You are not understanding the nature of my objection. I am saying that the average city-dweller has no good reason to believe that a person screaming about prophecies of destruction is correct.
Now, the person screaming about prophecies of destruction might be correct, but even if he is, the average citizen has no good reason to believe that he is correct.
As an example, I actually did hear someone the other day yelling on the street that aliens are going to bring about the end of the world soon. Do you think that I have good reason to believe this person?
My stance is that I have no good reason to believe apocalyptic claims merely on the say-so of a guy. Again, maybe he’s right and maybe he’s wrong, but regardless, I still have no good reason to believe merely because he says so.
I’m familiar with the history.
Well, that’s one interpretation. Another interpretation is that the “prophecy” was written down after the fall of the city and that it was a “post-diction” rather than a prediction.
For example, I could write a story in which I claim that my friend predicted the fall of the Berlin wall before it happened. He didn’t, but I could write a story that puts the words in his mouth. Then, in 2,000 years, when my story is discovered by later civilizations – and no one is exactly sure which decade my story was written in – there might be some gullible saps who take my story as “evidence” that there are people with predictive powers.
And besides, even if some guy had said that a city will fall some day, that’s not exactly a stunning prophecy – all cities eventually fall. That’s as much a “prophecy” as me saying, “In the future, our country will go through a period of great prosperity, followed by a down-turn and hard times.”
Inevitable truths can’t be prophecies.
Well, all I can say is, anything can be argued to be post-diction rather than pre-diction : all that is required is a lapsing of time and generations, and then you have enough (lack of) evidence to warrant a doubt about the thing pre-dicting the event.
That being said, perhaps you should go fishing off the coast of Tyre, Lebanon some day, and ask anyone walking by (Muslim, Jew, Christian, atheist or otherwise) what those stones and stubble are off the coast. They will tell you that
is Tyre. You might then wonder how Tyre can be a heap of rubble in the sea while also a city on the mainland. They will reply that the city on the land was built after the absolute destruction of Tyre by King Alexander and his army, and that the two cities share a name only ; however, anyone not knowing this history or these facts might think that the Prophecy in Scripture claiming that Tyre would be absolutely destroyed and be cast into the sea was an unfulfilled fiction at best, seeing as Tyre can be found on any map, “still” there, and not destroyed and in the sea.
P.S - both Rome and Jerusalem have never utterly “fallen.” They have been continually inhabited for millenia. Now it is one thing to vaguely predict a city “will fall,” and another to say that it will happen in a dramatic fashion within a generation (biblically defined as 40 years), and to include a fact like no stone of the then modern-world’s largest super-structure and construction project (the Jerusalem Temple) would be so destroyed that not “one stone would be left upon another.” Furthermore, the final or second “destruction” of the Temple (remnants) occured in the time of Julian the Apostate, who was trying to rebuild the Temple - as far as we know simply to spite and discredit the Christians, whom he apparently hated and blamed for the poor condition of the empire. Upon attempting this, earthquakes wrecked and consumed the massive project and the miserable condition of the Temple was further reduced to nothing more than a heap of rubble, with only the outer walls of the structure remaining partially intact. So the Temple was i) destroyed, and the city ramsacked, and its inhabitants ruined, then ii) as if to confirm that it was not a post-diction of events, the remnants of that magnificent structure were later further reduced upon attempting to rebuild them to an even more desolate and miserable state. Now anyone can imagine that the events precidting “i)” were actually recorded after the event, and that all of the first century Christians were thus perjurers and liars, but no one can possibly claim that “ii)” occured before the Gospels were finalized without discarding every know fact and shred of historic evidence available. The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple was and does still remain the best documented example of prophecy becoming reality, especially requiring that in order to discredit it, one would have to believe the keepers of the prophecy (the Christians) were one and all perjurers and liars at first, although their modern descendants give no such resemblance of such a characteristic.
Pax,
Tim
I replied to your previous post in my last post!