If you look at the paper page 15 you get a nice table and graph to go with it that seems to bear out what he says. So I decided to look into it.
The first thing I noticed was there seemed to be some colours missing. Surely there were other colours in the Old Testament other than red, green, yellow, magenta and blue. So I went to Biblegateway and did a search. Turns out there are no orange or pink mentioned in the Bible, but I did come up with black, white, silver, gold, crimson, scarlet, purple,and brown that were.
Now you could say that black and white aren't colours. and that gold and silver aren't either, because they need to be shiny to exist or they just turn into grey or greenish yellow, so I can see why they wouldn't be included in the chart. I was also told that because scarlet and crimson are just shades of red, they are included in the chart under red. In the same way, purple is included in magenta, because the purple in the Bible is more reddish purple than bluish purple. As for brown, it isn't a colour of the rainbow, so it doesn't have a frequency. So that explains that.
Next I went and showed the chart and the graph to my husband. He teaches computer graphics at UNSW so he knows all about colours. What struck him right away was that magenta was in the chart. He says magenta isn't in the rainbow. This chart shows you where the different colors lie- you can see that magenta lies around the bottom of the graph near reddish purple. The colours there have no frequencies.
But the chart says that the frequency of magenta is 546. If it isn't magenta, then what colour is it?
Looking at this chart you can see it is a green. That's nothing like purple. If you wanted a purple-like colour that does have a frequency, the author should have used violet. But the frequency of violet is 668–789 THz which would throw Shore's chart right off. If he wanted to be accurate, he shouldn't have included purple at all, because reddish purple isn't a spectral colour. However that would leave 4 points and 4 points don't give you a significant result. If you look at the graph without that point it looks like this:
Hardly something you could draw a straight line through.
So the moral of the story is, just because someone works for a University, it doesn't mean you can rely on their findings, especially if they writing about emotional issues such as religion or climate change. As it says in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (NIV):
Test everything. Hold on to the good.
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All NIV Bible quotes are from:
New International Version (NIV)
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica
taken from http://www.biblegateway.com
PS The paper also deals with the relationship between the words for the earth, moon and sun and their size. But he left out Venus, which is referred to as the morning star.
Another thing he does is try and find a relationship between the Hebrew words for the day, month and year and their length. This graph comes out to be really impressive but he left out the word for week, which I suspect would mess everything up.
