Problems with prophecy from the Bible and Koran
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By Nicholas Covington
Article ID: 1318
Most world religions, especially the Abrahamic faiths, promote the idea that God has spoken to man in the past and present. If they are right, we should find strong evidence that future knowledge was handed down to man in the form of prophecy. God may also have spoken scientific facts to a prophet which the prophet could not possibly have known at the time.
As you might guess, Christians, Jews, and Muslims all believe that their holy books contain such knowledge. However, a careful examination reveals that not only is there no strong evidence of prophecy, but also that the Qu’ran and Torah both contain falsehoods concerning history and science!
Before we can consider a prophecy as genuine, there are four standards that must be met.
1. The prophecy must be specific.
This criterion rules out the vast majority of prophecies. Take those in the Biblical Book of Revelation, which is so vague that it has plenty of different interpretations. For example, the number “666″ is said to refer to the Roman Emperor Nero by the Roman Catholics, while Seventh-Day Adventists maintain that this number refers to the Pope! Also, in order to be precise, the prophecy should give or imply a date by which it is to be fulfilled. Otherwise, any group can make a prophecy such as “City X will be destroyed” and claim victory for their prophecy if City X is destroyed hundreds or thousands of years later. Alternately, a group could always claim that the prophecy will be fulfilled sometime in the future, and so such a claim would risk nothing.
An example of this is in the Bible’s Book of Ezekiel (chapter 26). It says that Tyre will be completely destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. This is a false prophecy, since Tyre was still standing centuries later when Alexander the Great came through and conquered it.
Well, that clears it up.
2. The prophecy must be made before the prophesied event
This is another criterion which rules out a very high percentage of alleged prophecies. To be certain that a prophecy was made before the predicted event, we must have documentation. And this documentation must be datable – by carbon-dating or some other trusted method – to a time well before the event happened.
3. The prophecy must be fulfilled and must not appear in the same book as a text containing false prophecies.
We must be able to verify that the prophecy came true. We also would not expect a God-given prophecy to predict anything other than what actually happened.
4. The prophecy must not be something which could plausibly be attributed to a guess.
Years before the Soviet Union collapsed, many people predicted the collapse itself. This makes sense, since the Soviet Union had been terribly unstable for years. While there is nothing miraculous about these predictions, any alleged prophecy must likewise be this specific.
Prophecy: The Bible predicts the birth of the nation of Israel
Throughout my reading and research, I have come across only a handful of prophecies which were claimed to fulfill all of these criteria. A Christian website claimed that the book of Ezekiel predicted the exact year when Israel would again become a nation[1]. Here’s the relevant passage:
“Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the house of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin. So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the house of Israel.
After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the house of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year.” (Ezekiel 4:4-6, NIV)
Some say this passage predicts there will be 430 years of judgment against the nation of Israel. We have claims that the Babylonian Captivity began in 606 BCE, and lasted for exactly seventy years. This would leave us with 360 years of remaining punishment. The site claims that God multiplied this remaining sentence by seven for Israel’s refusal to repent (see Leviticus 26:18). Arranging for the differences between the Jewish and non-Jewish calendars, the prediction is that the punishment would end in 1948. That’s the same year Israel was officially recognized as a nation.
Pretty interesting, right? Perhaps. But it’s completely wrong.
The Babylonian Captivity’s dating is skewed and in contention. Some say it actually lasted from 597 BCE to 538 BCE [1], which is only sixty years, not seventy. Wikipedia says from 586 BCE to 537 BCE: 49 years. Furthermore, why didn’t God wait until the current punishment was completely finished? Instead [according to our originally-referenced Christian source] God stopped midway through his punishment, looked at the nation of Israel and how unrepentant it was, and decided to jack up their punishment by multiplying it times seven. This indicates that whoever performed these calculations had to fool around with numbers a lot before coming up with the desired answer.
Prophecy: The Bible predicts the shape of the Earth
Many claim that Isaiah 40:22 predicts the Earth is round. This was written thousands of years before the human consensus agreed we actually live on a globe. However, what this passage says is that God “sitteth upon the circle of the earth” (KJV, emphasis mine). Notice the word used there: “circle”. A common Christian defense of this is that the Hebrews did not have a word for sphere, so they simply had to make use of the language available. However, Isaiah also uses a word which is translated as “ball”, so this is clearly not true [1]. This passage doesn’t say we live on a sphere. It says the Earth is flat.
Prophecy: Scientific knowledge from the Koran and Bible
We know that both the Qu’ran and the Bible contain information which we know to be wrong. For instance, here is how the Qu’ran describes the development of the human embryo:
“Verily We created man from a product of wet earth; Then placed him as a drop (of seed) in a safe lodging; Then fashioned We the drop a clot, then fashioned We the clot a little lump, then fashioned We the little lump bones, then clothed the bones with flesh, and then produced it as another creation. So blessed be Allah, the Best of creators!” (Surah 23:12-14)
Obviously this is wrong on many counts: Human beings do not develop from “wet earth”, embryos do not pass through a stage in which they are “blood clots”, and bones do not form before flesh.
Conclusion
In determining our criteria for a prophecy, we need to clarify: we’re not trying to arbitrarily exclude a particular prophecy because we don’t agree with it, or aren’t a part of its parent religion. We define our standards to separate prophecy from lucky guesses, chance, and overeager proponents.
More about the prophecies of the Qu’ran
[1] Miracles of the Qu’ran by Harun Yahya: Although Yahya’s work is filled with scientific and logical errors, I believe that you should check this out for yourself. Seeing this site will only make you realize how weak the claims of prophecy are for the Qu’ran.
Cosmology and the Koran by Richard Carrier: This is an excellent article debunking Muslim claims of the Qu’ran predicting recently discovered scientific facts.
More on Biblical Prophecies
Biblical Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment? by Tim Callahan
The “Prophecy” article list at Internet Infidels
A thorough debunking of the “Bible Code”
Another thorough debunking of the “Bible Code”
Other articles related to this topic:
- Pascal’s Wager: gambling with an immoral god
- Religious revelations are religious delusions
- Evolutionary science and creationism: A skeptical response to Duane Gish’s “Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics”
- Jesus’ miracles, religious myth and biblical contradictions
- Religulous review: Bill Maher’s brutal and intelligent take on religion
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