Just a Coincidence

I went to a worldview class today and we were learning a little about ways to "prove" the Bible. I thought you might like to hear some neat facts!

Let’s consider the odds of all the prophecies about the Messiah in the OT being fulfilled by someone who walked the earth since the beginning of time until this day. If it wasn’t divine intervention, then perhaps we can measure the odds of it happening by chance. Well, there are 109 direct prophecies the Messiah must fulfill according to OT Scripture. (There are over 300 if we included the indirect prophecies He fulfilled) The odds of anyone fulfilling just 20/109 are 1/12,000,000,000,000!

What about probability that one single individual since the beginning of time until now could fulfill just the eight following conditions?

1. Come from Bethlehem: 1 in 10,000 (rough estimate)
2. A messenger will prepare the way for him and then the Lord will come to His Temple: 1 in 1,000 (rough estimate)
3. Ride on a donkey into Jerusalem and be declared as a righteous king having salvation: 1 in 10,000 (rough estimate)
4. Betrayed for 30 pieces of silver: 1 in 1,000
5. Silver returned, thrown into the Temple and used for the Potters field: 1 in 100,000
6. No defense though innocent: 1 in 1,000
7. Crucified (predicted before it was invented): 1 in 10,000
8. Bones not broken: 1 in 100 (rough estimate)

That makes the possibilities 1 in 10 to the 28th power. You do the math! To be fair, this could have been fulfilled by anyone who has lived since the time of these prophecies which would include 8.8 billion people. Of course the Temple must be standing, so that could slice 2/3 of history off this exponential number, but let's not.

Therefore the odds of these eight prophecies happening by chance to one particular man within that time frame is found by dividing 10 to the 28th power by 10 to the 10th power, which gives us 10 to the 18th power.

How big a number is that? Let’s take a silver dollar. So let’s look at that huge number that is required in order to make eight of these prophesies come to pass in one man since the beginning of time up until today. Let’s pretend that you had 10 to 18th power silver dollars. Do you know how many that is? It is enough to fill an area two feet deep. How big is the area? We would need to take the whole state of Texas and cover it with silver dollars to a depth of two feet. This area is 268,581 square miles and remember that it is filled two feet deep with silver dollars. That is an unbelievable amount of silver dollars.

We aren’t done yet. The next step is to mark one of them, randomly place it somewhere in the state of Texas. Finally we would need to take a blind man or women, and let the blind person go anywhere in the state and pick up one coin. The likelihood of that person picking up that marked silver dollar on the first try is the same as the odds of just these eight prophecies coming true in one person without divine intervention. Impossible.

And if we wanted to only chose 8 of the 300+ predictions...

Scientists tell us that the range of total atoms in our entire universe are somewhere between 10 to the 66th power and 10 to the 80th power.

That means you would have much more of a chance to randomly picking one atom out of the whole universe than all of these prophecies coming to pass in one man without it being controlled by God. Amazing. Breath-taking. Awesome. What can describe it but God's miraculous intervention.

In the field of physics, it is assumed that any probability smaller than 1 chance in 10 to the 50th power being selected on the first try is manifestly absurd.

To say Jesus Christ fulling just eight of these prophecies is "coincidental" is absurd. Every one of them have come to pass in the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Praise be to God!

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
~ C. S. Lewis

For this I also used work from Dr. Chuck Missler, from his book, Cosmic Codes, Hidden Messages from the Edge of Eternity, chapter 16, titled “Measuring Confidence” (pp.217-230).