Prayer ... SERIOUSLY?!

[eric209]

http://atheistevolution.blogspot.com/201...fails.html

I'm sure you will agree the Bible has some errors?

Did i kill this thread? i thought we were getting somewhere

[Cinjin]

Did i kill this thread? i thought we were getting somewhere

You fucking thread killer!!!!



just bustin your ballz. threads burn out on their own brother. Don't sweat it.

[Statler Waldorf]

http://atheistevolution.blogspot.com/201...fails.html

I'm sure you will agree the Bible has some errors?

Did i kill this thread? i thought we were getting somewhere

Oh no, you dind't kill it. I was just too busy to post over the weekend. I will have a reply shortly after I take a look at your link.

[eric209]

Oh ok.

[Statler Waldorf]

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http://atheistevolution.blogspot.com/201...fails.html

I'm sure you will agree the Bible has some errors?

Did i kill this thread? i thought we were getting somewhere

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I actually was expecting you to go in a bit of a different direction with this. I was expecting you to point out verses that contradict one another rather than Biblical prophecies. I guess this works though. I am not a huge fan of pointing to prophecy to prove scripture because I am not a dispensationalist or pre-millennialist; for this same reason I am not a huge fan of pointing to supposedly failed prophecy in order to disprove scripture. I think both are somewhat inappropriate. I will give some responses to the points in the article though.

1. "An oracle concerning Damascus: See, Damascus will no longer be a city but will become a heap of ruins."

I am not sure that this is talking about a physical destruction of the city or not. However, even if it is, this prophecy was never given a date so it very well still could happen. I do not see this as a failed prophecy at all.

2. "I will hand the Egyptians over to the power of a cruel master, and a fierce king will rule over them, declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty. The waters of the river will dry up, and the riverbed will be parched and dry."

Again, not sure this is talking about a real river or is describing God’s common grace. Some Christians do believe this was fulfilled though when the Soviets helped dam up the Nile in the 1960s thus making it impossible for its flood waters to be used by thousands of Egyptians like they had been doing for thousands of years. So to say it is a failed prophecy is jumping the gun a bit I feel.


3. "Awake, awake, O Zion, clothe yourself with strength. Put on your garments of splendor, O Jerusalem, the holy city. The uncircumcised and defiled will not enter you again."

Have to be very careful with this verse, scripture sometimes refers to holy physical places such as Jerusalem and the Temple when it is actually describing groups of people like God’s elect. The uncircumcised can also refer to people who have not been given saving grace and still have an uncircumcised heart. I think the actual intent of Isaiah 52 is to foretell the coming of Christ, which of course is prophecy that did come true.

4. "This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will put an end to the hordes of Egypt by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. He and his army - the most ruthless of nations - will be brought in to destroy the land. They will draw their swords against Egypt and fill the land with the slain."

Nebuchadnezzar did defeat Egypt in the battle of Carchemish. Although he did not occupy the whole nation of Egypt, his victory made him the major power in the region, and Egypt had to pay him tribute. There is also some historical evidence that he later campaigned in Egypt. Since this verse never says he would completely destroy Egypt for all time, I think saying it is a failed prophecy is not appropriate at all. In fact, it seems amazingly accurate given the historical evidence supporting its claims.

5. "therefore I am against you and against your streams,and I will make the land of Egypt a ruin and a desolate waste from Migdol to Aswan, as far as the border of Cush. The foot of neither man nor beast will pass through it; no one will live there for forty years."

I don’t see what the issue is with this verse, Egypt was ravaged pretty good by Nebuchadnezzar, and a lot of the verse seems to be a bit of hyperbole describing this ravaging.


6. .Matthew 16:28, Matthew 23:36, Matthew 24:34

Jesus is not referring to His second coming when he describes the coming of the Kingdom of God, but rather the first preaching of the Gospel on the day of Pentecost, which did happen within the disciples generation. Some references are also made to the destruction of the Temple, which also happened within their lifetime (70 A.D.).

7. "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold,a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."

The Hebrew word here actually means a young unmarried girl, which would have most definitely been a virgin in Jewish culture. This was also supposed to be a sign people would recognize, so an unmarried but sexually active girl giving birth would hardly be a recognizable sign. So I don’t feel the word being translated virgin is inappropriate at all. In the New Testament the word actually does mean virgin and not just a young unmarried girl. As for the “he shall be called” part, this is an expression used dozens of times referring to Jesus. It does not mean that this shall be his legal name, but rather something that people will call Him. Millions of people have called Jesus, Immanuel, which literally means “God with us”, so this prophecy was in fact fulfilled, not failed.

8. "And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene."

I think this one is actually really amazing. In the Old Testament, the Israelites believed a King would come to restore them as God’s chosen people (the Messiah). They often referred to this coming King as a “branch” from the line of David. The Hebrew word for “branch” is “netzer”, which sounds very similar to the Aramaic name for the city of “Nazareth”. So Matthew is not making a mistake here, but rather making a very interesting and intentional allusion to Christ being the foretold Messiah. There are other explanations of this verse that are all very possible, but I find this one very interesting.

9. “"When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth."

This one was kind of silly. Sure Cain had a family and survived, but he was forever marked and did not receive the same blessings as the rest of Adam’s children.

10. "Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.”

Again, this is most likely not a reference to a physical kingdom but rather a spiritual kingdom.


Wow, that took a lot longer than I thought it would. I think it is fair to say though that none of the examples given on that website are definitive failed prophecies, and definitely not something a Christian needs to leave the faith over. But again, I do not like playing the prophecy game to support or disprove scripture. Thanks for the interesting topic though!

[eric209]

Some if not most of those explanations on how those are fail the test of Occam's razor and special pleading. You introduce several meanings and explanations which are not written in the means of getting the verse to match up to history.

#8 for example.
The fail of the prophecy was that there was no old testament prophecy for this to begin with. It is very easy to proclaim a prophecy fulfilled when there is no original prophecy.

#7 for example.
The fail here is that Jesus is supposedly validated as the messiah because the birth story around him match the old testament. For the old testament prophecy to be fufilled jesus only had to be born of a young woman. Being that the writers of the new testament misunderstood the old testament it is easy to see how as the Jesus birth story was fictitious that they would of got their miracles wrong if they had wrongly interpreted the prophecy that they had aimed at.

The whole point of agreeing that the bible is erroneous is that the bible was written by man and not god inspired as the bible itself claims.

Under what premise or evidence do you find that the christian God is the correct god?
Under what premise or evidence do you find that the christian God exists at all?

[Minimalist]

OK so let's get this straight. You're claiming that the Bible doesn't say that the fruit of the spirit are a necessary result of saving grace? Or is it something else you are trying to "currently study" and finding "is plain as day not going to be true"?

Yeah I am lost as well.....

First correct thing you ever said.

[tackattack]

We're Christian min, we think everyone's lost

[Minimalist]

Easy solution. Give up the fairy tales and join the world of reality.

[Statler Waldorf]

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Some if not most of those explanations on how those are fail the test of Occam's razor and special pleading. You introduce several meanings and explanations which are not written in the means of getting the verse to match up to history.

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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.

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#8 for example.
The fail of the prophecy was that there was no old testament prophecy for this to begin with. It is very easy to proclaim a prophecy fulfilled when there is no original prophecy.

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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.

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#7 for example.
The fail here is that Jesus is supposedly validated as the messiah because the birth story around him match the old testament. For the old testament prophecy to be fufilled jesus only had to be born of a young woman. Being that the writers of the new testament misunderstood the old testament it is easy to see how as the Jesus birth story was fictitious that they would of got their miracles wrong if they had wrongly interpreted the prophecy that they had aimed at.

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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.

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The whole point of agreeing that the bible is erroneous is that the bible was written by man and not god inspired as the bible itself claims.

Under what premise or evidence do you find that the christian God is the correct god?

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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?