Quote Originally Posted by Faithful View Post
I don't want to name any single particular work, but many books of haven written on the probability a person could have fulfilled them all.
A scientific claim is, by definition, a claim that others do not have to simply take your word for because it can be tested. Since you don't seem to be able to support your claim that "All other religions besides Christianity are damned because they reject the Jesus of the Bible who is God and proved it by fulfilling so many prophecies from hundreds of years prior that taken together are humanly impossible. . ." with anything other than so say that books have been written on the subject, I think it's fair to assert that this claim is not scientific at all until such time as you show how these probabilities were calculated and what variables were taken into account.

Admittedly, this is a rigorous task. . .but then science is a rigorous process.

I am not sure what you are asking about controls. Perhaps give an example.
No problem. In a scientific experiment control groups are used to ensure that the variable you are testing for is actually what you are measuring. For example, if I want to do an experiment to see if a certain fertilizer increases plant growth I would grow plants both with fertilizer (experimental group) and without the fertilizer (control group) but keep everything else the same. The goal in using control groups is to ensure that there are as few variables as possible. I'm wondering how studies on the probability of fulfilled prophecies control for the variable of authors embellishing stories to make them fit OT verses. Thanks.

Moving on to the next claim in the OP,

. . .and He resurrected Himself which skeptics don’t know how to explain away given the data. . .
What is the scientific basis of this claim? There are certainly other reasons why people choose to die for ideas other than those ideas being valid, and the gospels have not been established as eye-witness testimony in anything other than church tradition which, if I'm not mistaken, doesn't exactly follow the scientific method. Nor are "group hallucinations" the only alternative here: the gospels seem to have been written decades after the events they record during a period in history during which the flow of information was arduously slow. We've observed other cults/beliefs spring up around highly embellished stories of events within this time frame such as, for example, Islam or Mormonism or even the cargo cults of the South Pacific. How can we test this hypothesis while taking into account these possible variables?





Lurker