From Gödel to God

​A Defense of Biblical Prophecies

1. Criticism - Prophecies about Christ are ambiguous.

Refutation - Simply not true. Here is just a sample: The Messiah was to born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2); He was to be a descendant of David (Jeremiah 23:5), Born of a Virgin and be called Immanuel (God with Us) (Isaiah 7:14). Pretty specific, huh?

​2. Criticism - The Bible is edited, so prophecies are self-referring.

Refutation - Accusations of corruption of the Biblical texts have never been proven in the least, in fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls point to the texts being the same for at least the last 2,000 years. It's hard to imagine a situation where the Old Testament (shared by Jews and Christians) is changed to the agreement of both; where prophecies fulfilled by Jesus remain, as Jews are stridently opposed to Jesus being the Messiah. The editing criticism is also highly circular in its second part as stated, in that, it contains as a premise that prophecies and fulfillment could never be referred to in the same text (self-referring). The result is that a prophecy can never be shown to be fulfilled.

An additional refutation is that the Bible is actually compiled from a number of books, spanning centuries so the criticism is also inaccurate in that regard. As a compilation, the Bible is obviously edited; books believed to be authentic revelation are included while those of spurious authorship are rejected. Christian denominations do differ on a few books that some consider to be canonical but ALL agree on the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible of the Old Testament (OT) as well as the core 27 books of the New Testament (NT), both of which are used to establish Jesus' divinity.

3.  Criticism - ​Other religions claim fulfilled prophecy as well.

​Refutation - This is a red herring argument as it does not address the validity of the Christian claim. Additionally, a close examination of these competing prophecies reveals stark differences in  quality, credibility and sheer number in comparison to Christianity's.

​4. Criticism - The prophecies and their fulfillment are both fictitious.

​Refutation - This is circular reasoning as fictitious prophecy and fulfillment are included in both the premise and the obvious conclusion. The argument is invalid. But besides that, there are loads of evidence for the factuality of much of the Bible; see Strobel (1998) and McDowell (1999).

5. Criticism - There are fulfilled prophecies in works of fiction such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series as well, the Bible is no different.

Refutation - This is a false equivalence logical fallacy. Harry Potter is a work of fiction but the Biblical message (esp. the NT) does not claim itself to be fiction. To conclude that the prophetic fulfillment in Harry Potter is fake and likewise the prophetic fulfillment in the Bible is fake as well is invalid.

6. Criticism - Bible prophecies were written and fulfilled in the past, making them invalid. Why are there no prophecies that we can see being fulfilled today?

Refutation - This criticism is absurd in that it means that no prophecy could ever be shown to be valid because when it is fulfilled, it becomes a past event and inadmissible. All that is necessary for a prophecy to be valid is that it pre-dates the predicted event. The criticism is also erroneous in how it views current events as not being part of prophecy.

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7. Criticism - Post-event interpretation of prophecy.

Refutation - This does not present an argument against prophetic fulfillment nor the probability of fulfillment, therefore a conclusion of their invalidity is a non-sequitur. Beforehand understanding of a prophecy is not a criteria for its legitimacy.

8. Criticism - The New Testament has been reversed-engineered to fulfill prophecy.

Refutation - The earliest gospel, Mark, was written circa. 50-70 AD, well within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses to the events making reverse-engineering unlikely. Furthermore, the bulk of the NT letters (largely written before the gospels) were written by Paul, who was a contemporary of the eyewitnesses, again making reverse-engineering very difficult. The writers themselves had nothing to gain from reverse-engineering but had everything to lose - in fact Christian martyrdom was incredibly high, again, making the reverse-engineering criticism much less tenable as persons would have died for something they in fact knew was a lie, as they themselves had written it!

Also testifying against the reverse-engineering was the large number of non-coerced conversions of eyewitnesses and non-Christian sources (Tacitus, Josephus, the Babylonian Talmud, Pliny the Younger and Lucian of Samosata) around that time who validate the accuracy of the recorded events.

* For more fulsome responses to objections, please see Dr. Michael Brown's Series, "Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus", Volumes 1-5.