Each fulfilled prophecy consists of two parts: the prophecy and the event that is said to fulfill the prophecy. What criteria should be used to evaluate the evidential value of any claim of fulfilled prophecy? How does one determine if a particular prophecy, and therefore a particular prophet, is supernaturally inspired? These criteria must be established and agreed upon before any meaningful debate about the validity of particular incidences of fulfilled prophesy can be started.
I am posting this in the Definitions and Explanations section, so that it can be referred to in the forthcoming debates about the validity of specific prophecies. If any debater has an objection, correction or suggested amendment to this list, either post a response to this posting or open a new debate topic. I will update the list of criteria as required.
So, here is my list of criteria to be used to evaluate any alleged prophetic fulfillment.
- The prophecy must be clear and unambiguous. We are looking for specific predictions. The prophecy cannot allow limitless room for interpretation. A prophecy that can be applied to a host of things with equal explanatory scope is useless. "There will be a war and people will die" can not be authenticated as an accurate futuristic prediction. A more specific example would be, "In the reign of Aliquam, Maecenopolis will war with Phasellus and the walls of Maecenopolis will be breached." The interpretation of the prophecy must be evident. The failure of a prophecy must be recognizable without any ambiguity. Different persons with different interpretations, and even vastly different expectations originating from diverse world views, should all reach virtually the same conclusion.
- The event must be a complete fulfillment of the prediction. That is, the prophecy must accurately predict the event. And the event must fulfill each component of the prophecy. If I say that the god Sodales revealed to me that next week Tom Cruise will purchase a red Ferrari and next week Mr. Cruise actually buys a red Porsche, my prophesy has failed the test.
- The event must be shown to have actually happened. The event must be independently confirmed to have happened. Ideally, there should be historical or archeological evidence that the event really occurred. The outcome of the prophecy must be evident by the present time, with that outcome well documented by publicly available facts. For instance, reliable and independent historical records, stones and relics found at archaeological sites and museums and evident facts of world history all count as publicly available facts. But unverifiable reports do not count, especially reports of miraculous events that are exceedingly improbable from an objective perspective. Lack of evidence that the event has happened does not necessarity disprove the fulfilled prophesy. The event may still have happened. But without reliable evidence of the event happening, the filfulled prophesy has lost any apologetic value.
- The prophecy must have happened before the event. The prophetic statement must be proved to precede the fulfillment event in time. Definite empirical evidence must be publicly available to document that the prophecy predates its fulfillment. For the Jewish prophetical books, this criterion is satisfied by all outcomes dated after 150 BC, the average date of copies of Bible books among the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is also about the time the independently-circulated Greek translation, the Septuagint, was completed in Alexandria, Egypt. Otherwise, knowledge of the outcomes could have influenced the selection process, canonizing those books with fulfilled prophecies while discarding other books with embarrassing ones, thereby producing a spurious prophetic accuracy using the unfair advantage of hindsight.
- The event must not have been artificially created by a person who knew of the prophecy, with the intent of fulfilling it. Thus, self prophecy about trivial things is not valid. "I will drink decaffeinated coffee tomorrow at 2:22 PM Eastern Daylight Time" is not a futuristic prophecy. That is merely a person listing their itinerary. Self-prophecy may be valid but only about nontrivial things that one can't easily bring about. The predicted event must be something that the author could not have known in advance otherwise his statements cannot be accepted as supernatural prophecy.
- The prophecy must not have been a logical guess. For example, a person in mid-1939 who prophesized that a European war would break out before 1950 would simply have been describing the inevitable outcome of pre-existing Nazi expansion plans and activities. Hundreds of millions of people at that time expected a European war. A geologist might predict a serious earthquake rated at over six on the Richter scale somewhere in the world during the current year. But these events are so likely to occur each year that the prophecy would be a sure thing. Similarly an ancient prophet might notice the Assyrian army approaching Israel from the East, conquering country after country in its path. He might quite logically guess that Israel was next. The fulfillment event must be very difficult to be confidently predicted through non-supernatural means. If I said, "Behold, the God Raktar says the sun will rise again tomorrow at 6. A.M." and it rises I did not supernaturally predict the future. It is common knowledge that the sun appears to rise every day. Predictions must be sufficiently specific and unusual to make their fulfillments unlikely merely by chance. For instance, a generic curse that a city will be destroyed has little evidential weight because most ancient Near-Eastern cities have been destroyed many times.
- We have to treat the passages individually. A prophecy in one work does not authenticate any other prophecies or statements in other works. For example, Isaiah and Mark were written by different authors during different time periods. If Isaiah has accurate prophecies it does not mean Mark is the word of God. A single prophecy in the bible or even a few in various books does not establish the authority of the entire bible itself.
Raymond Brown in Introduction to the New Testament wrote:There is unity to the collection; yet one should be cautious of statements claiming "The Bible says . . ." even as one would not state, "The Public Library says . . ." when one means to quote from Jane Austen or Shakespeare. The better phrasing names a specific book or author: "Isaiah says" or "Mark says," thereby recognizing that individuals from different periods of time with different ideas wrote the individual books of the Bible. Although the books take on added meaning because they are part of the whole Bible, their individuality cannot be overlooked."
All too often apologists forget this and decide to use fulfilled prophecy to bolster the entire Bible. But one book has no bearing on another unless you already accept canonization and if you accept canonization then you are not the one who needs biblical predictive prophecy as evidence of the bible’s authority. - All of the prophet's predictions, not just a few of them, must be shown not to be untrue. If infallible inspiration from a supernatural being is the source of this wisdom, why should there be any exceptions to the ability to foretell the future? There is little value to a prophet who makes thousands of prophesies with only a handful accurate. On the other hand, we cannot rule out that perhaps some prophecies are yet to be fulfilled.
