Discovery Seminar
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The Discovery Seminar was developed in 1985 by a team of Israelis. Their goal was to present a scientific rational evidence for the Divine authorship of the Bible. The seminar was translated by the staff of Aish HaTorah into English and Aish Hatorah reports that they have apparently presented variants of this program to over 100,000 Jews in audiences around the world.
The backbone of the seminar is a series of classes called "Failsafe". They include classes on the unique signs of Kosher mammals and fish that apparently couldn't have been known thousands of years ago. Another presentation is on the historical claim of a national revelation that the Jewish people experienced at Mount Sinai. And perhaps most controversially, a presentation on scientific documented evidence for hidden codes in the Bible.
There was ever only one article published in favour of the codes in the scientific press and that was by by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). The IMS since published an article refuting the codes and saying that the original article was simply published as an interesting puzzle to challenge the readership. A review by four leading statisticians provided a full rebuttal of these codes (http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/StatSci/PressRelease.html) which the IMS says has now been solved. Despite this rebuttal, some people continue to believe the codes credible as a result of the Discovery Seminar and the sensationalist book by Michael Drosnin. See Bible code for a fuller discussion of the topic.
