From *The Skeptical Review*, 1999 / March-April. [This is the second of seven posts dealing with alleged biblical prophecies. The remaining five will immediately follow this one]:
by Farrell Till
I am always happy to be of help to those who have taken their first steps away from Christian fundamentalism but still have lingering doubts about whether they have made the right decision. In Mr. Weston's case, he has raised so many questions that I hardly know where to begin. Since most of his concerns seem related to biblical prophecies, I will focus primarily on this issue, but first I want to assure him that after one has left a religion that he/she was indoctrinated in while growing up, it is perfectly normal to wonder if the right decision was made. I had such doubts myself for a period of time, and others who left religious fundamentalism have told me that they did too. Just the night before I began writing this article, I received a call from someone who had subscribed to The Skeptical Review after deciding to leave a sect that taught demon possession. Former associates in this sect had been bombarding him with warnings that he had put himself in danger of falling prey to demons whom God would allow to possess him as punishment for having lost his faith. The caller had been bothered with "what-if" concerns and wanted to know if I could give him advice on how to deal with them.
Pascal's Wager: The members of this sect, of course, were using a variation of Pascal's wager to try to scare a former member into coming back to the mire that he had pulled himself out of. The term "Pascal's wager" has been applied to an argument that was made by Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, who argued that one should "bet" on the existence of God rather than its alternative, because "if you gain, you gain all," but "if you lose, you lose nothing." Arguing from this false dichotomy, Pascal advised that one should "wager, then, without hesitation that He is." Pascal's dichotomy was false, because the conclusion that he reached cannot be justified by dividing the problem into just two divisions, i. e., God exists or God does not exist. While it may be true that God either exists or he does not exist, the problem of "gaining" or "losing" in the sense that Pascal was talking about is far more complex than simply betting that "He is." If one is going to bet that God exists, which religion based on that division of the dichotomy is one going to bet on? Should one bet on Christianity or Islam? Hinduism or Zoroastrianism? If one chooses to bet on Islam but Christianity turns out to be the true religion of the "God-is" division, we all know what Christianity says awaits those who reject the "son of God." In this case, it would not be true that the one who had wagered without hesitation that "He is" had "gain[ed] all." He would have lost everything even though he had bet that "God is."
Let's suppose that there were some way to know that of all the religions based on the "God-is" premise, Christianity is the correct one. What brand of Christianity should one then bet on? Catholicism? Protestantism? If one bets on Catholicism, which kind of Catholicism should he pick? Roman? Eastern Orthodox? Coptic? If one bets on Protestantism or some other non-Catholic version of Christianity, which one should he/she wager on? Lutheran? Methodist? Presbyterian? Baptist? Mormon? There would be hundreds of choices to make, and as anyone who knows what the different churches--both Catholic and non-Catholic--teach, making the wrong choice could result in dire eternal consequences. In other words, these religions themselves teach that one could easily bet that "He is" and yet wind up losing everything. As far as religion is concerned, there is no safe bet based solely on the premise that a god exists, so those who are looking for the truth about the Bible should get out of their heads the notion that maybe they should just play it safe and "bet" on God. Those who do this are really betting on the Bible and therefore begging the question of whether the Bible is the "word" of this god who may exist.
Atheism: Before addressing his concerns about biblical prophecies, I should first comment on an either-or fallacy that Mr. Weston seems to be applying to the question of whether he should believe the Bible. Choosing not to believe the Bible does not require one to espouse atheism. When I could no longer believe that the Bible was the inspired, inerrant word of God (as I had been taught when I was growing up), I abandoned this former belief and left the ministry; however, I did not abandon my belief in "God" at this time. I remained a theist for several years, but as my biblical studies continued, my theistic belief weakened to the point that I realized I was actually an agnostic. It wasn't until many years later that I decided that atheism more accurately expressed my lack of belief in "God." I personally know many people who have no belief at all that the Bible is a divine revelation, but they do maintain a belief in theism. Mr. Weston should realize, then, that just because he has found good reasons to question his traditional view of the Bible, this doesn't require him to become an atheist.
Biblical Prophecies: In Mr. Weston's case, his "what if" concerns prophecies instead of demons or some other aspect of Christianity. He wonders if real prophecies in the Old Testament would not prove that Christianity is the "true" religion. Personally, I don't think they do for the simple reason that no "real" biblical prophecy fulfillment can be established with even halfway certitude. I have debated biblical prophecy with many inerrantists, and they all have tried to defend prophecy fulfillment by begging the question of biblical accuracy. In other words, they assume that because New Testament writer A said that event B fulfilled prophetic statement C, prophecy fulfillment has therefore been proven. Such a simplistic view of prophecy fulfillment leaves too many questions unanswered. Did the prophet who made statement C mean what New Testament writer A claimed was meant? Did event B really happen? Even superficial analyses of the Old Testament prophecies that New Testament writers claimed were fulfilled in their time will show that the so-called prophecies existed only in the imaginations of the ones claiming fulfillment. Luke, for example, has Peter claiming that Judas's fall from his apostolic office and his replacement by Matthias was prophesied: "Let his dwelling place be desolate, and let no one live in it, and let another take his office" (Acts 1:20). When the source of this alleged prophecy is examined, however, one will see that Peter actually put together two statements from widely separated Psalms: (1) "Let their dwelling place be desolate; let no one live in their tents [69:25]. (2) "Let his days be few, and let another take his office" [109:8]. An examination of these statements in their original contexts will show that they had no relationship to each other. In Psalm 69, the writer was talking about enemies and adversaries who were trying to destroy him, and so his statement in verse 25 was actually a prayer that God would punish them by making their dwelling places desolate and then letting no one live in their tents. Luke took all sorts of liberties with the text to twist it into a prophecy about Judas that he could put into Peter's mouth. The psalmist spoke in the third person plural about his enemies and asked that their dwelling places be made desolate, but Luke changed the pronoun to the third person singular (his) in a deceptive attempt to make it seem that the prophecy was speaking of just one person, i.e., Judas, who had abandoned his apostolic office by his betrayal of Jesus. Accordingly, Luke changed dwelling places (plural) to the singular (dwelling place) and the plural tents was replaced with the singular pronoun it to make it agree with the above mentioned switch from plural to singular in reference to the "dwelling place" that was abandoned. If one is allowed to take such liberties as these with a text, he can make it into a prophecy of just about anything.
In the second part of this alleged prophecy, the psalmist was talking about the civil judgment of a wicked man, who was representative of just any wicked person and not Judas specifically. The writer asked God to enact certain judgments on the wicked man who is "found guilty" (v:7). He asked God to "let his days be few and let another take his office" (v:8), but he also asked God to "let his children be fatherless and let his wife be a widow" (v:9), to "let his children continually be vagabonds and beg" (v:10), to "let the creditor seize all that he has, and let strangers plunder his labor" (v:11), etc., etc., etc. The list of vindictive requests for punishment that the psalmist made extends through 10 more verses, and anyone who reads them with an open mind should be able to see that most of them could not be stretched to apply to Judas.
A contextual analysis, then, will clearly show that Luke manufactured a prophecy in Acts 1:20 to try to make it appear that the Old Testament had foretold the fall of Judas and the selection of his successor. This was nothing peculiar to Luke, because other New Testament writers also strained to find prophecies of Judas in the Old Testament (Matt. 27:9; John 13:18), but when the Old Testament statements on which these fulfillment claims were based are examined in their contexts, it should be obvious that they made no allusions to the events that New Testament writers arbitrarily applied to them. As a matter of fact, many of these so-called prophecies were really matter-of-fact statements and weren't even intended to be prophecies of anything.
Besides the problem of obvious twisting and distorting to find prophecy where prophecy never was intended, those who claim biblical prophecy fulfillment have another impossible duty to perform. They must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the events really happened that New Testament writers alleged were prophecy fulfillments, and that will be no easy task for the apologist who tries to prove the divine origin of the Bible through claims of prophecy fulfillment. Herod's massacre alleged in Matthew 2:16-18 illustrates both problems. Matthew said that this event happened in fulfillment of Jeremiah 31:15, "A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more," but when this statement is examined in the context of Jeremiah 30-31, it is obvious that the prophet was speaking about the symbolic sorrow of Rachel over the deportation of her "children" to Babylon during the captivity. This "prophecy," then, was a prophecy only in Matthew's imagination as he desperately searched through the Old Testament for predictions of events in the life of Jesus, but an even greater problem for prophecy-fulfillment buffs is that they can't even prove with reasonable certitude that any such event as Herod's massacre ever happened. Of all the New Testament writers, Matthew is the only one who referred to it, and secular records of the time, some of which treat Herod's reign very unfavorably, make no mention at all of any atrocity like this that was committed under his orders. This silence of contemporary records and the similarities of Matthew's claim to the "dangerous-child" myths of ancient times about babies that were massacred to eliminate special children who were perceived as threats to kings make the historicity of Herod's massacre very doubtful. Certainly, it cannot be established with a certitude necessary to make a convincing case for Matthew's claim that this was a prophecy fulfillment.
Space is not available in this issue to address each of the "prophecies" about the return of the Jews to their homeland and the destruction of Tyre, both of which Mr. Weston was particularly concerned about, so I will reserve space in the next issue to discuss these with the thoroughness that is necessary to show that they were not the successful prophecies that he seems to think they were. In the space that I have left, I will comment on the apocalyptic language in some Old Testament prophecies that he thinks we may be seeing fulfilled in weapons of modern warfare.
Nuclear Weapons: Mr. Weston wonders if the language in Zechariah 14:12 could just be the way that a person living in that time would have described a vision of the neutron bomb. The verse says, "And this shall be the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the people who fought against Jerusalem. Their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet. Their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets, and their tongues shall dissolve in their mouths" (Zech. 14:12, emphasis added). Since the text clearly uses the word plague, I wonder why Mr. Weston thinks that it may be an ancient description of the effects of a neutron bomb. Why not leprosy or even bacterial warfare that would infect the enemies of Jerusalem with flesh eating bacteria? I'm no expert on neutron bombs, but isn't it true that this weapon would cause death from radiation? If so, wouldn't those exposed to it die long before their flesh would dissolve while they were still standing on their feet?
Such language as this wasn't at all uncommon in the Old Testament. In the curses that were pronounced upon the Israelites if they did not obey Yahweh's statutes after entering the promised land was the warning that Yahweh would send upon them a "wasting disease" that would "consume the eyes" (Lev. 26:16). In the warning that Moses gave to the Israelites before they entered into Canaan, he said that if they did not obey Yahweh's commandments, "Yahweh will make the plague cling to you until he has consumed you from the land which you are going to possess. Yahweh will strike you with consumption, with the fever, with inflammation, with severe burning fever, with the sword, with scorching, and with mildew; they shall pursue you until you perish" (Dt. 28:21-22). In other words, there was nothing unusual about this kind of rhetoric in biblical times, and in the cases just cited, these warnings about plagues that would "consume" the flesh and eyes were made in reference to the generation of Israelites about to enter the promised land. There is no reason to think that similar language in Zechariah was not also intended for contemporary times. This kind of language was just a scare tactic that prophets used to whip the people of their times into shape. It's tragic that people in enlightened times still take it seriously.
Biblical Locusts = Attack "Choppers"? Mr. Weston wonders if the locusts in Revelation 9:3-13, which came out of the smoke from a bottomless pit were prophecies of modern attack helicopters, but why not ask if they could have been fighter planes or cruise missiles? Why helicopters? Whatever the writer may have meant in his hallucinatory madness, his description isn't very accurate of attack helicopters. For one thing, these "locusts" were "commanded not to harm the grass of the earth or any green thing, or any tree, but only those men who have not the seal of God on their foreheads" (v:4). I've never seen a battle involving helicopters, but if war movies are anywhere close to accurate, I can't imagine how attack helicopters could engage in battle with such precision that only men and not trees, grass, and any green thing would be harmed. Furthermore, the shape of these "locusts" was "like horses prepared for battle" (v:7), but attack helicopters are hardly shaped like horses. Even if we stretch the word horses to mean tanks, it would still require imagination to see the shape of tanks in helicopters.
The problem with such interpretations as these of biblical prophetic language is that it is entirely speculative and arbitrary. Whereas one preacher looking for "end times" in contemporary events will see neutron bombs and attack helicopters in the apocalyptic language of biblical prophets, others will see space shuttles and submarines, while still others will see germ warfare and the rise of Saddam Hussein. As the new millennium approaches, the situation has gotten so ridiculous that no leader in the Near East can even sneeze without someone seeing prophecy fulfillment in it.
In the next issue, I will address some of Mr. Weston's other prophetic concerns.
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