When Oprah Winfrey expresses enthusiastic interest, Time and Newsweek feature full-page reviews, and Warner Brothers executives negotiate film rights, no wonder one of these titles rockets to the top of The New York Times bestseller list. Calculations demonstrating the statistical improbability of such messages appearing by chance seem impressive. They hint that the message must have a supernatural source. The argument looks the same as my own argument for divine design. Actually, statistics are not the problem.
Abuse of statistics is.
Code publicists argue that the probability of finding a complex message within a limited word or letter sequence is so low that chance cannot explain it. Neither claim is true. One author claims that every 50th letter in a certain Bible book produces a brief but deliberately planted message. Let's consider the plausibility of that claim. Second, every 50th letter does not represent the only skip sequence that could be searched.