The Yakima Herald-Republic is the largest newspaper serving Yakima County in Washington State. It has a circulation of 28,104 (weekdays) and 40,018 (Sundays). The reporter Adriana Janovich, who interviewed me only once for about an hour, did an excellent job. She fully captured the surprising simplicity and amazing grace of the divine design of the Holy Bible in her review called In perfect alignment published on Saturday, December 30, 2006. The text of the article is reproduced below the digital photograph. Alternately, you can click on the image for a view large enough to read:

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Here is the text of the article:

In perfect alignment:

By ADRIANNA JANOVICH

YAKIMA HERALD REPUBLIC

It’s a simple idea: Take the Bible, roll it up like a scroll, see how all the books align.

Like spokes on a wheel, the books of the Bible line up “in a surprisingly meaningful way,” local author Richard Amiel McGough claims.

To him, the written Word takes the shape of a tri-radiant halo.

It’s an image he wears around his neck, imprinted on a circular pendant. It’s an image his wife, Rose, fashioned into a stained glass window for their West Valley home. And it’s the image that graces the cover of McGough’s self-published book.

The design is based on McGough’s “Bible Wheel” theory, in which Scriptures connect in a “beautiful, symmetrical” way, proving — he says — “God designed the Bible.”

“The pattern is infinity deep,” says 47-year-old McGough, a member of Wiley Heights Covenant Church. “The more details you know about the Bible, the more clear the pattern becomes.

“We end up with a perfect structure,” he says. “You can’t put a book in; you can’t take a book out. The perfect symmetry of that echoes the perfect symmetry of its author, God. Once you see it, it’s obvious.”

McGough, a mathematics, physics and computer enthusiast, began noticing the patterns about 10 years ago when he was studying the Hebrew alphabet. He found that books line up, verses have key words and key letters that line up with the Hebrew alphabet, among other parallels.

His book, “The Bible Wheel: A Revelation of the Divine Unity of the Holy Bible,” presents his theory in 412 pages of detail. It represents eight years of research and another two years of writing.

It’s a theory his brother-in-law, Robin Collins, a professor of philosophy at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, takes seriously.

“The most obvious patterns that Richard has discovered by rolling the Bible into a circle are both very improbable and special, and thus strongly indicate that something more than chance is at play,” says Collins, 45. “For example, the pattern of the divisions of the books of the Bible — what Richard calls the cannon-wheel — forms a maximally simple pattern, exhibiting both bilateral and radial symmetry. This pattern also has the form of the tri-radiant halo of traditional Christian iconography, and thus is special in the second way, of being particularly meaningful.

“The probability of the divisions falling into a pattern of this simplicity can be easily calculated, and is staggeringly small, less than one in 600,000,” Collins says. “When one adds the fact that the pattern is meaningful, along with the other obvious patterns he has discovered, the probability is much, much smaller.”

McGough paid Jostens, a company that specializes in school yearbooks but also does commercial printing, to publish the book — his first — last March. So far, he has sold nearly 500 of his 3,000 copies. The hardbound book costs $27.01. McGough gives discounts for sales of multiple copies.

It’s divided into three parts: “The Divine Design of the Bible Wheel,” “Synopsis of the Twenty-Two Spokes” and “The Divine Seal and Capstone of the Holy Bible.”

“The Bible is a single, unified, completely integrated book,” says McGough, who graduated from Washington State University with math and physics degrees in 1985. “That is a sign of divine design, that God did it.”