Who is the One True God? A Look at Prophecy as a Verification Test

Introduction

The skeptical issue in our culture mostly enters into the religious dialogue in the following way: “In the case of God, who isn’t some physical object but a divine being, what kind of evidence should we expect to find? [1]   There is a tendency to forget that the Bible stresses that sin can dampen the cognitive faculties that God has given us to find Him. Therefore, sin has damaging consequences on the knowing process (Is. 6:9-10; Zech. 7:11-12; Matt. 13:10-13). Thus, people are dead, blinded, and bound to sin.

Christianity stresses that the God of the Bible is capable of giving a revelation to mankind through a specific medium. Revelation is a disclosure of something that has been hidden– an “uncovering,” or “unveiling.” Christianity, Judaism, Islam, are all theistic faiths in contrast to pantheism (all is God), polytheism (many gods), and atheism (without God).The study of world religions involves a commitment to understand the issue of divine revelation. Furthermore, most religions think that there is a God who took the initiative to reveal himself to an individual or a group of people who later recorded it in a group of writings or sacred texts.

Therefore, for a Divine Revelation to Take Place, Three Things Are Required:

1. A Being capable of giving a revelation: God

2. A being capable of receiving a revelation: Man

3. A medium that is used for the revelation [2]

 Christopher Hitchens’ Complaint to the  Revelation Model

There are some challenges to the revelatory model. First, pop atheism asserts that religious people just “have faith.” It is blind and can’t be held to any empirical testing.  Also, what about all those contradictory revelations? Is there a way to verify whether there is a true revelation? Or, is there one God who gives a clear revelation? Or is there a God, or “god” who gives conflicting and contradictory revelations? Furthermore, if religious people start with their Holy Book (The Bible, The Quran, The Book of Mormon), they are begging the question as to how they know their sacred text has it right? The late Christopher Hitchens said:

Since all these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory. It could also follow that only one of them is authentic, but in the first place this seems dubious and in the second place it appears to necessitate religious war in order to decide whose revelation is the true one. [3]

A Solution: Predictive Prophecy and God’s Omniscience

So is Hitchens correct? Is is just impossible to weigh the evidence for each so called revelatory claim and come to a conclusion? There are several ways to approach this issue. However, when it comes to the history of Israel, God would continually speak through prophets to correct the problem of His people turning away from him towards false gods/nature deities. There are texts that support the God of Israel from other nature deities: For example:

“I am the Lord; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols.  See, the former things have taken place, and new things I declare; before they spring into being I announce them to you.”-Isaiah 42:8-9

We see the following:

1. God will demonstrate his true omniscience by demonstrating he is the one talking.
2. He will do so by declaring in advance what the course of future history will hold.
3. This provides a verification test as to who the true God is and that such a writing is from him.[4]

God also challenged Israel’s ‘gods’ to do the same:

“Present your case,” says the Lord. “Set forth your arguments,” says Jacob’s King.  “Tell us, you idols, what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare to us the things to come,  tell us what the future holds, so we may know that you are gods. Do something, whether good or bad, so that we will be dismayed and filled with fear.  But you are less than nothing and your works are utterly worthless; whoever chooses you is detestable.”- Isaiah 41:21-24

In this passage we see that if these gods could declare the course of history before it took place, it would prove they are deities.

What are the requirements for a prophecy to come to pass?

Let’s look at a case of predictive prophecy. For a prophecy to be predictive it must meet the following criteria.

1. A biblical text clearly envisions the sort of event alleged to be the fulfillment.

2. The prophecy was made well in advance of the event that was predicted.

3. The prediction actually came true.

4. The event predicted could not have been staged but anyone but God.

5. Clear Prediction: Is the prophecy publicly available with a reliable text and evident interpretation?

6. Documented Outcome: Is the prophecy documented by publicly available facts?

7. Is there evidence for it in world history?

8. Proper Chronology: Is there empirical evidence that is available presently and publicly to document that indeed the prophecy does predate its fulfillment? [5]

It must be remembered that the strength of this evidence is greatly enhanced if the event is so unusual that the apparent fulfillment cannot plausibly explained as a good guess.

Sources

[1] James Beilby and David K. Clark, Why Bother With Truth: Arriving at Knowledge in a Skeptical Society (Norcross, GA: RZIM Publishers, 2000), 60.