If the Problem of Evil Is Uncomfortable, Just Redefine It Away

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This is post #1500 of the Cross Examined blog! Thank you everyone for making the Cross Examined community a vibrant place to share ideas. I’ve probably learned more from your comments than from any other source. If it weren’t for you, I’d be doing something else!

This is the second half of a critique of Greg Koukl’s recent podcast “How to Respond to the Problem of Evil” (part 1). To get out of a bind, Koukl will redefine the Problem of Evil, not once but twice. He’s so casual about it that I wonder if he’s unaware that he’s doing it. Or if he knows how that looks to observers.

The PoE as an argument for God

This is Koukl’s primary argument. He knows the Problem of Evil (PoE) is a liability, but he wants to flip it into an asset. Given that evil exists:

This helps us. Evil is on our side, in that sense, because if there were no God, there would be no evil at all . . . because there’d be no lawmaker.

Nope. This won’t work when at every turn God is invisible. God ignores every chance to swoop in and overtly resolve some problem. He’s always a no-show. Why imagine this lawmaker of yours even exists when he’s indistinguishable from nonexistent?

A precedent in the Bible

Remember the public bonfire-lighting contest of Elijah, God’s last prophet, versus the priests of Baal? The hundreds of priests went first and were having no luck rousing their god. In one of the Bible’s rare bits of humor Elijah mocked his opponents:

“Shout louder!” Elijah said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” (1 Kings 18:27)

And that’s my encouragement to Koukl. Is God asleep? Using the bathroom? Getting his hair done? Pedicure? God is no more obvious than Baal. Maybe shout louder?

Koukl is now celebrating evil, but in so doing, he’s digging deeper the hole of God the Bronze Age barbarian. Remember the four-point list from part 1 (admit how bad the PoE makes God look; turn your vague assurance that God might have reasons into specific justification for the Holocaust; show that “God” exists; and justify suffering when God could achieve his goals without it). To give your argument any kind of standing, you need to respond to that list to show that you’re taking seriously the consequences of your argument. And those consequences aren’t pretty.

Objective evil?

The only supportable statement that can be salvaged from Koukl’s attempt to turn this lemon of an argument into lemonade is: Without God, there’s no objective evil, though there would still be the ordinary kind, which we find in the definition of “evil” in the dictionary. Koukl would dearly love to be able to defend the idea of objective morality, for which he has no evidence.

He next wonders how the naturalist explains evil.

[With no God,] it’s just molecules clashing in the universe. Okay, so then, what is “wrong”? Says who? Your grandma? kind of thing.

Says who? Says our moral programming—thanks, evolution. If we were honey badgers or meercats or Klingons, evolution would’ve given us different programming for how to behave among our peers.

So if there is no God, how can there be evil? . . . [If] there’s no lawmaker; there would be no law, right?

That’s a cute argument for children. Not so much for adults.

Rivers don’t meander according to the all-loving direction of a divine lawmaker. Natural principles are sufficient. And natural explanations are also sufficient to explain human morality.

The sun is about to rise, and the cock is about to crow . . .

At the beginning of Koukl’s podcast, he summarized the PoE this way: “[If God is] good, he’d want to get rid of all evil. If he’s powerful, he’d be able to get all rid of all evil, but there’s evil, right? So, there you go. God probably doesn’t exist.” I agreed that that was correct.

And now, six paragraphs later, the PoE is so hard to rationalize that Koukl wants to redefine it away. That first definition has become inconvenient, so let’s just discard it. Who will notice?

Here’s the new version. You can play “Spot the Differences!” at home.

You [atheists] just complained about the problem of evil. There must be evil in the world, right? So, what do you make of evil now that God doesn’t exist? How do you get traction to even complain about evil in the world? You can’t. . . . People think that they somehow solve the problem of evil by getting God out of the equation.

Yes! You do solve the Problem of Evil by getting rid of God! Your first definition correctly stated that the PoE requires a God, so remove God as a presupposition, and the problem is gone. QED.

This is so crazy that I must repeat it. Koukl’s Problem of Evil was: Given a good and powerful God, how is there so much evil in the world? And now, four minutes later, that definition no longer exists. It has been disappeared like a nosey journalist raising uncomfortable topics in a totalitarian state. The Problem of Evil is now, How do you respond to evil without God to define evil?

Deliberately conflicting definitions

I frequently see evangelists use two contradictory definitions. It’s one of their tricks to keep the disjoint Christian story together. They will use one definition of a word for the Christian insiders and a different definition for the skeptics. Or maybe it’s one definition to make sense out of Bible passage A and a conflicting one for passage B. For example, there are two definitions of “faith.” And there are many definitions of “morality.”

Usually the incompatible definitions will be in different articles, giving evangelists some plausible deniability. Koukl’s podcast shows an especially abrupt redefinition and nicely illustrates the problem.

It’s been said that you can’t ride two horses with one ass, though evangelists desperately try.

Problem of Evil, redefined

Koukl has now clumsily jumped to the other horse. Let’s see how satisfied he is with his new mount.

You [atheists] got God out of the picture. You didn’t get rid of evil. You still got all the things that you used to call evil. They still are existing, and you still probably consider them evil. Okay, now solve the problem.

Okay, there is no God. Problem solved. QED.

And did you catch that? That’s his third definition of the Problem of Evil! The problem is now: Evil exists in the world, so what are you going to do about it?

That’s not the actual PoE, but I’ll respond. Evil is easily understood. Reality has no obligation to be fair or nice. That’s the Petri dish for the evolution of life: there’s good luck and bad luck, some individuals live long lives and some don’t, and not everyone passes on their genes. We can call things we detest “evil,” but that’s no support for a claim that objective morality exists.

Well, heck—let’s just declare victory anyway

His argument is in ruins around him, but Koukl pops up from behind the rubble to declare victory.

The point I’m making is, atheism can give you no traction to even make sense out of evil to begin with. . . .

See, our answer makes sense of all the facts. We don’t have to play games like that. The world is broken. That’s why there’s evil in the world. . . . We broke it. And so, we’re responsible.

You can make sense of “the facts”? “We broke the world” is no fact. Nor is it an argument. It’s just dogma.

Koukl changes definitions in plain view. He points to the Garden of Eden as if it’s an argument. He declares that his perfect, omniscient God somehow let his human experiment get out of control. And it’s the atheists who are playing games?! I can see the irony even if he can’t.

Natural explanations make clear why the world isn’t perfectly tuned to our wishes and why we see evil in the world. That’s much easier to digest than evidence-free supernatural presuppositions.

If there is a God, his plan is very similar
to someone not having a plan.
— Eddie Izzard

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I form the light and create darkness;
I make peace and create evil; 
I, the Lord, do all these things.
— Isaiah 45:7

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Image from Valerie Everett (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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How Can a Christian so Completely Misunderstand the Problem of Evil?

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This happens all too often. I’m (mentally) yelling at the screen, wondering how a well-respected apologist—sometimes even an apologist with a PhD—gets the basics of their own field so wrong. Are they lying? Being deceptive for some imagined greater good? Or is this a good mind deluded by unsupportable supernatural beliefs?

In the naughty corner today is Greg Koukl, who recently wrote “How to Respond to the Problem of Evil” (podcast and transcript here). The Problem of Evil (PoE) is his bread and butter. How does he get it so confused?

The Problem of Evil

The PoE is often stated this way: Why would a good God allow bad things to happen to good people? Here’s Koukl’s version, which (at this moment) sounds good to me.

You think God is good and he’s powerful . . . but if he’s good, he’d want to get rid of all evil. If he’s powerful, he’d be able to get all rid of all evil. But there’s evil, right? So, there you go—God probably doesn’t exist.

This is roughly the PoE as given by Epicurus in the third century BCE.

Dwelling on how Koukl defines the PoE may seem like an unnecessary detour, but it’s important to get this in writing. Before the cock crows, Koukl will deny knowing this argument.

Flaws in the PoE?

But first, Koukl wants to push back against the PoE as he described it above: “When you press the issue, you can’t build a valid argument from those facts.”

Or maybe you can. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a more comprehensive argument and declares that it is indeed valid. But let’s set this aside.

To prove his point, Koukl took one of the premises in his statement of the PoE—if God is good, he’d prevent all evil—and argued that it fails with this example.

[A vaccination is evil from the standpoint of my daughters] because it causes them pain, but Daddy makes them get shots, so why does he do that? Because Daddy’s evil? No. Because I know that the short-term evil to them is going to result in a longer-term good. And so, there is a moral justification for the shorter-term bad.

Right—that’s a moral justification for a human. God is omnipotent, while Daddy and the medical profession aren’t. God could achieve any goal, whether it’s the vaccination of one child or the worldwide elimination of a disease, without side effects. That’s what “omnipotent” means.

There could be a morally sufficient reason for allowing it because it leads to something good, okay? Or maybe something bad that prevents something even worse from happening. . . .

Now, the possibility [is that God] could have a reason; we don’t have to tell them what that reason is.

And you’re already backing away from your own argument. I don’t blame you—I wouldn’t want to defend that either—but yes, you do need to give a plausible reason.

4 mandatory steps before objecting to the PoE

And there’s more: I have four demands of apologists who make this “God could have reasons that we can’t even imagine” argument.

  1. Admit how bad the PoE makes God look. Even if God had some non-obvious justification, admit that he looks like a Bronze Age barbarian when he allows evil that he could easily prevent.
  2. You say that God could have his reasons? Give some. That is, move from vague, ungrounded handwaving to specific reasons for actual evil events in the world. I suggest you start by listing plausible benefits that would justify World War II and the Holocaust. (Do you seriously think a God a billion times smarter than you couldn’t come up with anything more benign than the Holocaust to achieve his goals?)
  3. Does “God” even exist? Let’s worry about God’s reasons for evil after we have solid grounding that he exists.
  4. Why would God allow suffering when he has magic? He’s omnipotent! Any goal he can achieve through human suffering, he can achieve without it.

(I expand on this list here.)

Follow this list, and when you start struggling to find explanations for God’s absence (or might it be . . . nonexistence?) you begin to see the problem. Nonexistence explains the evidence so much better.

Evil happening to people vs. other animals

A rock could tumble down a mountain and hit a person or a deer. Is there a moral difference? Accidents, disease, and natural disasters hit both humans and other animals.

When a calamity hits a person, we often critique the event to search for a silver lining. Maybe someone broke their leg, but the downtime finally prompted them to begin writing that book. Maybe a teenager lost a parent to cancer, but that pushed them to become a doctor or missionary.

Christians could see God using these disasters for his Grand Plan, but is that what this really looks like? Animals by the billions die in pain. Most will die outside of any human awareness as mere statistics, and no moral benefit comes from these. Why then imagine moral benefit from human suffering? (h/t commenter Ignorant Amos and author John Loftus)

Koukl declares the PoE defeated

Remember the type of objection that this is: [it’s a strong defeater to the conclusion,] “It’s not possible that there is a God because there’s evil in the world.”

I’m easy to please—just show me where the preponderance of evidence is.

I don’t say “it’s not possible” for God to exist, and in fact, neither do you! Remember that you ended your summary of the PoE (above) with “So, there you go—God probably doesn’t exist.” There’s a big difference between “God probably doesn’t exist” and “It’s not possible for God to exist.”

But let’s revisit your characterization of the atheist position: “It’s not possible that there is a God because there’s evil in the world.” I’ll actually accept that. You’re not talking about some ill-defined supernatural something-or-other but Yahweh of Christianity. Given Yahweh is as Christians bill him now—all-good, omnipotent, and omniscient—he is indeed incompatible with evil.

Conclusion next time: Koukl tries to turn the Problem of Evil from a liability to an asset (with limited success) and redefines it here.

Some have attempted to explain [suffering] in reference to man
by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement.
But the number of men in the world is nothing
compared with that of all other sentient beings,
and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement.
— Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

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Image from Kat J (free-use license)
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Christian vs. Atheist Worldviews

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The atheist worldview is bleak. How do we know? Because Christian apologists, who don’t understand the atheist worldview, tell us so.

But here’s a twist: Julian Baggini is an atheist who wrote an article, “Yes, life without God can be bleak. Atheism is about facing up to that.” Is this an atheist from whom we can get a fairer critique?

Nope. Those hopes were quickly dashed (see part 1). Baggini observed, “Sometimes life is shit and that’s all there is to it,” which is true, but it’s not like Christianity gives some advantage. Life does sometimes suck, but that’s a reality that applies to both the atheist and the Christian.

The usefulness of Christian belief

Christians might come at this from the other side: “Don’t you at least admit that it would be nice if there were a God?”

Not if it’s the monster described in the Old Testament.

“But the atheist worldview is so depressing! You imagine that we’re all alone. And what happens after you die?”

What happens to a pet when it dies? If animals just die, with no afterlife involved, why should it be different for humans (except that it would please you to be otherwise)? Let’s be adults and follow the facts—there simply is no good evidence for an afterlife, so we shouldn’t organize our lives as if there were one.

As for the atheist worldview being depressing, some parts are, as Baggini correctly points out. But we try to act as adults and accept the evidence. There are no fairies or unicorns or wish-granting genies, darn it. If you had cancer, wouldn’t you want the unpleasant truth so you could take action?

Reality or a pretty story?

Imagining away the bad parts of life without evidence is something atheists won’t do, and our lives are as fulfilled as Christians’ are. We take pleasure in a child’s laugh or a beautiful sunset just like anyone else. Because we accept that this life is all we have reasonable evidence for, we know that every day is precious. If instead you imagine that you’re en route to heaven, and life on earth is just a brief and insignificant stopover, you may treat life, not as a rare gift but as a chore to be gotten through.

It wouldn’t matter if the atheist worldview were bleak—as adults, we embrace reality and follow the evidence. And why think that the atheist worldview is the bleak one? The Christian must imagine that God is constantly monitoring them to make sure that believe and do the right things, and if they don’t thread this needle, they’re headed for Hell. They must imagine that God is there with them in terrible hardship, except that there’s never any evidence of this. And, of course, God was behind the hardship. Some Christians must admit that God never answers their prayers, though the Bible claims he answers every prayer. This view of God wouldn’t be any bleaker if God didn’t exist.

Maybe that’s why the most religious states tend to consume the most antidepressants (source data: largely Table 6 here).

The Christianity-is-pleasing view seems to be losing its power. The remarkable rise in the U.S. of the “Nones” (those unaffiliated with any religion)—26 percent now, up from 17 percent twelve years ago—comes from a rejection of Christianity’s intellectual standing. The leading reason by far for rejecting their childhood religion is that they simply “stopped believing in the religion’s teachings.”

Related posts:

Other posts responding to atheists:

We’re either alone in the universe or we’re not.
Either way, the thought is staggering.
— Arthur C. Clarke (paraphrased)

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/10/16.)

Image from hannah k (license CC BY 2.0)

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8 Tests for Accurate Prophecy and Why Bible “Prophecies” Aren’t

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What makes a good prophecy?

Bible prophecies don’t get special treatment. Prophecies from an all-knowing God should easily pass the highest standards, and if they don’t, the religion behind those claims should be rejected.

We’ve just finished a look at 13 Bible prophecies from Hugh Ross of the Reasons to Believe ministry. He said that 2000 Bible prophecies have already been “fulfilled to the letter—no errors.” In fact, the 13 prophecies that he gave were laughable failures—see for yourself. (Maybe he read his list wrong and gave us the bottom rather than the top 13?)

Judging bad prophecies

Most of us can easily spot bad prophecies—tabloid predictions by psychics such as Jeane Dixon or Sylvia Browne, for example. And not even many Christians are sucked into the end-of-the-world predictions by such “prophets” as Harold Camping.

There’s a great infographic of Christianity’s many end-of-the-world predictions here, and I write about Harold Camping’s ill-advised venture into prophecy in 2011 here and here. Ronald Weinland assured us that Jesus would return on May 19, 2013. John Hagee imagined that lunar eclipses predict something (he wasn’t quite sure what), and Ray Comfort just imagines things.

Another interesting category are the claims of fulfilled biblical prophecies. (I’ve responded to some of those claims here, here, here, and here.) The claims are so weak that I wonder: don’t we have a common idea of what fulfilled prophecy actually looks like? Don’t we critique prophecy claims like those made by Sylvia Browne or Jeane Dixon the same way? Let’s take a step back and agree on what makes a good prophecy.

1. The prophecy must be startling, not mundane.

“The [fill in political party] will gain control of [fill in branch of government] in the next election” isn’t very startling. “There will be no legislature because of a coup” would be startling.

We regularly find big surprises in the news—earthquakes, wars, medical breakthroughs, and so on. These startling events are what make useful prophecies.

2. The prophecy must be precise, not vague.

“Expect exciting and surprising gold medals for the U.S. Olympic team!” is not precise. “A major earthquake will devastate Port-au-Prince, Haiti on January 12, 2010” is precise.

When Xerxes of Persia invaded Greece in 480 BC, the Athenians consulted the Oracle at Delphi. The prophecy: “The wooden wall only shall not fail.” But what does that mean? A literal wooden wall? Or maybe the thorn bushes around the Acropolis. They finally decided that it meant their wooden ships. The navy saved Greece, but this prophecy was so ambiguous that it was no prophecy at all. A cryptic prophecy makes a good story, but this is not an indication of an omniscient source.

Nostradamus is another example of “prophecies” that were so vague that they can be imagined to mean lots of things. Similarly, the hundreds of supposed Bible prophecies are simply quote mining. You could also apply the identical process to War and Peace or The Collected Works of Shakespeare to find parallels to the gospel story, but so what?

3. The prophecy must be accurate.

We should have high expectations for a divine divinator. American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce could perhaps be excused if he was a little off (in fact, he showed no particular gift at all), but prophecy from the omniscient Creator should be perfect.

4. The prophecy must predict, not retrodict.

The writings of Nostradamus predicted London’s Great Fire of 1666 and the rise of Napoleon and Hitler . . . but of course these “predictions” were so unclear in his writings that the connection had to be inferred afterwards. This is also the failing of the Bible Code—the idea that the Hebrew Bible holds hidden acrostics of future events. And maybe it does—but the same logic could find these after-the-fact connections in any large book.

5. The prophecy can’t be self-fulfilling.

The prediction that a bank will soon become insolvent may provoke its customers to remove all their money . . . and make the bank insolvent. The prediction that a store will soon go out of business may drive away customers. The Greek god Kronos heard that one of his children would kill him, so he ate them, but if he hadn’t been so violent, Zeus might not have killed him.

Self-fulfilling prophecies are cheating.

6. The prophecy and the fulfillment must be verifiable.

The prophecy and sometimes the fulfillment can come from centuries past, and we must be confident that they are accurate history. We must have higher standards than that they were written down.

7. The fulfillment must come after the prophecy.

Kind of obvious, right? But some Old Testament prophecies fail on this point.

Isaiah 45:1 names Cyrus the Great of Persia as the anointed one (Messiah) who will end the Babylonian exile (587–538 BCE) of the Israelites. That might be impressive if it predicted the events, but this part of Isaiah (Deutero-Isaiah) was probably written during the time of Cyrus.

Or take Daniel. Daniel the man might have been taken to Babylon during the exile, but Daniel the book was written centuries later in roughly 165 BCE. Its “prophecies” about events before that date are pretty good, but it fails afterwards. There’s even a term for this, vaticinia ex eventu—prophecies after the event.

8. The fulfillment must be honest.

The author of the fulfillment can’t simply look in the back of the book, parrot the answers found there, and then declare victory. We need strong evidence that this didn’t happen.

But we see this when Mark records Jesus’s last words as exactly those words from Psalm 22. Did it really happened that way, or was Jesus was deliberately quoting from the psalm as he died, or (my choice) Mark knew the psalm and put those words into his gospel?

I think that any of us would find this a fairly obvious list of the ways that predictions can fail. We’d quickly spot these errors in a supermarket tabloid or in some other guy’s nutty religion. But the Jesus prophecies are rejected by this skeptical net as well. Consider Matthew: this gospel says that Jesus was born of a virgin (1:18–25), was born in Bethlehem (2:1), and that he rode humbly on two donkeys (21:1–7). It says that Jesus predicted that he would rise, Jonah-like, after three days (12:40) and that the temple would fall (24:1–2). It says that he was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver (26:15), that men gambling for his clothes (27:35), and it records his last words (27:46).

Are these the records of fulfilled prophecy? Maybe all these claims in Matthew actually did happen, but if so, we have no grounds for saying so. Because they fail these tests (primarily #8), we must reject these claims of fulfilled prophecy. The non-supernatural explanation is far more plausible.

Should we have separate standards for biblical prophecies? Yes, we should judge a perfect God and a flawless Bible with much, much higher standards.

See also: Make Your Very Own Prophecy (That Actually Comes True!)

Risky predictions have been successfully made
thousands of times in science,
not once in religion.
— Vic Stenger

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(This is an update of a post from 3/28/15.)

Image from Dawn Endico (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Bible Prophecies: a Miracle Victory and Priestly Justice

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Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe (an old-earth Creationist ministry) claims that the Bible has thousands of fulfilled prophecies, and he gives us his top 13. These last two “prophecies” will conclude our critique (part 1 here).

12. Jehoshaphat wins a battle

“Jahaziel prophesied that King Jehoshaphat and a tiny band of men would defeat an enormous, well-equipped, well-trained army without even having to fight. Just as predicted, the King and his troops stood looking on as their foes were supernaturally destroyed to the last man.”

2 Chronicles 20 tells of a great army approaching Judah. King Jehoshaphat prayed to God, and the prophet Jahaziel reported that God would deliver them. The next day, God caused the individual tribes within the opposing alliance to fight each other until they were all dead.

What is there to say except that it’s a fanciful story? Just like #11, this is a self-contained story with a prophecy. The dating problem is also similar: King Jehoshaphat reigned in the 9th century BCE, while the books of Chronicles document events up to Cyrus the Great allowing the Jews to return after his conquest of Babylon 539 BCE. They were probably written later still, in the 4th century BCE. Not only would we doubt the original oral story, we’d question whether it was recorded correctly.

Half a millennium passes from event to documentation, and Ross wants us to credulously accept the story as true?

13. When priests back the wrong horse

“King Jeroboam of Israel (922–901 BCE) encouraged worship of deities other than Yahweh. A prophet told him that a future King Josiah of Judah (641–609 BCE) would burn the bones of Jeroboam’s wayward priests on their own altar. And that’s indeed what happened.”

The prophecy is in 1 Kings 13:2, and the fulfillment is in 2 Kings 23:15–18. Here Ross makes the same mistake: the two books of Kings were originally one book. It documents events up to the year 560 BCE, and it received its final editing at about that time. There is no credible prophecy if an editor tweaked the prophecy and the fulfillment at the same time.

Hugh Ross’s probability conclusion

Since the probabilities were stated without justification, I haven’t been critiquing them, but Ross has attached one to each prophecy, from one chance in 105 to one in 1020. They’re outlandish figures, since none are fulfilled prophecies and all have obvious natural explanations, but that doesn’t stop Ross from computing the final probability.

Since these thirteen prophecies cover mostly separate and independent events, the probability of chance occurrence for all thirteen is about 1 in 10138.

Then he talks about how unlikely “the second law of thermodynamics will be reversed in a given situation” and concludes,

Stating it simply, based on these thirteen prophecies alone, the Bible record may be said to be vastly more reliable than the second law of thermodynamics.

The Christian who wants to accept this as true has their sound bite, though a brittle one. As these posts have shown, each of these prophecy claims crumble with a little investigation.

Each reader should feel free to make his own reasonable estimates of probability for the chance fulfillment of the prophecies cited here.

There is no “chance fulfillment of the prophecies” when there was no prophecy and the natural explanation works fine, but I accept your challenge. 1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1 = 1 (no, not 1 in 10138).

Ross wraps up by saying that, given that the Bible is so fabulously correct, the Bible’s 500 upcoming prophecies “will be fulfilled to the last letter.” Who can risk ignoring these upcoming events, missing out on the blessings of Jesus, and blah blah blah?

Conclusion

As I’ve researched each of Ross’s claims, I’ve been amazed at how elementary these mistakes are, and this is from a guy with a doctorate in physics. But perhaps I should be more accustomed to this. We see many credentialed scholars who ineptly step in to help out their powerless Jesus. William Lane Craig has two doctorates, and John Lennox and John Warwick Montgomery have three.

You say the Bible has a prophecy from God? First make sure that it avoids the childish mistakes that Ross made in these 13 claims. Next, make sure that the prophecy meets the straightforward criteria I explore here—criteria that you’d instinctively demand from any foreign religion or supernatural claim.

Thirteen certainly hasn’t been Hugh Ross’s lucky number. That he had to cite this many rather than offering just one compelling prophecy is a clue that even he thinks they aren’t convincing.

These 13 claimed prophecies have been a useful exercise in seeing what prophecies from a perfect holy book would not look like.

I won’t insult your intelligence
by suggesting you believe what you just said.
— William F. Buckley

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/3/16.)

Image from Wikimedia (GNU Free Documentation License)

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Bible Prophecies: Edom’s Barrenness, Deaths of Sons, and Elijah’s Fiery Chariot

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Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe (an old-earth Creationist ministry) claims that the Bible has thousands of fulfilled prophecies, and he gives us his top 13. Let’s continue our critique (part 1 here).

9. Edom will become barren

“Jeremiah predicted that despite its fertility and despite the accessibility of its water supply, the land of Edom (today a part of Jordan) would become a barren, uninhabited wasteland.”

Reading the cited passage in Jeremiah (49:15–20), I feel like I’ve been called in to settle a playground dispute. Israel and Edom are arguing and calling each other names. “You think you’re so strong?” Israel says. “My big brother will take care of you!”

Here are a few selections of the bravado. These are coming from God’s mouth:

I will make you small among the nations, despised by mankind.

Edom will become an object of horror; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds.

The young of the flock will be dragged away; their pasture will be appalled at their fate.

Ross says that Edom will be made “a barren, uninhabited wasteland.” If you look at a satellite map of where it was—a rough circle from the Dead Sea south to the Gulf of Aqaba—it does look pretty dry.

There’s a lot of trash talking here and in the other passage mentioned (Ezekiel 25:12–14) but no mention of their fertility or water. Did God take away their water? Apparently not, since ancient Edom has always had almost no arable land. In the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, its economy was based on the caravan trade.

Ross’s story of fertile land suddenly turned into a desert is at best a fairy tale. At worst, it’s the breaking of the ninth Commandment against lying.

(I’ve lost interesting in passing along Ross’s ridiculous probability estimate. Just assume that it’s a bajillion to one against whatever happening without God’s intervention.)

10. The rebuilding of Jericho

“Joshua prophesied that Jericho would be rebuilt by one man. He also said that the man’s eldest son would die when the reconstruction began and that his youngest son would die when the work reached completion. About five centuries later this prophecy found its fulfillment.”

Ross cites Joshua 6:26. After Joshua’s army had plundered and destroyed Jericho, Joshua is either speaking a curse or making a prophecy against anyone who would rebuild the city:

At the cost of his firstborn son he will lay its foundations;
at the cost of his youngest he will set up its gates.

The fulfilment is in 1 Kings 16:33–4:

In King Ahab’s time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundations at the cost of his firstborn son Abiram, and he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, in accordance with the word of the Lord spoken by Joshua.

We can date the prophecy by noting that Joshua came from the 13th century BCE, and we can date the fulfilment by noting that King Ahab came from the 9th century BCE. That sounds good for Ross’s claim except that there is good evidence (the “Deuteronomistic history”) that Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings were edited together by one person, creating a unified story from Moses to the destruction of Judah by Babylon (see also Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? p. 103).

No historical hypothesis can be proven, but the plausible natural explanation that the “fulfilment” was deliberately written to satisfy the “prophecy” destroys Ross’s claim.

11. Elijah’s fiery chariot

“The day of Elijah’s supernatural departure from Earth was predicted unanimously—and accurately, according to the eye-witness account—by a group of fifty prophets.”

Ross’s source is 2 Kings 2:3–11. In this story, Elisha is tagging along as Elijah makes several visits, and at each stop, local prophets tell Elisha ominous news: “Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?”

Sure enough, the prophecy comes true: “A chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind.”

We’ve not seen this kind of claim so far. Instead of a prophecy in one part of the Bible confirmed in a later book (not that we’ve seen this yet, but that has been Ross’s claim), all we have here is a story contained in one chapter.

Elijah lived during the reign of King Ahab (9th century BCE), while 2 Kings was written in the 6th century BCE. This story was kept alive orally for three centuries, and when it’s written down it has magical events. Why accept that as history?

To be concluded in part 5.

Every image that has ever been projected of God
is a mirror reflecting the age
and person or group
which produced it.
— Jesuit scholar Ignatius Jesudasan

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/28/16.)

Image from NASA, public domain
.