Yes. In particular, your own certain claim of skepticism creates a paradoxical dilemna; because of your finiteness you can never be totally certain that you have enough of all possible knowledge to justify your skepticism.
Fact is that we have a text describing a prophecy which it claims is later fulfilled. Well, that could be true but there are also other possibilities: the prophecy was never made and only after an important event happened it was claimed that it has been prophecied some time ago or the prophecy was vague so it could be made to fit a wide range of occurrences; there are of course self fulfilling prophecies and sometimes it is also very hard to tell whether it happend by chance that a prophecy was fulfilled or by divine intervention.
As long as I cannot rule out these other possibilities beyond a reasonable doubt I simply cannot accept them as true even if I really want them to be true. (This article addresses this point in more detail than I could have done here)
Yes, I can at least agree with you here that these are all possibilities that must be considered when examining claims of prophecies.
I thought of posting the infidels.org article, which IMO contains numerous inaccuracies, but on the other hand, I'm afraid if I posted it, it would generate another 600 responses:^)
Cordially,
Well, this still doesn't make sense to me. Maybe somebody could elucidate me on what your point really is.
I thought of posting the infidels.org article, which IMO contains numerous inaccuracies...
I don't claim that that article is absolutely accurate and neither does the author. However, this is not the only article that addresses this topic, there are many more. Most of them show that these so called prophecies could also have other explanations. So there is no reason to assume that everything happened exactly as it is described in the bible. Especially if we consider the fact that the further we go back in time, myths and legends become more and more common.
So it is only natural to assume that many (but not all) details in bible were invented and did not really happen. Even if there are some details of which we have evidence of, like the names of ancient cities, tribes or places of important battles, doesn't mean that the rest is also true.
Of course, if you say that the bible is true because the bible says so, you don't have these problems any more but in my opinion this isn't a valid argument.