From: Chris Cogan <ccogan@telepath.com>
>Chris
>Paul does such as good a job on this one as I would have, and probably in
>less space, that I won't repeat what he says. One of main arguments was
>going to be to the effect that the accounts of Jesus, having been written
>by people who knew of the earlier predictions, would simply write their
>character to fit the predictions. I could easily do the same; gather up
>some old prophecies, create a name for my character (assuming the
>prophecies did not include the names), and then simply design his "career"
>to match the prophecies. In fact, *other* writers of fiction (than those
>who created and cobbled together the gospel stories) use this technique
>more or less frequently (but usually more honestly).
There are two other possibilities:
1. Jesus was aware of the prophecies and matched his actions to the
prophecies.
2. Out of many claimed messiahs, Jesus was the one widely accepted because
the events of his life happened to roughly fit the prophecies.
In the case of the Daniel prophecy, however, it just sounds like post-hoc
reinterpretation of the prophecy to fit the alleged facts.
Richard Wein (Tich)
--------------------------------
"Do the calculation. Take the numbers seriously. See if the underlying
probabilities really are small enough to yield design."
-- W. A. Dembski, who has never presented any calculation to back up his
claim to have detected Intelligent Design in life.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 01 2000 - 04:54:56 EST