All the problems with Christianity

[Esquilax]

Oh man, you leave the thread for 1 night to go to sleep and you come back to all this! Well, let's do it...

We're a talkative bunch.

Now, before I get started, just know that there's really no way to say what I need to say that isn't really blunt, but at the same time I don't want to come across as mean, because I don't want a potentially productive conversation to devolve into a shouting match, nor do I want to close off any chance of discourse because my tone was too aggressive. Therefore, when I say that your evidence for god is really, really bad, please try to take that in the spirit of constructive criticism, rather than outright flaming.

Now if we have to take a minute for that understanding to come to us, as is the case with large numbers, then our understanding cannot come from us, otherwise we would have had it to begin with.

That doesn't really follow. Have you never had an idea before? The mind isn't an instantaneous wonder-organ, it's a cobbled-together biocomputer built up through evolution. It takes time to work things out, just as it would with any other computational device. You might have had a point if we didn't have to do anything and then magically, understanding came to us, but that's not how it works. When you add numbers, you're mentally working through the process, aren't you? Slotting them in where they need to go, thinking it through... the result, and the reason why that is the result, is something you had to come to on your own. What part of that process makes you think that you were just supernaturally gifted this insight?

Besides, even if we had no idea how the brain does that- we do, in some respects, and you can check out science to see how that works- leaping to the conclusion that this stuff must be the product of an external, supernatural source would still be unjustified. It's an argument from ignorance: "I don't understand how this works, and therefore my bible's answer must be true."

It must come from someone who not only shares that understanding but has control of our minds and our understanding. Call that person what you will. I call Him God.

If you had never read the bible or heard of any religion whatsoever, do you think that's the conclusion you would have come to? You're really making some huge leaps of logic, here.

-Evidence for the Bible's veracity
There are a few reasons to believe that the Bible is true, but the best argument is probably fulfilled prophecy. Some of these can be explained away as hoaxes, e.g. prophecies that came true in the same book lend little credibility to the Bible. Also, some OT prophecies could have been read by NT authors and they could have said they were fulfilled when they really weren't. Except that the Gospels were likely all written within 100 years of Jesus's birth (70 years of His death), which is very little time for stories like that to be corrupted by people who wanted to give the OT false credibility.

There's a ton of problems with this prophecy game, the first of which being that a lot of these fulfilled prophecies owe their existence to spin, aided in no small part by the amazingly vague language employed by the old testament authors. These things are entirely self fulfilling; we're given a hazy, general statement about something happening in the future, which is then attached to any given event and spun to be confirmation of the prophecy by people who already want these things to be true. Looking at it from a non biased perspective, the links are nowhere near as ironclad as you christians want them to be.

Besides, for a prophecy to actually mean something, it needs to be specific, it needs to have a timeframe, and be fulfillable by a single event. Otherwise, it's just throwing names at a dartboard. When the bible does use specifics, the prophecy ends up failing; just look at Tyre. It's still around, it never fell to the hands of the person the bible said it would... it's a completely failed prophecy from every angle, but you're not presenting it as evidence that the bible is false, though.