i) One objection unbelievers raise to Bible prophecy is the vagueness of Bible prophecy. With few exceptions, Bible prophecies lack names, dates, and addresses. For instance, imagine if Isaiah predicted that "On September 11, 2001, Muslim hijackers will fly jet airplanes into skyscrapers on Manhattan." Wouldn't that be impressive? An undeniable prediction!
ii) But that evinces the paradox of prophecy. In the case of long-range prophecies, the more specific the prophecy, the less intelligible it would be to the original audience. Every detail of my faux 9/11 prophecy would be utterly opaque to Jews in the 8C BC.
That's because, in the case of long-range prophecy, the world may have undergone such drastic changes in the intervening centuries that a description of the modern world would be unrecognizable to an ancient audience. There were no Muslims, hijackers, jet airplanes, or skyscrapers in the 8C BC. Manhattan didn't exist. The Gregorian calendar didn't exist.
And it's not just the original audience which would be out of the loop. My faux 9/11 prophecy would be meaningless to anyone living before the mid-20C AD or thereabouts.
iii) This would create problems for the transmission and translation of the oracle. Scribes would be tempted to substitute recognizable words for senseless worlds. Likewise, scribal errors are more likely to creep into the text when copyists don't recognize the words. You can see that when people transcribe a text in a foreign language they don't know.
And ancient translators would certainly recast the text into something comprehensible to the translators and their target audience.
iv) There's another catch. If the Bible did contain this oracle, its very presence would subvert its fulfillment. The 9/11 attack counted on the element of surprise. If enough people were expecting the 9/11 attack, the terrorists would choose a different day, different method, different target. For that matter, it's not as if Muslims have an incentive to prove Bible prophecy.
So prophecy rests on a knife-edge. It must be sufficiently specific that you can discern its fulfillment after the fact, but not so specific that you can discern its fulfillment in advance.
I completely agree.
ReplyDeleteiv) There's another catch. If the Bible did contain this oracle, its very presence would subvert its fulfillment.
The same thing is true about why God doesn't always tell us the reasons why He allows certain evils in the world. Telling us might actually undermine the reasons. William Lane Craig points this out in this video here:
Why Doesn't God Reveal the Reasons For Permitting Evil and Suffering?.
So prophecy rests on a knife-edge. It must be sufficiently specific that you can discern its fulfillment after the fact, but not so specific that you can discern its fulfillment in advance.
Agreed. Though, both Christians and atheists (et al.) can think of ways in which prophecies can be unambiguous and very specific and avoid the problems Steve mentioned above. For example, a prophecy of a natural occurrence (e.g. the date of a major tsunami, super nova explosion, comets hitting another planet like when Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 hit Jupiter etc.).
In fact, God isn't limited to prophecies to make the knowledge of His existence coercive. He could speak with booming voice every 24 hours telling people He exists. But that would thwart His purposes as I've explored HERE and HERE.
Regarding the necessary vagueness of long-range prophecies, there is another arguable factor. Many short-term prophecies are also long-term prophecies or even allegories. Many Messianic prophecies, for example, are in the context of prophecies of Israel's deliverance from exile. So there are going to be specifics left out in order to marry the immediate context with some future context or ultimate application.
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