What Happened to Gregg Braden?
— A critique of his latest work: The God Code
Andrew Paterson—03/2004 (Footnotes updated 07/2007)

Gregg Braden is at the forefront of the New Age movement with his books, Awakening to Zero Point, The Isaiah Effect and Walking Between The Worlds. An ex-engineer in the earth sciences and aerospace industries, Braden presents himself as a scientist and modern-day prophet at the cutting edge of research into our collective destiny and the science of prayer. Here is a review from a lecture promoting his latest book, The God Code.

This was the biggest load of pseudoscience I have heard for a long time, and it was delivered in a thoroughly patronizing manner (his target audience when preparing this material can only be imbecilic). I cannot understand this because none of this comes through in his previous work — although I have never heard him lecture before, I have read his previous books, some of which were fantastic and are recommended on this site. I have also listened to one radio interview, which was great.

Braden prides himself on being a scientist, and in his other material he presents the right balance between scientific fact and "spiritual" interpretation of those facts. But his latest work, The God Code, seems to be fantasy masquerading as science, and actually ends up discrediting his previous works. Throughout his lecture he keeps trying to reassure the audience with "this is proved scientifically" or "scientists do not doubt this", when in fact nobody with any scientific understanding could accept what he is claiming on the evidence that he presents. It just isn't science, period.

The crux of The God Code is that our DNA sequence, when read by assigning Hebrew characters to the base sequence, spells out the words of our Creator. His mystical justification for this comes from the Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Creation) which is one of the central texts in the Kabala tradition. Braden gives us a quote from this mystical text which says, "Within the letter is a great, concealed mystical exalted secret… from which everything was created."

From this he looks at DNA and questions whether the DNA base sequence lettering could be the lettering referred to in the Sefer Yetzirah. Perhaps our DNA is the "great, concealed mystical exalted secret" because, after all he reasons, it also contains letters and it is universal to life. He then presents his theory that our DNA is a library of information (nothing new there… even orthodox scientists would agree with that), that each chromosome is a book (if you want to call it a book Gregg… that's fine) and that each gene-length is a sentence (yes… DNA is the language of our Biology so the analogy is obvious and has been made many times before). But his next step is to say that code is literally translatable into Hebrew! And he bases this grand hypothesis on just single and very dubious 4-letter correlation. (There is exciting new evidence suggesting that the 90% "junk DNA" in our cells actually has grammatical structure and so may well be a language of some sort, but this is a far cry from Braden's puerile reasoning.)

To justify this revolutionary claim, Braden appeals to numerology: he states that because the base molecules in our DNA — the language codes of thymine, adenine, cytosine and guanine — are made up of the elements hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon, with respective "atomic masses" 1, 5, 6 and 3 [these are wrong], they actually correspond with the 1st, 5th, 6th and 3rd letters of the Hebrew Alphabet. Therefore, they spell YH VG which means "God/Eternal… Within the Body". Braden is blown away by this… although the audience seems less sure of the connection or have been bamboozled by his pseudoscience build up.

So this is the big secret that he has discovered (at least I presume it is his discovery): within each cell of our body is God's signature in Hebrew (and because Hebrew is a Semitic language, this supposedly works for Arabic as well). From this tiny numerological connection he bases his entire case and claims a whole new science. He tells the audience that it has taken ten years to translate this "introduction to the DNA" or "first level" but that subsequent translations should now be much faster. (Quite why such a basic numerological calculation would take 10 years is beyond me.) It is easy to play around to get just 4 letters to fit, but to then state that this implies the entire DNA is a library that will shortly be read in Hebrew with the right translation is absurd.

Just in case there are doubters in the audience thinking along these lines, Braden then makes the point that the chance of getting this by accident is 1 in 234,256… a figure calculated by "a statistician at the University of Los Angeles." But is this statistic really accurate? Braden repeatedly gives the audience the impression that this is bona fide science, that scientists are welcoming his work or at the very least cannot deny it, but anyone with scientific training knows immediately that this is not the case.

The holes in his theory are very easy to spot and as wide as the Grand Canyon. Braden links the elements hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon to the Hebrew Alphabet with "atomic mass". But the respective atomic masses of these elements, which he gives as 1, 5, 6 and 3, are actually 1, 14, 16 and 12. To make the evidence fit, he has resorted to a numerological trick: 14 becomes 1 + 4 = 5; 16 becomes… well 6 (it does have 6 valence electrons though!); and 12 becomes 1 + 2 = 3. Also, the 1st letter of the Hebrew Alphabet is actually alep. Yod, the Y in his YH VG translation, is Hebrew letter number 10. But Braden justifies calling 10 a 1 because 10 = 1 + 0 = 1.

The problem with this sort of fiddling, to get the evidence to fit the theory, is that it invalidates the "statistician's probability" above. If unscientifically adding numbers together is okay, which he has done with nearly all his "evidence", then the following must be valid: nitrogen, with atomic mass 14, could equally pertain to Hebrew letter 14 (1 + 4 =5), or even letter 15 by just getting rid of the 1 as he did with oxygen; oxygen, with atomic mass 16, could also be Hebrew letter 15 (5+1=6) or Hebrew letter 16; and carbon with atomic mass 12, could also be Hebrew letter 12 or even 21 (2 + 1 =3). The link between these "alphabets" now seems more tenuous, and the 1 in 234,256 statistic starts to look a bit optimistic.

But if the link is valid, as he says it is, then it must be valid both ways. So Y, the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, could be relating to neon which has atomic mass 10 or manganese with atomic mass 55 (5+5) or silicon with atomic mass 28 (2+8) or fluoride with atomic mass 18 (1+8) or even radium with atomic mass 226 (2+2+6). And that is just one letter and just some of the transitional elements. Try doing it with the other three letters and you come up with loads of other elements. Also, why put the elements in the particular order to give YV VG? The "introduction to our genetic code" could just as well have been YG VH (which, as any linguist from Los Angeles will tell you, means "Yo, Gregg Vas Here"). There is HUGE room here to cook the facts, which is exactly what Braden seems to have done.

So his revelation is is just a clever numerological trick that is faintly entertaining. 4 letters? Big deal! But to base a whole scientific theory on such contrivance is pure fantasy. Braden may well be right in that the DNA is a message from our creator, and it is entirely possible it is related to ancient alphabets — who knows — but the way that he has tried to justify this with very selective and subjective "evidence" with just a 4 letter "fit" is nothing short of astonishing. And the fact that his book is selling so well is a testimony to the credulity and scientific illiteracy of the New Age community (although it has no doubt also sold on the strength of his previous work).

But how does he cover up the lack of scientific or logical justification for his assertion of DNA being a transcript of the Hebrew alphabet? It was simple: he continually played the "I don't have the time to go into all the science" card whilst rushing through a padded out explanation of his theory in 30 minutes. The truth is that one and a half hours was way too long for him to present his theory, let alone 30 minutes (5 minutes on a Post-It note would have sufficed - seriously). So what does he do to fill the time? He shows two "touchy feely" videos which, although great watching (no words, just music to pictures of people of different religions and pictures of people's faces), have little relevance to this sort of lecture except as a time filler and to trigger in his audience sentiments that he feels his theory deserves. Braden wasn't in a rush, he was actually desperate to fill up the time slot! His theory is so weakly supported that, although he was forced to pad it out ad nauseam to fill up time and to make it seem a substantial theory, he was also forced to rush through the little he had.

His actual lecture, outside the videos, is supported by a slick Power Point presentation, and mixes genuine science with pseudoscience in a way in which the authority of the former all too easily rubs off on the latter. This is deceptive to the non-scientific and, I am afraid, intellectually dishonest (if he is indeed a genuine scientist he must realize what he is doing). I had the distinct impression during this lecture that I was in the presence of a preacher, and not a scientist or even a spiritual teacher. "Am I going to fast?" he would continually ask, to which I would mentally reply, "Yes you are Gregg, but if you go any slower the audience will see how contrived and vacuous your theory really is."

So what has happened to Gregg Braden? Why is he now so firmly on the pseudoscience track? His sentiments are admirable: he wants the whole world to be as One and for humanity to forget its differences and live in peace. We all want this. But in his effort to get across this very valid message and goal, Braden tries to justify it with numerology (and even then the "evidence" doesn't quite fit), which he parades as frontier science. In the process of this scientific charade, he not only damages his own former works, but also the credibility of genuine frontier science so excellently reported by authors such as Lynne McTaggart, Rupert Sheldrake and Michael Talbot, who have a genuine understanding of what science is and what it can and cannot justify.