God exists

Failure In PrinciplePro has so far ignored my major point regarding the use of prophecy in principle to affirm God’s existence. At best we would be left with an unexplained event. Thus I can concede every single one of Pro’s prophetic “facts” so far in this debate, and it would not being Pro any closer to affirming the resolution.Even if we assume that there really were genuine prophecies in the Book of Daniel, we can still yield more likely explanations for them than God, since God carries so many assumptions: 1. Lucky guess 2. Self-selection bias I am advocating for the stronger postdiction explanation, but even if this fails then these 2 hypothesis would still be more likely. Since attempted prophecies were very common at the time and it’s inevitable that eventually one of these would be precise by sheer chance. Furthermore we have excellent reason to see the successful prophecies biased in the transmission of history over unsuccessful ones, since the successful prophecies are indeed going to be more interesting. This self-selection bias leads to a greater proportion of “successful” prophecies in our textual transmission over “unsuccessful” ones.Again, both of these explanations are well-within our background knowledge and understanding of the world, which gives it a tremendous advantage over God, which by definition is beyond our understanding of the world, in terms of a priori plausibility.We can most certainly agree that the majority of “divine prophecies” made are false, either due to post-diction (prediction after the fact), sheer luck, etc. I only need to cite the prophets of other religions that are mutually exclusive with Christianity to affirm that much. Thus we can easily attach a very low prior probability of any given prophecy (before one looks at the evidence) is indeed a true divinely inspired prophecy. Daniel 11:36 Onward Will address this fully next round. The Book of Daniel makes “predictions” for events that are frequent and periodic thoroughly the 400 years up until Daniel 11:36, Pro and I are both in agreement on this much, although we disagree on whether or not they are predictions. That being case, if we really assume these were predictions, then we have good reason to believe that the events that follow Daniel 11:40-45would have occurred periodically and consistently after the events under Antiochus Epiphanes. There is no evidence whatsoever of a periodic gap and the remainder of the text is written prophetically. Thus we can assume the remainder of the text really was a prediction, and we have good reason to believe it would have occurred not too far after the events in 11:36 prior. However absolutely no events that are consistent with it have been found.Thus from an objective approach to the text, it is clear it has failed predictions that we would expect it is making. The simple explanation for this is that these were genuine prophecies by the author(s) of Daniel following postdictions in the prior text. It’s not a case of sceptics having it both ways but using those facts to come up with a likely timeframe for the composition of the text.Dating of Book of DanielOverviewPro’s entire care hinges upon an early dating of the Book of Daniel’s composition. Quite frankly, I am unimpressed by the evidence that Pro has presented.Remember, we are trying to establish that a genuine and accurate prophecy has occurred, something that essentially doesn’t happen, ever today (just take a look at all the failed doomsday prophecies). If we assume the uniformity of nature principle generally held in the past, then we would expect such revelations to be rare/non-existent in the past as well. Thus, they carry a high standard of evidence to fulfil since there is a very low prior probability of a genuine prophecy.ALL of Pro’s arguments are based on conjectural reasoning (which I will get to later), and none is based on any hard evidence.We do not have: 1. Early Contemporaries reporting about the Book 2. Earlier Manuscripts of Daniel dating Either of these would have made for very powerful evidence in favour of real prophecies having been made. And to be quite frank, if God really did exist, he would have made access to either of these unambiguously available. This is quite simply not the case, Pro is left relying on dubious and weak conjecture to try to make the evidence fit. My position is that the evidence for any specific date is nowhere near as strong and any would prefer it to be outside of the evidence from then predictions made, which would themselves be strong evidence of a later composition.Pro’s Positive CasePro hardly cites anything to support any of his positive evidences for an early composition. Again I reiterate that I could easily accept all of Pro’s evidences as indeed evidence of an early composition, but they would be pretty crap evidence of an early date, and nowhere near sufficient to overturn the fact that prophecies are extremely rare even if they did happen. Thus is quite plainly insufficient to overturn the low prior probability of it having an early composition.“Daniel is written with only 15 Persian words and 3 Greek words. If the book were written at a later date ... one would expect far more Greek words to be used."Why should we expect that?Has Pro got studies on comparable texts with the average Persian/greek word ratios? Can Pro make an accurate estimation of how many of these words we generally expect to be included in the book of Daniel, especially when considering it was in Arameic and Hebrew?This is quite frankly, not an argument, made with no evidence to support the presupposition. Even if it was the case that we would generally expect more of these words in the Book of Daniel, that in no way demonstrates it was composed during the 6th century as Pro requires. The evidence quite frankly is flimsy at best. Even if Pro does present evidence here, it almost certainly won’t allow him to fulfil the standard of evidence for us to believe it really was a prophecy over some other explanation.Furthermore, we perhaps wouldn’t expect any Greek words at all in the script since Greeks did not occupy the area until after Alexander the Great (4th Century BC).JosephusJosephus existed in the 1st/2nd century AD, 3-400 years after the canon was closed. This isn’t evidence of anything.EzekielIF Exekiel mentioned the Book of Daniel, Pro might actually have a good case here, since it would be evidence that this book was composed at that time. However it’s a mention of a person named Daniel. Thus, it simply is not evidence of an early composition, it just mentioned a person named Daniel. Even if there was a real historical figure named Daniel, and both the Book of Daniel and Ezekiel refer to the same one (a fact that Pro is light years away from demonstrating with any confidence whatsoever), it doesn’t follow that the Book of Daniel which contains the prophecies was composed at the time this “Daniel” is purported to live. It’s simply a non-sequitir.