Quote Originally Posted by John T View Post
What I am doing is to establish a prior philosophical and logical basis for the discussion of prophecy. One of the strenghts of the apologetics os Walter Martin was his insistence on defining the terms of the argument. That way the cultist, (most notably the Mormons) could not change the definition of a unicorn into that of a Pegasus; the difference being that the former has the body of a horse, and a spiral horn protruding from its forehead, and the latter also has the body of a horse, but lacks the horn, and can fly with the wings attached to irs spinal column.

It is rather a simple process to determine probability, and I will get to that later. I want to go about this methodically so you can see that this is logical, mathematically accurate, and that I am not making any ewrrors of logic. (spelling is another matter! )
I have to stop you here. Are you asking me to help you build a scientific model so that we can test it, ****yze the data, and make predictions? If so, I’ve already made it clear that I don’t have the qualifications for this type of thing. I’m not a statistician. This would not be a fruitful discussion for either of us. So, I’m going to respectfully bow out of any further discussion on the topic of prophecy.

I do want to address the Einstein and Hawking quotes, though.

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." Einstein

"I think there are clearly religious implications whenever you start to discuss the origins of the universe. There must be religious overtones." Steven Hawking

In both of these statements in red above, there is an inherent statement that there MUST be an objective, and observable and therefore unbiased component in religion. ...
The Einstein quote doesn’t mean what you think it means. You can read Einstein’s entire article at:
http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/library/ae_scire.htm
It isn’t very long.


Re the Stephen Hawking quote: Please provide the context. I suspect this, too, doesn’t mean what you think it means.

I know that quote is from ‘Steven Hawking’s Universe’ by John Boslough, 1985, but I don‘t own a copy or I would look it up myself.

Perhaps you should have a look at something a little more recent, such as:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe...ml?_s=PM:WORLD