DaveM,
Reminds me of the Prof of Statistics several years ago who took eight prophecies relating to the life of Jesus. All were from OT writings where there is general agreement that they dated back at least 400 years before Christ. He then gave his senior class an exercise to calculate the probability of all eight being fulfilled in one person. They came up with a figure of 1:1017. So perhaps another seven prophecies from you would be in order.
The results were published in a respected journal. So clearly his methodology was considered acceptable.
There were of course over 30 prophecies fulfilled in the last week of Christ's life alone.
But I forget. Floo has it on the highest authority that the Gospels were specially invented and written to ensure that all prophecies were retrospectively accounted for. How fortunate that not one was missing.
A “Prof of statistics” eh? “Published in a "respected journal” you say?
Well, it should be easy enough for you find a citation or two then I’d have thought. See, there’s a funny thing about stories like this beloved of religious websites and the like –
they very often aren’t true.I know! Shocking eh?
So if you could just, you know, reference this respected journal that’d help a lot.
Thanks.
Oh, and in the meantime being a professor of statistics and all presumably he’d have been aware of the pitfalls inherent in this kind of thing. What methods did he employ do you think to address the usual ones?
For example:
Authenticity: how did he eliminate the possibility of additions, alterations etc
after the prophesied events had actually occurred?
Specificity: it’d be awful wouldn’t it if, say, the prophecy had said something like “a charismatic preacher shall arise” and someone had just retro-fitted the one that suited – say, ooh I dunno, Jesus mabe – and claimed that it had been fulfilled when any other charismatics would have done just as well.
Inevitability: “A great empire shall fall” for example sounds pretty impressive when one does in fact fall, but the problem is that empires (and lots of other things) inevitably come and go all the time.
Silent evidence: if I e-mailed you to tell you whether the FTSE would end the week either up or down and got it right, and then did the same thing a dozen times in a row I’d be a financial genius right? Actually no, if I’d also e-mailed thousands of others and got it wrong your results would just be dumb luck – only persuasive to you if your ignored all the misses.
What other predictions in this remarkable tome were wrong would you say, just to eliminate the dumb luck problem you understand?
Probability weighting: how in any case would you propose to assign a probability weighting to each of these future events? What if the book said there’s be a son of god only his name would be Fred, would that still count? How about Mohammed? Or Josus? Or what if it said there’d be a feeding miracle, only instead of loaves and fish it would involve tapenade and cheesy wotsits? Still a probability of one would you say?
No doubt all will be made clear when we read the article you’re going to cite though won’t it.
Won’t it?
