Monday's guest was Joseph Noah, the author of Future Prospects of the World According to the Bible Code. He said that messages were encoded in the Bible to give people needed information about the coming end times. Noah meditates to uncover meaningful search terms which he then plugs into bible code software created by Doko Media. Here is a timetable for some of the coming events that he mentioned, based on his bible code interpretations:

• 2004: Start of the 7-year "tribulation" period, sees a catastrophic event occurring around July 4th.
• 2005: Increased chaos, turbulent weather.
• 2006: Quake in Los Angeles
• 2011: Asteroid hit in Russia, and the U.S. causing pole shifts, start of the "Armageddon" war.

Four billion lives will be lost during the tribulation period Noah calculated. The Great War, he explained, will pit a 10-nation Middle Eastern/Asian alliance against the United Nations.

Spotlight on: Bible Codes

For centuries, scholars such as Sir Isaac Newton have looked for hidden messages encoded in the Bible. But it wasn't till the advent of computers that one such code was fully revealed. Using a method called "ELS" or equidistant letter sequencing, various phrases have been found to appear in close proximity to each other that proponents of the code claim exceed any statistical chance. A report that was published in the Statistical Science journal in 1994 showed that in using ELS on the Old Testament, the names and dates of deaths of various prominent Rabbis over the centuries were accurately listed.
According to the History Channel's program, The Bible Code: Predicting Armageddon, here are some phrases that appeared together in the same grids that seem to defy coincidence:

• Wright Brothers, airplane
• Napoleon, France, Waterloo
• Edison, electricity, light bulb
• Columbia, spaceship, they will mourn, consumed by fire

Skeptics of the Bible Code claim that similar phrases can be found in books of comparable length. Researcher Brendan McKay ran the ELS method on the book Moby Dick and found messages that seem to foretell the assassinations or deaths of such figures as Princess Diana and President Kennedy.