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!)

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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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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.

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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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I remember the tabloid magazines from years ago at the grocery store checkout stand. Every new year’s first edition had famous psychics’ predictions splashed across the cover. What Hollywood or royal celebrities would get embarrassed, arrested, or divorced? What gaffes would various world leaders commit? What natural disasters or wars would happen, what scientific or medical breakthroughs would develop?

What was surprising was how they could keep doing this, year after year, when the issue just one week earlier had the end-of-year scorecard showing how badly the prior year’s predictions had done.

Kidding! There was no scorecard, not at the end of the previous year or ever. No need to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

The tabloid fan might admit that if you really want to get precise about it, sure, the occasional prediction wasn’t completely accurate. If the prediction was that a celebrity would lose a child from a drug overdose, but what actually happened was that their ex got divorced, that was close enough, right? Blur your eyes and score generously, and those psychics were still worth reading.

This has been called the Jeane Dixon effect after a prolific psychic. From her oeuvre, you can find loads of preposterously wrong predictions as well as the occasional correct one. Knowing what sells, the media celebrated the hits and forgot the misses. (One author called this kind of selection bias the Jeane Dixon defect.)

And isn’t it fun to believe? For the tabloid buyer, maybe, just maybe, the psychic will be right, the predicted natural disaster will happen, and they can say they knew it all along.

For the kid waiting for Santa, maybe, just maybe, they’ll get that pony they asked for.

And for the Christian, maybe, just maybe, their prayer for a miracle will be answered.

Christian predictions

This naïve belief is widespread in many Christians today. The fraction of Americans who say that we’re living in the end times as described by the Bible is 41 percent. Of American evangelicals, it’s 77 percent.

When you or I hear a terrible news story—a pandemic virus, for example—we likely see this in the context of bad stuff that happens across the world from time to time. For apocalyptic Christians convinced that Armageddon is around the corner, however, any tragedy neatly confirms their conclusion.

John Hagee’s hysterical 2015 blather about the four blood moons scratched that “All aboard!” itch that these apocalyptic Christians seem to have. They’re playing the poker game of eternity, they’re all in, and they’re eager to show their cards. About the four blood moons, Hagee said, “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon,’ ” and “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”

(You didn’t notice the world ending in October, 2015? No four horsemen? Nothing to suggest the End? Me neither. The only blood is Hagee’s bloody nose when he walked face-first into reality.)

Just like psychics’ failed predictions in tabloid magazines, Christian prophets have no final reckoning. The Jeane Dixon defect is in play, and failed predictions are either ignored or reinterpreted to be close enough.

One relevant difference is that the Bible demands the death penalty for false prophets.

A prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded . . . is to be put to death. (Deuteronomy 18:20–22)

How can we identify this false prophet? The passage continues:

You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?” If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously.

Hagee’s flock haven’t picked up stones. He hasn’t even been shunned or exiled. It’s almost like Christians aren’t consistent and are selectively reading the Bible.

Comparison: psychics vs. prophets

The National Enquirer psychics seem not to be on the covers anymore, but they did predict big things for 2015: an assassination attempt on Pope Francis, a Hollywood job offer for Barack Obama, significant volcanic activity in the Pacific Northwest, and a deathbed confession that that moon-landing thing really was a hoax. Wrong, as usual.

And notice what they missed. No 2015 prediction about ISIS or the Paris attacks or Charlie Hebdo. Nothing about the Obergefell decision or Christian bakers or Kim Davis. Nothing about Donald Trump and the sycophantic comedy that American politics would become.

We can laugh at how badly the psychics got things wrong, but then the Christian prophets, perpetually crying wolf about the latest disaster, were just as laughably wrong. My prediction for 2020: more empty and irresponsible predictions from both psychics and Christian prophets.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/1/16.)

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In part 1, I summarized John Hagee’s “Four Blood Moons” hysteria, which culminated with its final lunar eclipse four years ago.

So what was supposed to happen?

We need to learn from Reverend Hagee precisely what was supposed to happen and when. Hagee told us, “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”

Okay, but that’s rather vague. Hagee said (in a video that is, embarrassingly, still in the Hagee Ministries channel), “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon.’”

Surely the creator of the universe can do better? “Something is about to change,” according to the book’s subtitle.

Okay, forget it. Hagee won’t be specific because he can’t. Perhaps the purpose of the book wasn’t to enlighten the flock but (dare I say it?) to make money. It turns out that Pastor Hagee wasn’t the first to think up the four blood moons idea, though you wouldn’t know it from his movie, where he claims to have come up with this connection. Hagee loves money like sharks love chum.

Others piled on and predicted financial disaster after the end of the Shemitah year (didn’t happen—the Dow was up on the next trading day). Unsurprisingly, those financial prophets didn’t conclude that their game is groundless. One pundit concluded that God simply didn’t want to make himself predictable. It’s clear that no lesson has been learned, and the next breathless, invented crisis among gullible Christians is in our near future.

One element of this hysteria is a “the sky is falling” attitude. Prophecy-hungry Christian charlatans point to the worrisome news of the moment—Iran’s nuclear ambitions, ISIS, problems in Israel, Ebola, police shootings, droughts and forest fires, same-sex marriage, and more—and imagine that these are the signs of the End.

No, that’s not bad. You want bad? How about the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) that killed between three and eleven million people in Europe? That was bad. Or how about 1942–43 when it looked like the Axis powers might succeed and carve up the world? Or the 1918 flu pandemic that killed up to 100 million people? Or the Black Death in Europe (1346–53), which killed 20% of the world’s population?

Remember when you were a kid in history class, and you asked why you had to learn all that stuff? This is why. It’s so you can immunize yourself from people like Hagee who hope you are ignorant of events like those—events so world-shakingly calamitous that they plausibly could have signaled an end of the world.

Sorry, Christian apocalypticists, same-sex marriage doesn’t compare.

Consequences

I believe a quote from the Good Book is relevant here.

The prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die (Deuteronomy 18:20).

Wow—that’s tough love. I wonder if pastor David Berzins, who was eager to stone gays to death, might have been happy to carry out that punishment since Hagee obviously wasn’t speaking for God since his prophecy didn’t come true.

Hagee had to walk a fine line. He had to be specific enough to mesmerize his flock into buying his books and mailing in checks but not so specific that he could be easily called on a prophecy when it didn’t come to pass. That was the error that Harold Camping made. He spent $100 million to advertise a very specific date for the Rapture, May 21, 2011. Things became uncomfortable when May 21 came and went just like any other day.

After several years of planning, you could imagine a crescendo at Hagee’s web site on the eve of the fourth “blood moon.” Nope—out of a bunch of ads, a single one read, “The final blood moon is coming . . . are you ready?”

Ready for what? Hagee pretty much ignored the blood moons non-event and moved on to the next apocalyptic message so we can get good and scared all over again. John Hagee has become Pastor Freddie Krueger of the (Nightmare on) Elm Street Church. And like the groundless claims in John Oliver’s much-missed megachurch, Hagee’s far-reaching but empty claims are, incredibly, all legal.

If there were justice where you could pull a stunt like this once but then you’d lose all credibility after a failure, I wouldn’t mind. The problem is, there are no consequences. When Hagee and others tap dance away from their false claims, no one will stone them. Their flock will continue to do what they’re told. Like a stage magician, Hagee will focus his flock’s attention on some new book or outreach. While I wonder how Hagee can live with himself, the whole thing looks like a smart financial move in hindsight.

What’s it like on the inside?

Patheos atheist blogger Captain Cassidy wrote about what it was like growing up as a Pentecostal teenager during the “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988” scare. On why this kind of thing is effective, she said that being on the inside flatters one’s ego. You know that you’ve got it figured out and the naysayers will get theirs soon enough, and then who’ll be laughing? Chillingly, she observed, “Fear lies at the heart of Christianity, not love.”

To remind us of how common end-of-the-world prophecies have been in history, I’ll wrap up with this much-mended “The End is nigh!” sign envisioned by Kyle Hepworth. The End has been predicted more often than you may know.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/26/15.)
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Televangelist windbags get away with too much. Let’s hold their feet to the fire. Today, let’s revisit John Hagee’s nonsensical Four Blood Moons hoax.

It was useful, of course—useful to Pastor Hagee in shearing the flock of their money and keeping them subservient to his “Oh dear, oh dear, the end is nigh!” message. While this was important to him, it wasn’t helpful to those of us who care about truth.

Hagee’s four scary lunar eclipses ran from April 2014 to October 2015. (Do you remember any world news during that period much more noteworthy than usual for an 18-month period? Me neither.) So weak was his story that not only was there no scientific evidence that anything dramatic should’ve been expected, the Bible itself couldn’t even support his claims.

Astronomical background

Because the plane that the moon orbits in is off by five degrees from the ecliptic (the plane defined by the orbit of the earth around the sun), an opportunity for either lunar or solar eclipses only happens twice a year. Lunar eclipses are quite common, with total lunar eclipses somewhat less so. Much less likely is a total eclipse and then six months later, another, and then another, and then another—four total lunar eclipses over 18 months. Since the year 1 CE, there have been 57 such “tetrads.”

Why are these eclipses interesting religiously?

Now consider the religious connection. The Jewish festivals of Passover and Sukkot begin on full moons, and they are also six months apart. A lunar eclipse tetrad can line up with them—four lunar eclipses on successive Passovers or Sukkots—and there have been eight such alignments since 1 CE, with the last concluding in 2015.

What’s the religious significance of this alignment? None. Joel 2:30–31 talks about the moon turning to blood, but there is nothing about four of them, so Christian Zionist opportunist John Hagee invented a connection. Since total eclipses usually look red, he calls a lunar eclipse tetrad that aligns with the Jewish festivals “four blood moons,” and he says they line up with significant events in Jewish history. He argues his theory by looking at the three alignments that preceded the most recent one (the dates below are of the first eclipse in the tetrad).

• 1967 was the Six-Day War
• 1949 was the establishment of Israel
• 1493 was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain

The sharp-eyed reader will notice that the Jews were actually expelled from Spain one year earlier. The date for the establishment of Israel is also off. Omnipotent God apparently isn’t so good at lining things up.

Apparently, Hagee’s hypothesis was that tetrads mean either good or bad things happening to the Jewish people, with the date a little fuzzy. Note also that not all significant events get a tetrad. The Holocaust during World War II is glaringly absent. God’s message then becomes, “Something good or bad will soon happen to the Jewish people, or has happened, and I might’ve missed a few.” I have far higher standards for Hagee’s god than Hagee does.

What about those tetrads that were omitted?

It gets worse when we consider the four ignored alignments, which began in the years 162, 795, 842, and 860. Hagee doesn’t bother wondering what God was saying with these, because they don’t support his flabby hypothesis. But if God wanted to point to important events for the Jewish people, obvious candidates would have included the three Jewish-Roman Wars. Hagee apparently doesn’t credit his flock with much knowledge, but even they will know the first omission.

• The First Jewish-Roman War (66 – 74 CE) included the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70, the deaths of 1.1 million Jews (according to Josephus), and the enslavement of the survivors.
• The Kitos War (115 – 117 CE) began with ethnic Judeans outside of Palestine rising up to slaughter Roman soldiers and noncombatants—reportedly half a million. The empire violently put down the revolt.
• The Bar Kokhba Revolt (132 – 136 CE) was, like the First War, conducted in Judea. One source called it a genocide and more significant in damaging Judaism in Judea than the First War.

(For further detail on Hagee’s ill-advised dabblings into prophecy, I’ve written more here. And about his movie. And about what actually makes a good prophecy.)

Piling on with more apocalypse fear

This recent tetrad provided an opportunity for opportunists like Hagee to pile on more stuff with vague, unsupported claims that it is meaningful to Christianity or Judaism says.

• The last year in a seven-year cycle in the Jewish calendar is a Shemitah year, and Hagee’s tetrad included such a year (which ended 9/13/15). Shemitah is a time to let the land go fallow and forgive debts with fellow Jews. Some said that this was meaningful, but Wikipedia says, “There is little notice of the observance of this year in Biblical history and it appears to have been much neglected.” And why imagine divine wrath when Shemitah is a time of forgiveness?
• This entire celestial farce was invisible in Israel, with the exception of the final lunar eclipse.
• Four days before the last of Hagee’s eclipses was the September 23, 2015 apocalypse. Oddly, that didn’t happen, either.

Perhaps the real calamity is the gullibility of Christians who give credence to charlatans like Hagee.

Let’s conclude by trying to figure out what’s actually supposed to happen in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/25/15.)

Image from krheesy, CC license
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Let’s wrap up Prophet Ray Comfort’s Top Ten list of surefire clues that “the end of the age is happening now,” as he puts it. We’ve explored the first half in part 1. Let’s finish up to see if Armageddon really is around the corner.

Ray’s Bible verse #6:

For [although] they hold a form of piety (true religion), they deny and reject and are strangers to the power of it [their conduct belies the genuineness of their profession]. (2 Timothy 3:5, Amplified Version)

Fortunately, we have Ray to translate: this means that religious hypocrisy will be prevalent. He illustrates this by interviewing people on the street who claim to be Christians but who attend R-rated movies and have premarital sex. This is hardly a statistically sound study showing that hypocrisy within Christians worldwide is markedly greater now than it was in the past, which would be necessary to show that conditions have gotten much worse. (I’m beginning to sense that scientific rigor isn’t one of Ray’s goals.)

In the last days scoffers will come. . . . But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. (2 Peter 3:3, 5–6)

So in the last days, people will deny that God created everything and flooded the world.

Ever the evolution denier, Ray scratches his head trying to figure out the logic behind panspermia. He interviews people who also don’t understand it to make his point. (No, I don’t see the relevance, either.)

Ray asks, “Do you think 70% of the earth being covered with water is a good clue that there was a worldwide flood?” Nope. The water likely came from comets, the earth may have been seeded with the components needed for abiogenesis from planets with different initial conditions than earth (that’s panspermia), and there is no evidence of a worldwide flood.

Next, Ray defends the plausibility of the Noah story. He says that the ark was enormous and that only representatives of biological families were taken on board, not species. (I’ve written about the many problems with taking the Noah story seriously here.)

Ray is right that people reject the ridiculous Flood story, and they’ve been doing so ever since science provided an alternative. I wonder, though, if gullible acceptance of Bible stories is more prevalent in recent decades with the success of fundamentalist Christianity. Ray’s concern on this point may be unfounded.

People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. (Luke 21:26)

In this long description of how the end will unfold, Jesus says six verses later, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”

Didn’t happen. Apologists have tried to reinterpret this to avoid the embarrassing fact that the Son of Man was wrong, but their attempts are themselves embarrassing. The real test is to imagine Jesus actually saying this and then asking how his followers would have interpreted it—obviously, that the end would come within a few decades.

Awkward.

… in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” (2 Peter 3:3–4)

Good question! Where is this imminent “coming” he promised 2000 years ago? Of course there are scoffers. Given the Bible’s poor track record, what else would you expect?

The rest of this chapter clumsily tries to rationalize away the problem. You see, God has a different sense of time than we do. And isn’t it handy that the end has been delayed since it allows more people to be saved? Still, you must be ready! It could come at any minute!

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:37–39)

Ray takes this as license to give his famous Ten Commandments test. He asks people if they’ve ever stolen something (even once), ever lied (even once), and so on. He concludes by declaring that, by their own admission, each person is a lying, thieving, blasphemous adulterer at heart. The next logical step, apparently, is to assume God’s existence and ask these sinners how God should treat them on Judgment Day.

Sorry, Ray. The Ten Commandments test assumes what you’re (ineptly) trying to prove. Your Top Ten list of Signs of the End is no better.

Religion is regarded 
by the common people as true, 
by the wise as false, 
and by the rulers as useful. 
— Seneca the Younger

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/15/14.)

Image credit: Modern Event Preparedness, flickr, CC