Reply To: Why do you believe in Science?

I apologize for not getting back to posts quicker. As much as I enjoy debating on the internet, it literally costs me hundreds if not thousands of dollars in lost work hours. I am also going to try to keep my posts shorter (if I can help myself).

For Real,

1) Logically I don’t need to account for all of them. If there were an infinite number of prophecies you would be correct, but there is a quite finite number and many, if not most, of them have already occurred. You and Lakewood001 keep on saying that these prophecies are vague. The question however is not vagueness in general (most statements have some degree of vagueness) but vagueness as to the issue at hand. A word might be vague but still significantly narrow the universe of possibilities as to its meaning. I pointed to a prophecy that set forth certain outcomes that would not be easily predictable, and in fact would be counter-intuitive to humans, even at the edge of their vagueness. There might be avenues of argument that might rebut this evidence (or severly weaken it), but just claiming “vagueness” without explaining how that vagueness effects the probability of the evidence in this case is not one of them.

2) I don’t know what you mean by “as you seem to agree yourself.” The para aduma argument is just another piece of evidence that increases the likelihood that the Torah was not written by men. That increase might not be very large, but I only need a preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt.

3) I don’t think you are understanding my argument. (My knowledge on those 3 religions is very limited so I cannot speak with that much authority on them. Whatever truth claims they have would have to be examined on a case by case basis. I don’t see however how the existence of these religions impacts my argument.) If the Torah was written by men (as biblical critics claim) there was a time when everyone (i.e. the Jewish people) knew that it was written by many men over multiple generations. That they then forgot, or were fooled into thinking that the entire Torah was written down by one man as commanded by G-d (including large segments of which are the actual word of G-d and including a segment of which was actually written down by G-d and spoken aloud to everyone) is unlikely. I don’t know of any analogue to this situation in other religions.