Findings: Theomatic Research asserts that:
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Investigators stress that these observations could not have happened by chance. They state with confidence that:
Attempts at Falsification: They have tried to disprove the validity of theomatics by scrambling all the values associated with each letter. For example, instead of the first three numbers of the Greek alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma) being assigned the values 1, 2, 3, they might be given the arbitrarily selected values 6, 5, 3; the last three letters (chi, psi, omega) which normally are given values of 600, 700, 800 might be assigned 100, 300, 600. Then the biblical text was analyzed with their computer program, using these random value allocations. Relatively few matches were found. Repeat runs with other random values assigned to the letters produced similarly dismal results. It appears that only the values traditionally assigned to the letters produce large numbers of matches. It is their belief that these values were picked by God. Further investigations: Before Theomatics could be accepted as a proven fact, the findings of Theomatics Research would have to be replicated independently by other investigators. This should include an analysis of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures using Theomatics, as well as secular texts of a similar length. If matches are found in all long texts, as in the case of the ELS technique, then there would be nothing unique about the Bible from a Theomatic point of view. If multiple observers find that:
evidence for Theomatics would be greatly strengthened. There exists the possibility that an intelligent human mind inserted very complex codes into the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. The next step would be to evaluate the difficulty of actually creating these codes in text. If it is beyond the mental capacity of humans, then one must speculate that a super-human intelligence exists, of some type, somewhere in the universe. "A.B. Leever" attempted to validate Theomatics, but was unsuccessful. She/he concluded "that his [Del Washburn's] claims are indeed false, and that the supposedly scientific methodology used to validate his claims is invalid. At times, we find his work to be simply absurd." 3 A possible problem: One complexity that has apparently not been evaluated yet is the choice of which Hebrew and Greek texts to use in the studies. There are many versions of both in existence. Each is based on thousands of ancient documents that disagree in thousands of places. No original autograph copy of any book in the Bible has survived. The most ancient surviving copies of the Hebrew Scriptures are currently the Dead Sea Scrolls. But they are based on copies by untold generations of scribes for over a millennia. Mistakes have been made; letters have been left out; words have been changed. In the case of the Christian Scriptures, margin notes of some books in the Bible appear to have ended up being incorporated in the text. Certain passages appear to have been inserted by authors other than the original author. The error rate of our "standard" Greek and Hebrew texts may throw great suspicion on Theomatics. There seems to be little merit in either this technique or ELS codes. Another applications for Theomatics: If Theomatics could be proven to extract meaningful patterns out of the biblical text, then it might be possible to use it in the reverse direction. Theologians continually argue over which ancient manuscript of a given passage in the Bible reflects the original wording of the author. By testing the passage as it appears in all of the ancient manuscripts, the correct copy -- the one with the greatest number of matches -- might be the correct one.
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