It’s further proof that the Torah is divine, assuming it’s true.
Only divine power can foresee the future in advance.

Indeed. I meant that it isn’t important as Torah study.

Rabbi, not everyone involved in this is biased. (Only the non-believers, who would have to change their worldview if they turned out to be wrong.)

It’s not as though Rips isn’t a great mathematician.
In any case, my understanding was that Aumann still thinks it’s problematic. But from reading the various reports, you can see that a large part of the committee’s examination was dealing with the style and conduct of Rips and Witztum versus Kalai and Bar-Hillel. They were trying to run some kind of tribunal, an almost judicial proceeding, that would decide the matter, and the sides behaved as childishly as possible.
Since it’s clear that if something was given at Sinai, it did not reach us in precisely its original letters—and here I’m of course referring to your column “If You’re a Heretic,” and applying it to myself, the insignificant one—and the idea that He made sure it arrived in exactly its current form in our own day, when it’s possible to search for a code, sounds completely far-fetched. Of course, that’s an a priori consideration that isn’t relevant once there are already empirical findings.

From what I understood, the detractors admitted that something strange happened here, except that it could have been engineered by choosing different criteria for the experiment, and that’s where the question comes in whether to trust that they didn’t fudge things. (On Witztum’s site he says that he once ran an experiment to predict when a war would break out or something like that, and got a certain date [in hindsight you can see that it was correct]. If he really didn’t go looking for it afterward, I personally would be floored.)

A.H., sometimes there is a prediction that is discovered beforehand but only takes on meaning afterward. So the argument that always comes up in this debate—why don’t they predict events in advance—doesn’t seem decisive to me. Suppose they found the murderer of Sadat next to Sadat’s name (they really did find that). Before the murder happened, nobody knew his name or who he was, so that prediction was meaningless until the murder occurred.
Of course, if the result had been completely unambiguous—meaning a sentence came out like: “Sadat will be murdered by Reuven son of Shimon on such-and-such a date”—that would be a prediction in advance. But that’s not the kind of predictions they get there.
Moreover, before the murder happened they weren’t looking at all, so it’s no wonder they didn’t find it. The occurrence of the event is what sends them to go look.

Yishai,
A long time ago I read the report, and in my opinion they dealt with the substance too. And indeed Rips is also an important mathematician; among other things, that’s why I said I’m not really qualified. Aumann partially walked it back in a newspaper interview (not in the report). Again, it’s not that he now believes in Rips’s findings, but he phrased himself more moderately. I think I referred to this in the appendix to God Plays Dice.

A.H.,
I wasn’t persuaded that you’re right. As a matter of fact, all sides here are biased. First of all, in my impression, that is simply the reality. Now you’re looking for an explanation, and in my opinion there is an explanation for both sides. These people want to prove that the Bible is true and divine, and those people want to prove that it isn’t. So the situation is fairly symmetrical. We all know the tendentiousness of people who bring others to repentance just like those who lead people away from religion.
It is true, though, that the situation is not completely symmetrical, because if the findings are not correct there is no necessity to leave religion, whereas if they are correct the secular person has a problem.

It seems to me that the story with Aumann is exactly the opposite: at first he was convinced it was credible, and afterward he walked it back and said he didn’t know.