50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God by Guy P. Harrison Page B

god is real?
    (2) Because the Book of the Dead/Bhagavad Gita/Torah/
Bible/Koran/Book of Mormon, and so forth says my god is real.
    (3) How do I know my holy book is true?
    (4) Because its words were inspired by my god.

    (5) How do I know my holy book contains the inspired word of
my god?
    (6) Because it says it does.
    Obviously this proves nothing. If this line of thinking made any sense,
then Christians would have to believe that the Koran is the word of the
real god and Muslims would have to believe that the Bible is the word
of the real god because both groups rely on this circular reasoning to
support their claims. If it works for one holy book, then it would have
to work for all of them. But, of course, it never does. Typical believers
see right through this nonsense whenever a rival believer attempts to
use it on them. It seems that in most cases one has to first believe the
god is real before that god's holy book can make an impression.
    Many believers claim that their holy book contains details of
future events and scientific facts that could not possibly have been
known by people when they were written. This, they say, is proof that
their book comes straight from a god. It's the Nostradamus approach
to proving a god is real. Although many of these claims are made,
none of them hold up under scrutiny. "The Bible code" or "Torah
code" is a good example of this. According to some believers, the
Bible is filled with hidden messages from their god that reveal startling information about important events. Michael Drosnin's book,
The Bible Code, became a best seller in the 1990s and gave believers
one more thing to cite as proof for their god. Some nonbelievers may
be surprised by how popular the Bible code is. Although finding
"secret messages" in the Bible is nothing new, it warrants attention
because believers bring it up often and it doesn't seem to be going
away any time soon.
    Bible code skeptics have demonstrated that one can find just about
anything in any large collection of letters simply by tweaking an
extraction formula. For example, code skeptics have "discovered" fascinating predictions within the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
With a little work I am sure that they could find "Oswald killed
Kennedy" or "Giants win the Super Bowl" in this book.

    Skeptic David E. Thomas writes:
    Some believe that these "messages" in the Hebrew Bible are not just
coincidence-they were put there deliberately by God. But if
someone finds a hidden message in a book, a song played backwards, funny-looking Martian mesas, or some other object or thing,
does that prove someone else put the message there intentionally?
Or might the message exist only in the eyes of the beholder (and in
those of his or her followers)? Does perception of meaning prove the
message was deliberately created? (Thomas 1997)
    To be consistent, Christians who insist on believing in the Bible code
must consider the "Koran code." Yes, there is a Koran code. And some
Muslims say it is the only true code that reveals messages from a god.
There probably are others. What is important to know is that no holy
code comes close to providing convincing evidence for the existence of
a god. These are just cases of religion hijacking numerology's gig.
    I once asked a Muslim why he is confident that the Koran is the
word of a real god. He replied that it contains many facts that have
only recently been discovered by science. This, he said, was proof that
the Koran is the only book inspired by a god. I have learned over the
years that it is not wise to allow a believer to swamp you with a long
list of prophecies, "facts," and "revelations" found in their holy book.
What happens is that they end up feeling that they have proven their
case simply because they talked a lot, as if truth somehow correlates
with the number of words spoken. The way around this that allows one
to avoid being rude while wasting as little time as