Outside of his specialty, McKay is best known for his collaborative work with a group of Israeli mathematicians such as Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, together with Maya Bar-Hillel, who rebutted a Bible code theory which maintained that the Hebrew text of the Bible enciphered predictive details of future historical events. The paper in question had been accepted for publication by a scientific peer-reviewed journal in 1994. Their rebuttal, together with a paper written by an anonymous mathematician, argued that the patterns in the Bible that supposedly indicate some hidden message from a divine source or have predictive power can be just as easily found in other works, such as "War and Peace". The discredited theory was taken up by US journalist Michael Drosnin. Drosnin said he was convinced of this theory when one of its exponents stated that the Torah predicted the Iraqi wars. He expressed his certainty publicly that such coded messages could not be found in any other work than the Bible, and, in an interview with Newsweek, he challenged: