(June 13, 2011 at 9:09 pm)eric209 Wrote:
Not sure why you would invoke Occam ’s razor here. I am also not sure why you would call this special pleading. I would be committing that if I used the fulfilled prophecies to prove the Bible’s inerrancy but then ignored the supposedly failed ones. I made it very clear that I do not use fulfilled prophecies to prove the Bible’s inerrancy, nor do I use supposedly failed prophecies to disprove its inerrancy, so I feel I am being very consistent here. I just didn’t feel the author at the website you cited did a very good job of demonstrating that there even are any failed prophecies in the Bible. Moreover, he or she just displayed more of an incorrect understanding of scripture than anything really.
(June 13, 2011 at 9:09 pm)eric209 Wrote:
Well the verse clearly says it was spoken by the prophets, so to say that it necessarily had to be written in scripture somewhere is reading something into the text that is not there. Paul even quotes Jesus as saying something that was never written in the gospels. Does this logically mean Jesus never really said what Paul quoted? Of course not.
(June 13, 2011 at 9:09 pm)eric209 Wrote:
I don’t get how this is a failed prophecy at all. There are two options here…
1. The writers of the Old Testament verse actually meant that Jesus would be born of an unmarried and yet sexually active young girl.
2. The authors knew that in Jewish culture unmarried young girls were virgins, so they understood this to be the miraculous sign to come.
Either way, Jesus being born of a virgin fulfills both of these options; Mary was an unmarried young girl who was also a virgin. So no matter how you look at it, the prophecy was fulfilled. Not sure why it made the list even. I don’t for a second believe that the writers of the New Testament would have misunderstood the Hebrew in the Old Testament. On the contrary I believe they would have realized that this verse inferred he would be born of a virgin because they understood the culture. The only way this would have been a failed prophecy would be if Jesus was born of an old and/or married woman.
(June 13, 2011 at 9:09 pm)eric209 Wrote:
The Christian God’s existence and His revealed word in scripture are my initial presuppositions. A person does not try to prove their initial presupposition. Rather, I think these presuppositions must be true in order for us to even be having this discussion. It is the only presupposition that can actually explain reality and the acquisition of Truth. Let me ask you something, if you only had one source of information that could be inerrant, how would you prove it was inerrant?
