Ezekiel's Failures

by Farrell Till

(excerpted from Prophecies: Imaginary and Unfulfilled)

Possibly the most pessimistic of the Old Testament prophets, Ezekiel proclaimed impending doom upon everyone from Judah itself to the enemy nations surrounding it. The failure of his prophecies to materialize as he predicted makes a compelling argument against the Bible inerrancy doctrine. In one of his doom's-day prophecies, Egypt was to experience forty years of utter desolation:

Therefore, thus says Yahweh God: "Surely I will bring a sword upon you and cut off from you man and beast. And the land of Egypt shall become desolate and waste; then they will know that I am Yahweh, because he said, `The River is mine, and I have made it.' Indeed, therefore, I am against you and against your rivers, and I will make the land of Egypt utterly waste and desolate, from Migdol to Syene, as far as the border of Ethiopia. Neither foot of man shall pass through it nor foot of beast pass through it, and it shall be uninhabited forty years. I will make the land of Egypt desolate in the midst of the countries that are desolate; and among the cities that are laid waste, her cities shall be desolate forty years; and I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations and disperse them through the countries" (29:8-14).

Talk about extravagant rhetoric, we certainly have it in this passage. No such desolation has ever happened to Egypt; there never has been a time in recorded history when Egypt was not inhabited by man or beast for forty years, when its cities were laid waste and desolate, when its people were all dispersed to foreign lands, etc. Bible defenders, of course, resort quickly to figurative and future applications, but their strategy just won't work. Future fulfillments are excluded by patently clear references that Ezekiel made to contemporary characters who were to figure in the fulfillment: "Son of man, set your face against Pharaoh king of Egypt, and prophesy against him" (29:2). Although Egypt still survives as a nation, its rule by pharaohs ended long ago. Furthermore, Ezekiel identified Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, as the instrument Yahweh would use to bring about Egypt's desolation: "Therefore thus says Yahweh God: `Surely I will give the land of Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; he shall take away her wealth, carry off her spoil, and remove her pillage, and that will be the wages for his army'" (29:19). Clearly, then, Ezekiel had in mind a contemporary fulfillment of this prediction. As for spiritual or figurative explanations of the prophecy, just what events in Egyptian history were so catastrophic in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and the pharaohs that they could justifiably be considered a figurative desolation of forty years? Unless bibliolaters can identify such a catastrophe, their figurative interpretations must be regarded as just more attempts to sweep aside another embarrassing prophecy failure.

The Impossible Voyage Of Noah's Ark

Farrell Till presents some interesting information concerning Noah's ark and the Genesis flood---from creationists. From the Errancy Discussion List, 1-5-97:

One of the best works I have read on Noah's ark is Robert Moore's 

"The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark," which was published in the

Winter 1983 edition of *Creation/Evolution.* I highly recommend 

it. So far, we have discussed only the 300-foot limit in our 

exchanges, but Moore discusses at length many problems that 

the ark would have encountered. While you are trying to find 

reputable naval architects who will confirm that the 300-foot 

limit would not have been a barrier to building a seaworthy 

barge 450 feet long, I want to present some of the other 

problems to you. You have insisted that the ark floated "gently" 

on the water, whereas the science of meteorology would require 

a scenario that would make hurricanes seem like mere soft 

breezes.

In "Impossible Voyage..." Moore presented the scenarios that even
creationists themselves have stated as the type of forces that the 
ark would have had to endure. In *The Creation Explantion,* 
Robert E. Kofahl and Kelly L. Segraves said this about the flood: 
"The Flood was accompanied by violent movements of the earth's 
crust and by volcanic activity of momentous proportions. 
Tremendous tidal waves and rushing currents scoured and deeply 
eroded the continental surface. Entire forests were ripped up and 
transported large distances to be dumped where the currents 
slowed" (p. 226).
  
John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris certainly need no 
introduction to creationists. In "The Genesis Flood,* they 
presented the following scenario: "Even after the forty days, 
when the greatest of the rains and upheavals diminished, 
the Scriptures say that the waters 'prevailed' upon the earth 
for one hundred and ten days longer. This statement... would 
certainly imply that extensive hydraulic and sedimentary 
activity continued for a long time, with many earlier flood 
deposits perhaps re-eroded and reworked.... The only way in 
which land could now appear again would be for a tremendous 
orogeny to take place. Mountains must arise and new basins 
must form to receive the breat overburden of water imposed 
upon the earth" (pp. 266-267).
  
Would such forces at work on the earth's crust have caused 
turbulance? Whitcomb and Morris certainly thought so: "Yielding 
of the crust at even one point, with resultant escape of magmas 
and water or steam, would then lead to earth movements causing 
further fractures until, as the Scriptures portray so graphically, 
'the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up' 
(Genesis 7:11). Truly this was a gigantic catastrophe, beside 
which the explosion of the largest hydrogen bomb, or of hundreds 
of such bombs, becomes insignificant" (pp. 242-243).
  
The creationist J. E. Schmich presented this scenario: "The 
worldwide ocean of the Genesis flood was swept by wind storms 
that would make modern tornadoes seem lik a zephyr" ("The 
Flood and the Ark," *Creation Research Society Quarterly,* 
11:2, pp. 120-122).
  
These are not the claims of despicable atheists. These are 
statements that have been published by men who are recognized 
as the foremost spokesmen for the scientific accuracy of the 
Genesis flood record. Some of us on the errancy list tried to get 
you to investigate the meteorological implications of a flood like 
the one described in Genesis, but you ignored our statements. 
Now I have presented to you statements from leading creationists, 
who agree with our claim that meteorological conditions in Noah's 
flood would have subjected the ark to unimaginable forces and
stresses. If anything, their scenarios are far more extreme than 
anything skeptics have proposed, because, of course, they are 
trying to present scenarios that would have the flood as an 
explanation for the geological record. If you want the discussion 
to continue, I am going to insist that you address this issue and 
present evidence that the leading arkeologists are wrong in the 
scenarios they presented and that the ark merely floated
"gently" on the water.

Farrell Till

Empiricism

From the II Errancy Discussion List, 1-1-07:

This is like the ivory-billed woodpecker example that I gave in an earlier reply to McDonald. If I were claiming that the ivory-billed woodpecker is extinct and McDonald knew that specimens of this species had been discovered in Arkansas, he wouldn't hesitate to counter my claim by producing an ivory-billed woodpecker or at least pictures of the discovery. The easiest way to prove the existence of gods or angels or miracles, then, would be to produce one.

You just can't beat empiricism for reliability. It beats all to heck holy books, visions, and such like.
-Farrell Till

When You Lack Evidence...

Just common sense, really. Something biblical inerrantists are woefully lacking in: 

When you lack evidence, the only way to decide whether or not to believe something is to ask: Is it likely? If you tell me a bird flew past my window, I will probably believe you, even though I did not see it myself and I have no evidence. That is because such a thing is likely. I have seen it happen before. It is more likely that a bird flew past my window, than that you are deceiving me. But if you tell me a pig flew past my window, I will not believe you, because my past experience tells me that such things do not happen, and so I presume that what you reported is false. Thus, where there is no evidence we have to rely on our own past experience of the sort of things that really happen ( Carl Lofmark from What Is The Bible, pp. 41-42).

More Trouble For The Perfect-Harmony Theory

An absolutely devastating article for the perfect-harmony Bible theorists. From The Skeptical Review, 1995:

by Farrell Till

The Bible is so perfectly harmonious from cover to cover that only divine inspiration can explain its unity. You don't believe it? Well, just ask any Bible fundamentalist, and he will assure you that it's true. 

Critical works of the past two centuries have shot the perfect-harmony theory so full of holes that by now it should be lying rusted out at the bottom of an ocean of biblical scholarship. Instead, Christian fundamentalists continue to proclaim to gullible pulpit audiences that there are no contradictions or inconsistencies in the Bible. As we have shown repeatedly in past issues of The Skeptical Review, this claim is patently false. Let's take as an example the fact that the Bible plainly teaches that God is no respecter of persons: "(F)or there is no respect of persons with God" (Romans 2:11, KJV). Acts 10:34, Ephesians 6:9, Colossians 3:25, and 1 Peter 1:17 all claim that God judges all men fairly without respect of person. In boasting of having stood his ground against the pillars of the Jerusalem church who wanted to force Titus to submit to circumcision, the apostle Paul said that the positions of prominence held by his opponents in the dispute didn't matter to him, because "God shows personal favoritism to no man..." (Gal. 2:6, NKJV). There is no doubt, then, that the Bible teaches that God is impartial toward all men. 

Well, okay, let's see how consistent the Bible is in presenting God as an impartial deity. We could begin by pointing out that God at one time favored an entire nation, because he selected the Israelites to be his chosen people "above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth" (Dt. 7:6). That certainly sounds like favoritism to me. If a teacher should select Bobby to be her chosen student above all students that are in the class and even proclaim to the world that she had done so, who would argue that she was not showing favoritism? 

Inerrantists are fond of arguing that God had a plan of redemption for mankind that required him to select a special people. Bible fundamentalists constantly use this marvelous "plan of redemption" to cover a multitude of divine shortcomings, and they apparently can't see that an omniscient, omnipotent deity would not have been required to select a plan of redemption that necessitated racial favoritism, because such a deity could have redeemed mankind in any one of several ways that would not have entailed racial favoritism and the various atrocities committed against the non-Hebraic people of biblical times. To argue otherwise is to argue that God is not omniscient and omnipotent. At any rate, this is the quibble that inerrancy defenders resort to in this matter, so I'll just let the readers evaluate the merits of it so that we can go on to other examples of divine favoritism that will give the inerrantists plenty more to cavil about.