from the original forms, so that the elements into which the characters were analyzed did not even exist in the original forms.

> When this was pointed out to Nelson after the publication of that book, she then came out with this one, scrapping most of her previous contentions and producing new ones, using older character forms as a basis. However, the authors are careful to pick and choose forms that support their analysis, even if other forms are far more common. You can find lots of samples of oracle bone characters on the Web. See for yourself. In fact, it appears that some may be made up on the basis of related forms, as I can't find any examples of them.

If one can do that both in modern Kaishu as well as oracle bone Chinese, then this is strong evidence that one can fudge almost anything similarly using Chinese.

> Also, this book and the previous one share another set of problems. Nelson and her co-authors seem to have no idea that the origins of specific Chinese characters have been well understood for quite some time.

Source

The origins of chinese characters is well understood; creationists deliberately skip over well known etymology of them to sell their message (and books). From the same source

> Also, this book and the previous one share another set of problems. Nelson and her co-authors seem to have no idea that the origins of specific Chinese characters have been well understood for quite some time. They don't even recognize that the vast majority of characters are not simple indicative or compound indicative forms, as they would have us believe, but are semantic-phonetic compounds. They consistently miss this well-know point. It is obvious that they have never read a single work on this subject, but have simply made up their own stories out of whole cloth. This is nothing more than a work of imaginative fiction.

> They also don't realize that many characters are known to be phonetic loans. For example, "lai2" ("to come") was originally a character for "barley" or some related grain, also pronounced "lai2". For a while, the same form was used for both. Later on, the "grass" radical was added to the "barley" character to distinguish it. This becomes quite obvious when you compare the character for "barley" with the character for "wheat" ("mai4"), as they have many elements in common. It is simply ridiculous to analyze the character as two people (presumably Adam and Eve) coming from behind a tree. They even analyze the hook at the bottom of the vertical center stroke as "possibly representing a foot...to indicate movement". They didn't even know that the hook is a modern innovation in the brush-written form, and does not even appear in older forms. It's really sad to see people taken in by such nonsensical fantasies.

> It's quite amusing to see how Nelson confidently puts forth one analysis of a particular character, like the one for "fire", in the first book, and then produces an equally confident explanation of the same character in the second book that completely contradicts the first one. The fact is that the second analysis is just as baseless as the first.

> A final problem with both books is that many of the characters that they analyze did not even exist in the beginning stages of the writing system, which is what these books are trying to deal with. That is, there are no examples of the existence of these characters among the Shang period oracle bone characters--only about 1000 of which had even been deciphered at the time of publication.

> If you want to know something about how Chinese characters are really composed, I suggest starting with "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", by John DeFrancis. If you want to know more about Chinese oracle bone characters, try "Sources of Shang History" (pretty expensive), by David N. Keightley. A cheaper, but less reliable, source is "The Composition of Common Chinese Characters: An Illustrated Account", from Peking University Press. Even Wieger's "Chinese Characters: Their origin, etymology, history, classification, and signification." is light years ahead of Nelson's attempts. (Parts of this were simply copied word-for-word from my review of Nelson's first book.)

The idea that God reveals truth in cryptic mathematical codes hidden in the text of the Bible can hardly be characterized as a "linguistics explanation". If you are interested in this type of research, you might also enjoy The Bible Code

Cheers,

Nasorenga

That's definitely a guy who buys, reads, and then uses techniques from The Bible Code