We have noted the first of two objections those opposing the Bible have offered in response to the Christian’s claim about the fulfillment of prophecy requiring a supernatural source. Objection number one declares the supernatural to be foreign to the closed system of the universe. Since our claim for the divine supernatural Source being the only explanation for the fulfillment of prophecy, they merely say the closed system of the universe prohibits that, so it cannot have occurred. Their presupposition declares there is no reality beyond the observable. Hence, they have defined the supernatural and the fulfillment of what Christians call “prophecy” out of existence. In short, their explanation of biblical prophecy, which we say is unexplainable, is “couldn’t happen, didn’t happen. End of argument.” You will have to decide for yourself just how scientific that presupposition is.
The second objection is equally unconvincing. Their claim is that the utterances we take as prophetic were not prophetic at all. They were historic. “That right,” say they, “the reason these so-called ‘prophecies’ seem to have been fulfilled in such precise detail is that they were not writing of these things in advance at all but recorded them after they happened. No wonder,” say they, “that what Christian call ‘prophecies’ were so accurately realized. They were describing the events after they happened, not before they happened. In short,” they conclude, “the whole claim of fulfilled prophecies is, in reality, a scam.” Precisely what the scammers stood to gain from this massive deception, they have not said. But, really now, isn’t it quite a stretch to suggest that two dozen prophets, most of whom never lived at the same time and never knew each other, somehow engaged in a gigantic collusion, or conspiracy, to deceive future readers into believing something they knew was not true. It’s hugely taxing on one’s ability to embrace such nonsense. Apart from its being devoid of logic, a brief investigation into secular history recorded in reputable encyclopedias clearly revealed the distance between the dates of the prophets’ predictions and their fulfillment. One can understand the desperation in trying to justify one’s unbelief, but this is embarrassing. Calling prophecy history does not make it so. The prophetic record and its multitude of fulfillments stand firm. Not only does the biblical record consistently verify them, but secular histories on every continent acknowledge them. A feeble attempt to explain away the myriad of fulfilled prophecies is far different and far less scientific than explaining them. One can hardly imagine a less scientific approach than that.
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