Are All Religions the Same? Part 3: Predictions

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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Are All Religions the Same? Part 3: Predictions

July 29, 2023

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose continue their discussion about whether all religions are equally valid paths to God. In this episode, we look at what different worldviews have predicted about the future. We don't just focus on the prophecies of various religious, but also look at the predictions of secular, non-religious people. We've decided to expand this series to five parts, so this episode is the third in a five-part series.

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Show notes: https://winteryknight.com/2023/07/29/knight-and-rose-show-episode-35-are-all-religions-the-same-part-3

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight & Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. Today, we're going to continue our series on competing worldviews with a new topic. We're going to look at some predictions that have been made by different religions and different worldviews, and see whether or not they prove to be accurate when compared with reality.

I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose. Welcome, Rose.

So, in our last two episodes, we discussed what truth was, how we would define it, and we looked at some scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe and for a design of the universe. And we concluded that the universe began to exist, that it had a cause, and that the cause was an intelligent designer who fine-tuned the universe and our planet for complex life of any conceivable kind. But it isn't Christianity alone that is compatible with that evidence.

Other religions also predict a supernatural cause and a universe that permits life, for example, Judaism and Islam. So, today, we're going to look at some historical evidence to help us kind of whittle down the number of live options that we have, so that we keep working towards a worldview that has truth claims that align with reality. Right.

So, let's get started with a few examples of predictions made by different worldviews that we can test. All right. Well, Christianity, first of all, claims to have fulfilled prophecies that were spoken at least 500 years before their fulfillment.

So, that's one option as we're looking at predictions. We can certainly test for that. Yes, exactly.

Jehovah's Witnesses, in contrast to Christianity, are perhaps best known for their numerous false predictions. So, we'll look at that. Muslims actually also often claim that one of the ways non-Christians can know the Koran is reliable is because of its fulfilled prophecies.

When speaking of different worldviews that claim to have fulfilled prophecies, we should definitely look at Islam as well. And we have new age spiritualists who have actually an unfortunate history of both false prophecies and apparently true but problematic prophecies. So, we'll take a look at those as well.

Okay, sounds good. Yeah, and we're even going to look at secular worldviews as well. Well, different groups within the secular world and look at some of their predictions and prophecies because there's no reason.

I think most people kind of think about atheism and say, oh, it's automatically scientific. It's automatically rational. But there are actually different strands of thought inside the secular worldview where these groups have made predictions and those predictions have failed spectacularly.

So, we don't just assume that secularism is a default position. We have to evaluate them like we would evaluate any other religion, try to find predictions that they've made and then test them against reality. Right.

Yeah, they make truth claims and we need to evaluate them, test them. Let's start with the Jehovah's Witnesses. So, last week I got a letter in my mailbox and it had a handwritten address on it and a return address from a girl.

So, I was really excited and I opened it up. Yeah, what single guy doesn't want a handwritten letter from a woman? Yeah, but it was actually, it turned out to be a letter from our local Jehovah's Witness and she was just sharing a bunch of stuff about the need for community and the need for happy feelings. I'm sure there was also a whole bunch in there about, you know, arguments for the objective veracity of her worldview, right? Actually, no, no, it was no, no, I'm shocked.

Yeah. Well, so I wasn't impressed with that. I just pitched it in garbage after reading it, but yeah, that actually reminds me of my Mormon visitors who came not too long ago, about every five years or so, it seems like they take me off the blacklist or the blacklist doesn't get passed on or maybe it's because I moved every few years.

But anyway, they came and visited me again recently and advocated for Mormonism as the worldview I should go for because it meets desires for a happy family, you know, just like in the TV ads. Yeah. Feelings.

This is a good line of thought because I think a lot of people are going to present their worldview as being a way to achieve family and unity and community. And I don't know about you, but I'm kind of hardheaded. I think you are too.

And I'm not interested in spending time and money and effort in a worldview that isn't reflective of reality because I would rather take a bitter medicine than have a piece of tasty candy that doesn't really solve the problem. Exactly. So you're probably not going to be a Jehovah's Witness.

No. Yeah. I've looked into them a little bit and I know that one of the biggest problems with them is these predictions that they keep making that turn out not to be true.

So why don't you tell us about that? Because I know you've researched this quite a bit. Yeah. So let me just give you a few examples.

In 1899, they declared the world would end in 1914, prophesying, quote, the battle of the great day of God Almighty from Revelation 1614, which will end in A.D. 1914 with the complete overthrow of Earth's present rulership is already commenced. That's from the time is at hand, the 1908 edition. Okay.

So 1914, the world's going to end and all of the governments are going to be all overthrown. Right. Exactly.

That didn't happen. No, it didn't. In 1918, their leader declared 1925 as the year of the return of the prophets in glory.

They repeated this prediction with certainty many times. The leader wrote, therefore, we may confidently expect that 1925 will mark the return of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the faithful prophets of old, particularly those named by the apostle in Hebrews 11 to the condition of human perfection. Okay.

That didn't happen either. Did not happen. Another example, beginning in 1965, they claimed 1975 would be the beginning of Christ worldwide millennial reign on earth.

So all of these dates, as you pointed out, have come and gone. The prophecies unfulfilled. JW's will claim things like, well, they didn't mean it the way it sounded, or they'll say things like, well, it came true in this unrecognizable spiritual sense that you just can't see.

But how convenient that right. Either way, the evidence does not look good for their claims. Yeah.

It's funny that you still get the letters from the people, you know, and they're still getting new members as well. Yeah, that's sad. Okay.

You know, that's not a group of people who take getting the predictions right very seriously. It's funny because I think they would think of themselves as a prophetic group, but if they keep getting it wrong, they obviously, you know, maybe they just care about making the prophecies, but they don't really care about whether they actually come true. Anyway, so let me talk about one of those secular groups I mentioned that makes predictions that don't come true in reality.

So you remember when we were discussing the origin of the universe? Well, it turns out that historically, atheists have thought that the universe was eternal and they've actually put this in print. Okay. Yeah, exactly.

And then scientists made a series of discoveries that pointed to a beginning of the universe. Right. Let's just see the prediction first.

I actually wrote some series of blog posts on the evidence for beginning the universe on my blog, and I wanted to see what like atheist groups had said historically about the supposed beginning of the universe prior to us discovering scientific evidence for it. So I found this document from a group called the American Humanist Association, and this is a group of atheists who try to codify what atheists believe about morality and policy and even how the universe works. So in their first manifesto, that's what they call it.

It's a manifesto. They list out 15 points that all secular humanists believe. And point number one says this, and I'm quoting religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

Oh, no. So they got it wrong. Yeah, this.

Yeah. As you mentioned, the scientific discoveries we talked about in episode 33 disproved a self-existing universe. Yeah.

So they made a prediction about reality before the science came in, despite insisting that they're driven by science. And then the science came in and it disproved their prediction. So then they stopped being atheists? Actually, no.

Then they released a new version of the secular humanist manifesto. They took that part out. What secular humanist manifesto the sequel? No, they called it secular humanist manifesto too.

Yeah. So was that the last one then? No, they just keep making them every time they get disproved. But oh, well, okay.

Let's go to another one. So you mentioned Islam, you mentioned Muslim prediction. So why don't you tell us about something that they've said? We always are interested in the ones that are testable.

So go ahead and tell us about something they've said about the world, something important, you know, core to their religion that is testable. And then we'll see how they did. Yeah.

Well, as I mentioned, Muslims often claim their prophet issued amazing prophecies from Allah that later came true. But the fact is, first of all, there are very few that are even testable. This is a big problem.

Yeah. And secondly, what they claim are prophecies are actually just a few words taken out of context and given a radically different meaning than the way they would have been understood in their context. Okay.

Give us an example of that second one, something taken out of context to mean something that the author never intended. For example, sometimes Muslims claim that Quran 41 20 chapter 41 verse 20 predicts the development of fingerprinting as a means of identifying crime suspects. Oh, no.

Yeah. They arrive at this conclusion by pointing to the part of the verse that says, and their skins will testify against them of what they used to do. That doesn't sound like fingerprinting that that sounds like tattoos or something.

It really does. So on its own, I guess to some people, this may seem like a prophecy foretelling fingerprint ID, but let's read this passage in its context. Okay.

Verses 19 through 21 say in the day when the enemies of Allah will be gathered to the fire while they are assembled in rows until when they reach it, they're hearing in their eyes and their skins will testify against them of what they used to do. And they will say to their skins, why have you testified against us? They will say, we were made to speak by Allah who has made everything speak. And he created you the first time.

And to him, you are returned. There's nothing about fingerprinting there, but this verse seems to be telling us, you know, that they're not referring to anything that's going to happen in this life, like fingerprinting. It sounds like they're talking about some kind of end of the world scenario there.

Exactly. It's the day of judgment that they're talking about when everyone one will be gathered together by Allah before the fire and that sort of thing. Okay.

And so when a few words are taken completely out of context, they can be used to make all kinds of claims. But we do the text a great disservice when we don't consider its context. The same is true of any book.

And it's certainly true of the Bible. If we don't even read the full sentence that a phrase is found in, much less the paragraphs around a passage, we can easily be led astray. And I see this happening all the time with Christians who like to quote a sentence.

Yeah. I was just about to say, this has happened to me a lot too. Right.

Exactly. People have like a favorite doctrine and they yank a couple words and a phrase, you know, out of a text and go, look, God has a wonderful plan for my life. Everything is going to work out.

You know, he's going to manifest me the perfect spouse or whatever. And I'm like, you're pulling that passage out of like a judgment narrative. All those people died horribly, you know, or something like that.

You know, right. Exactly. Exactly.

Yes. Yeah. Nor is it compelling to point to an event that was almost certain to occur in the very near future as evidence of fulfilled prophecy.

These two principles together actually eliminate most of the Quran's so-called prophecies. But there is one passage that actually does appear to be a genuine prediction. Okay.

Chapter 30 verses two through four. One sec. So you're saying like, if I, if I predict like, say tomorrow, you know, that we're going to get rain, you know, or in the next week, we're going to get rain.

You know, that's, that's pretty reasonable. It happens most of the time. So that's not a very interesting.

Right. Exactly. And then, yeah, imagine you live, you know, in Seattle.

And you predict you're going to get rain sometime in the next month. I mean, that, that's probably more akin to what we're looking at here. So yeah, that would be unpersuasive to say the least.

So you got an example. Yeah. Yes.

There's something similar in the Quran in chapter 30 verses two through four. It predicts a Byzantine victory over the Persians within three to nine years. It says the Byzantines have been defeated in the nearest land, but they, after their defeat, will overcome with within three to nine years to Allah belongs the command before and after.

And that day the believers will rejoice. That's, that sounds pretty good, actually. I mean, they're making a specific prediction about two specific peoples about a specific event within a short period of time.

So how did that one fare against reality? Yeah. So here's the even bigger problem. Okay.

Well, first of all, first of all, given the ongoing nature of the conflict between the Byzantines and the Persians at that time, it was highly likely that the Byzantines would have a victory at some point. Let me give you an analogy. Okay.

Imagine I predict that sometime within the next 10 years, the Duke blue Devils are going to defeat the UNC tar heels and basketball. Okay. If you know anything about the college, American college basketball, you know that if that were to happen, nobody would be impressed.

Okay. Because Duke and UNC compete in basketball about three times every season. It's always a close game.

It goes back and forth and back and forth. Even if one team is top five in the country and the other is, you know, having a bad year. That game is always an exceptional game.

Similarly, the Byzantines were likely to defeat the Persians sometime in the near future. They fought all the time. They, they were rivals.

And to say that the Byzantines would win, would defeat the Persians in the next, you know, decade or so is just, you know, pretty safe guess. Okay. And yet, and yet somehow this prophecy still failed.

It took 17 years for the Byzantines to defeat the Persians despite the constant conflicts and near certain imminent victory at the time of this revelation. If anything, this passage is strong evidence that Muhammad was a false prophet. Wow.

Okay. Let's move on to a different group, a group that won't murder us. Let's go to the Darwinists.

So Darwinians have made quite a few predictions about the world that we can test. So one of the predictions that was made was by Darwin himself, where he says the process for creating life from non-life is very simple. And that's because I can imagine that the conditions when life emerged in our past were very favorable to the creation of life.

You know, we had the right gases, we had the right environment. You know, he, he asserted, he also said, um, the process of going from non-living chemicals in like a pool of water is very simple and easy because cells are very simple. They're not complex at all.

We can take a look at that's wonderful. It's a prediction and we can test it, you know? And he also talked about the fossil record where he says, well, the way that all the different body plans emerge is that it started with one or two, and then they moved to different environments and adapted to those environments. And then as more of these animals moved to these environments and adapted, then we got new body plans.

So over a long period of time, over a long period of time. So maybe if I needed wings and I moved somewhere where I needed wings, then I would evolve wings. But if I needed fins, then I would evolve, you know, fins or gills, you know, just depending on what the environment was pressuring me to do.

So if we look at the fossil record, we should see the gradual emergence of more body plans from less body plans. And it should happen over a long period of time. Okay.

And then one more prediction that Darwinists have made. This one is more modern. They have asserted that after DNA was discovered, they said, well, the process that created this DNA was not designed.

Okay. So when we look at DNA, we should expect to find a lot of junk in there that's just leftover from this long evolutionary process that developed all this DNA in our bodies. So three predictions.

So all of those are wrong. All of those are wrong. So tell us about why they're wrong.

Well, the more scientific discoveries we've made, the more complexity we've discovered in the cell, of course, we've discovered that the origin of life is far more complicated than Darwin could have ever thought. We've found molecular machines in the cell that cannot be built up in a stepwise Darwinian fashion. And that's not even to mention the problem of sequencing building blocks into functional components.

So that's, you know, that's one problem. Yeah, that's the origin of life problem. And then for the fossil record, they're expecting like slow increases in the number of body plans, but that's not what the fossil record shows.

It shows stasis from the beginning of the first records of animal life to this period known as the Cambrian era, when a whole stack of body plans come in within a very short period of time. And then the number declines to the present day. So this is not the gradual growth in body plans that they were expecting.

Yeah. And to the third point, I remember there was a recent large scale study to find out how much junk was in our DNA. As you mentioned, some atheists were saying that it was almost all junk.

Yeah, this is called the ENCODE study ENCODE. Yeah, exactly. And it revealed that the non-coding DNA that atheists had predicted to be junk were actually very useful and important.

Yeah, so they're O for three. So I think this is important. Like if you're trying to decide which worldview that you should pick, I think you want to pick one that doesn't make these kind of predictive errors.

Yeah. A lot of times, Darwinists will say, well, science is self-correcting. But I think when people are always making predictions where their view is disproved by science, you have to consider that there's something else going on there.

Now, we're not going to, we're not going to talk about that in this show, but it's something to think about. Why would they want this to be true and then keep trying to save the theory when it gets disproved by evidence? Yeah, great point. So let's talk about New Age spiritualists.

Oh, yeah, you had mentioned those. Yeah, so that would include like palm readers, tarot card readers, the New Apostolic Reformation, NAR. If you've heard of that movement, they claim to be Christians, have very concerning practices and beliefs.

Yeah, there was a really good episode of the Apologics 315 podcast about that New Apostolic Reformation. Yes, yeah, people should definitely listen to that because there's a lot of deception and concerning teachings going on there. People need to know about that because they're actually very popular within some evangelical circles.

But anyway, with the whole broader idea of New Age spiritualists. So when I had my really bad cough this spring for a couple months and nothing my doctors had prescribed was working, a friend of mine suggested that I go to a salt cave. And so I decided salt cave.

Yes, yes. So you basically sit in a room and they pump pharmaceutical grade salt that is ground up so small, you cannot see it. You can't really feel it.

And it gets into your lungs and it actually can go into some into the lungs and into parts of the body so deep that it can go deeper than where some medications can go and it can absorb toxins and reduce inflammation. So I thought it was worth a try because I grew up on the water and I was always healthy. Whenever I go back and see my family on the water, I get healthy.

So anyway, there were a lot of Christians at the salt cave. So I don't want to give the impression it's a place where just New Agers hang out or anything like that far from it. But there was this one woman who said, she said, you know, I'm here because my palm reader told me to come here and she's always right.

And, you know, like last month, for example, she predicted from reading my palm that a new day is coming and a breakthrough that will leave you excited for what is next is ahead. And she thought this, you know, this prediction was just dead on because something new and good, exciting happened to her. Okay.

So these, and I hear this a lot. I have some family members who are into new age mysticism and palm reading and this sort of thing. The predictions they share tend to be very, very vague.

I also know from, from reading, studying and talking to people who do this, that they, they practice reading people's expressions. So they'll talk and talk and talk. The palm readers are the, you know, the prophets or whatever they call them.

They'll talk and kind of look for reactions in people. And then when they see a reaction or an emotion expressed in a face or things like that, they'll kind of camp out there. They'll go with the odds when making predictions.

Like they'll consider what is someone male or female, how are they dressed? Do they have a wedding ring? And they'll kind of guess their desires and things like that. And so this would be an example of a type of prediction that is just not testable, not very helpful. And, you know, with a little bit of discernment, it's pretty obvious that nothing truly remarkable is going on here except remarkable deception.

Yeah. It's definitely not the specific kind of prediction that we were talking about. Yeah.

So I have to say something about this. So I have noticed that a lot of people really put a lot of stock in horoscopes and zodiac signs, even Christians. I saw this hilarious meme.

Basically this man and woman are talking and the woman says to the man, so what's your zodiac sign? And he goes dinosaur. And she says that one doesn't even exist. And he says none of them exist.

I totally know that one. I know that meme. It's so funny.

The best part of that is that you actually use the same image of the guy with this big dorky grin on his face for both frames. Like when he's saying dinosaur and then also when he's saying none of them exist. It's hilarious.

Yeah. That's pretty funny. Yeah.

So I don't know. I don't want to offend anybody. And maybe I do.

Yeah. I don't think you're too concerned about that. Yeah.

I would just I would just recommend, you know, don't bring that up when you're dating and maybe or do bring it up because it might really help you discern that it's time to move on. Yeah. Cut it short.

Just go. Oh, are you? Yeah. But I don't know that that says anything good about a person that you would want to get involved with them.

Yeah. Well, that was that's it for the podcast. Anyway, I'm kidding.

Our listeners are. Yes. Yes.

Okay. Okay. Let me go on to another group that I had mentioned before.

Again, I'm trying to give us like some balance, like you're focusing on and, you know, well, you know, well done. You're focusing on different religions and saying that they're making strange predictions. Honestly, I deal with mostly atheists in my office.

You know, a lot of times it's Christian raised guys. I'm an I.T. So it's mostly men and they are born into like a Christian home and they attend youth group and they meet their wife at youth group and then they become atheist, maybe move in together, stuff like that. But they're very analytical.

So, you know, I don't have to, you know, most of the time I don't have to deal with people from different like strange backgrounds because they they wouldn't make it into I.T. Although occasionally I do have to deal with Hindus and Muslims and talk about, you know, Hindu predictions about the oscillating universe and compare that with the Big Bang cosmology. And then for Islam, you know, like you say, their prophecies or perhaps their historical claims. Right.

But one group that I do have to deal with a lot is the climate change people. OK. OK.

So they come in and they're very convinced we've all heard this in our public schools. I can remember being in my public school chemistry class and being warned about the impending fireball, you know, that was going to strike the earth from my atheist teacher, Mr. Hayes. And yeah, he was very convinced about this.

And he said, well, we need to do something about this. We need to you know, we need to let the government control how much energy we're electricity we're using and we need to be careful about this. We need to be whatever.

Yeah. And if you were if you were about 20, 25 years older, your public school teacher would have been teaching you that the world was going to end by freezing global cooling, global in 10 to 20 years. Yeah.

This is probably a shock to our younger listeners. You know, a lot of time, young people think I don't have anything to learn from older people. But like you really should rely on the experiences of older people who have been successful.

But yeah, back in like the 1950s, 60s and 70s, people were predicting ice ages and that all of North America would be covered in ice and global cooling. So another show we may talk about the motivation for this kind of thing. But just suffice to say that some people look at their neighbors and they're uncomfortable with the decisions that their neighbors are making.

Like I don't like he drives a big car. I don't like that he has so many kids, right? Like what about overpopulation? So there's there's something going on there that drives people, whether it be global cooling or global warming, they are hoping that the government is going to come in and restrict individual behaviors and maybe, you know, business behaviors. Anyway, for our podcast, I found a really good article from a really far left website.

I'm talking about as far left as you can go. The UK Guardian. So this is this is the Guardian in the UK.

And they had an article from 2004, February 21st, 2004, and they called it. Now the Pentagon tells Bush George W. Bush was president at that time. Now the Pentagon tells Bush climate change will destroy us.

OK, so this is a Pentagon report that was presented to President Bush. And here's what the Guardian says. Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.

A secret report suppressed by the U.S. defense chiefs and obtained by the observer warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020. Oh, wow. Got that one wrong.

Yes. But there's more. Nuclear conflict, mega droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

This document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism. Say the few experts privity to its contents.

Disruption and conflict will be endemic. Features of life concludes the Pentagon analysis. The Pentagon predicted all this would happen by 2020.

They did. Yeah, so I don't think any of that happened. In fact, the number of deaths has been decreasing with new human inventions and ingenuity.

But anyway, so did the global warming alarmists reject global warming alarmism after their predictions didn't come true? I don't think they did. I think they're still claiming this is a big crisis. It's kind of like the secular humanists, right? They're like, the universe never began to exist.

And then you show them and they go, let's just take that out and keep going. So I think I think the global warming people just took this prediction out. What's remarkable about this, and I really want people to see this, is we give a lot of credit to non theistic groups.

We assume that they know what they're talking about, you know? And what we're seeing here is nothing different than what the Jehovah's Witnesses were doing. It was end of the world predictions that didn't come true. And so why I mean, the Jehovah's Witnesses aren't going to drive us trillions of dollars into debt for a green new deal.

So arguably this group, the climate change people, they're the more dangerous group because they're advocating for large scale changes. Now I'm going to be very careful about what I say here. I think climate does change.

The real question is what's driving it and what should humans do about it? And that's where we disagree with the climate change people. I could easily say that changes in global temperatures have been going on since the planet was formed, that it was warmer in the past than it is now, and that these changes are caused by solar like behavior cycles or, you know, changes in the sun's behavior. And they're not caused by human activity at all unless you think that medieval knights were riding around in SUVs or something and they were driving, you know, they had global warming back then and that's what was causing it.

Yeah, I just, I can I just add something because it just happened like two or three days ago. Go ahead. Did you happen to see that AOC tweeted that we just had the hottest day in 120,000 years? So apparently, apparently she is privy to some information that the rest of us are not by which for 120,000 years now, there are apparently records somewhere probably in the little UFOs that the aliens, you know, drive around in.

There are, you know, apparently these records that AOC knows about. I'm joking. There are no records from 120,000 years back.

Yeah. Of exactly what the temperature was every day. But yeah, I just thought that was a really, really funny tweet.

People are listening to Greta Thunberg as if she's a great authority. Right. So I wouldn't put it past people to go, wow, look what AOC said.

We need to change. I mean, this is going to hurt your family. This is going to hurt your kids.

They're going to be paying off the debt that we run up to fix this so-called I'm holding up quote, quote, fingers problem. You know, right. So it's something, you know, to be concerned about.

Nobody is worried that the Jehovah's Witnesses are going to bankrupt you and bankrupt your kids. But when this group gets it wrong and we disregard their record of making predictions that are correct and accurate, we're going to suffer. And so it's very important that everybody be careful about how they choose their worldview.

And they are careful about insisting that if people from these different groups make predictions that they be tested and they can't just move the goalposts every 20 years. Human beings are the same in every generation. Just because they kind of dress up their worldview with scientific garb and scientific language, it doesn't mean that their real motivation is just, I don't like my car, my neighbor drives, or I'm scared about the future, or who's going to keep the planet from doing anything once I get rid of God, you know, a lot of this anxiety that these secular groups are having are because they've ejected God from the cosmos.

And so they don't think anybody designed a solar system and a planet that regulates itself. They think there's nobody regulating it. And that's why we have to do it.

Then there's all this taxing and spending in order to attempt to do that. So, right. Okay.

Well, let's talk about, we've seen a lot of bad predictions today. Let's talk about some Christian predictions. So I want to see, are they testable? And if they were testable and we have been able to test them, then were the results good or bad? Right.

So in contrast to the ones we've been talking about, biblical Christianity has over 300 prophecies just regarding the Messiah, some of which are very specific, completely outside the control of any human's ability to manipulate things and strongly defensible, I'd say, certainly in at least a few examples. And these were fulfilled in an unmistakable way by Jesus of Nazareth about 2000 years ago, as opposed to kind of the, you know, the Jehovah's Witnesses like claims that, well, it was fulfilled in a spiritual way that nobody can observe or tell. So these predictions were hundreds of years and sometimes more than a thousand years before the birth of Jesus when they were made.

So why don't you just give us like a listing of some of the examples of prophecies that have been made in the Bible? Okay. Well, according to the historical records, it was prophesied that the Messiah would be of the tribe of Judah, for example, that he would be from the line of King David, that he would be born in the town of Bethlehem, that he would be called out of Egypt, that he would be accursed and afflicted, but not open his mouth, that he would be led to his death as the lamb is to be slaughtered. He would be buried with the rich.

He would be wounded for our rebellion against God. So there are eight examples right there. These are all coming from the Old Testament.

You have the reference for this. We'll put them in the show notes, but they're all before Jesus was born. So it's very hard to arrange things so that he meets all these prophecies.

You would have to be like in charge of the government. And I don't see that the early Christians had that kind of power. Right.

Exactly. With, yeah, exactly. With specifics about how and where and from which line he was born, how and where he would die, things like that.

So we haven't looked like too closely at the individual texts that you're talking about here, but are these prophecies like only record? Remember the Muslim one where you're saying, oh, wow, it's fingerprinting. And then you ask anybody else and they go, that's not talking about fingerprinting. So if I showed these prophecies to a non-Christian, would they think that they were predicting something about the future? Yeah, they certainly would.

They, they may challenge when it was written. And of course, then there's a ton of evidence for that. But for example, Peter Stoner was professor emeritus of mathematics and astronomy.

So we're not talking about just, you know, some guy off the streets with no academic credentials. He took these very seriously. He had 600 students of mathematics and astronomy work together to estimate the probability that any one human being could fulfill just eight of the prophecies made about Jesus, any eight of the prophecies.

And so, you know, if this was just kind of some, some joke that nobody can really take seriously, right? Professor Stoner would not have been working on this and had 600 serious. The students wouldn't do that. They would, they wouldn't waste their time.

They're paying money to get an education. Right. Exactly.

And so, uh, since I mentioned that, it's actually interesting that what they came up with was that there is one chance in 100 million billion that any one human being could fulfill just any eight of the prophecies made about Jesus. Wow. Okay.

So this is actually the same as if we were to cover the entire landmass of earth with one and a half inch tiles and then go, you know, roam around the earth and randomly pick the one tile that was marked with a cross on the bottom. Wow. Okay.

I mean, highly, highly unlikely. Okay. And there are reasons to believe Jesus fulfilled far more than just eight prophecies about the Messiah, but that's just, that's, that's the chance, the mathematical likelihood of fulfilling eight of them.

So no other worldview has that kind of remarkable evidence on its side. Okay. So, so far in this episode, we looked at some examples of bad predictions and bad prophecies from different bad worldviews.

And in the next episode, I'm thinking that we could look at an example of a good prophecy that is specific and defensible. And we can see whether when we test it, whether it came true or not. Sounds good.

Yeah. So we'll, we're going to look at a prophecy from the old Testament that Christians think was fulfilled by Jesus. And we're going to ask, how is this one different from the prophecies of all the other religions and worldviews that we looked at and can it be justified and defended as reliable? So, unfortunately, we're out of time for today.

So I think we'll continue with that topic next week. We're just getting to the good part about this. So you don't want to miss the next episode.

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