McKay et. al. argued that the Torah code experiments of Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg on the Genesis text succeeded because one way or another they selectively omitted appellations to make the experiment produce a seemingly statistically significant result. To demonstrate this they cooked an experiment using a Hebrew text of War and Peace. They showed that by selective omissions and some spelling stretches their Monte Carlo experiment yielded a comparably small probability. In essence, they argued that had there been no stretches and had a full set of appellations been used, neither the rejection of the Null hypothesis of no Torah Code effect for the experiment using the Genesis text nor the rejection of the Null hypothesis for their cooked experiment using the War and Peace text would have happened.

In this talk we describe an experiment which proves the McKay et. al argument to be fallacious. We combine the appellation lists of McKay et. al. and Witztum et. al. to form a more complete list of appellations with no selected omissions. We designed an improved protocol for the experiment using statistically more powerful compactness measures and an ELS Random Placement control text population. We tested the Null hypothesis of no Torah code effect against four different alternative hypotheses. Our experiments show that the combined list of appellations has the same or a slightly stronger effect in the Genesis text than the original list for three out of the four alternative hypotheses and a slightly weaker effect for the fourth alternative hypothesis. For the McKay list in the War and Peace text there was a significant decrease in the effect for all four alternative hypotheses. And with the improved protocol, the combined list had a statistically insignificant effect in the War and Peace text.

These results provide evidence of the fallaciousness of McKay et. al.'s assertion that had a more full list of appellations been used, the Null hypothesis of no Torah code effect would not have been rejected in both the Genesis text and the War and Peace text.