Update: The Case for Christian Prophecy website is live, and the prologue is on audio.
Why this post?
I have written a book. It is titled The Case for Christian Prophecy, it runs just over five hundred pages, and I would like someone to read it.
I also wrote it in the first year a man could sit down with these machines and attempt something this size. So this post is two things. The book, briefly. Then what a year of building it with artificial intelligence actually taught me — which is not what I expected to learn.
The book
I sat in a pew for decades thinking I had the gist of it. I wrote about that in the post on how I got here. This book is what I did about it.
It walks. Nine parts, twenty-nine chapters, and each part is a question rather than a conclusion — how would I know, is anyone there, can the book be trusted, does prophecy actually work, and on to the end. Nobody gets told what the fourth question answers until the first three are dealt with.
I went at the historicist line, which reads the prophecies as running through history from the prophet’s own day down to ours. My reason is that it is the only reading that can be checked. The book unpacks the evidence for it. If a prophecy runs through history, history can be consulted, and it can embarrass you. If it all lands after the last page of tomorrow’s newspaper, nothing can be tested and nothing can ever be wrong. The book argues that; I am not arguing it here. The post on Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is where I laid the method out.
It does not set a date. It does not name a living person. It does not tell you what is going to happen to you.
If you would read it
It is just over five hundred pages and no fresh human eye has been over it. It has had the major edits, the rewriting, and a great deal of machine attention. Not one reader who came to it cold. I would like that reader, and I would like to be told what is wrong with it.
Five hundred pages on prophecy is not an elementary problem, and I expect most people who start will stop. The length is the receipts — nearly every claim that is not Scripture has a source behind it, and the sources are why it runs long.
If the whole thing is too much, read the first chapter and tell me whether you would have read the second. That takes twenty minutes and it is a real answer.
The PDF is on this post. There is a password on it, which I added because of the bots, and if you asked me what that actually protects me from I could not tell you. It is TheCaseForChristianProphecy then v0.2, run together with no space anywhere. The email for feedback is in the pdf.
Take it from the post and say nothing, and that is completely fine.
The machines
Now the other half.
At code they are extraordinary and that argument is over. Give one a problem with a right answer and a way to test it, and it will get there.
This month they cracked open the Navier–Stokes equations — how fluids move, one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics — at OpenAI, with the proof checked by computer. But read how. Human mathematicians built the strategy first. The machines ran the road. They did not find it.
Also, schools spent two years trying to catch students using these machines, and more than fifty universities have now switched their detectors off — the detectors were wrong too often, and wrong in a particular direction. They flag people writing in a second language. I write in a second language. The machines built to catch machine writing accuse men like me.
Then the trouble starts. The danger is not that it is stupid. It is that it is confident.
With the older machine learning you got a number alongside the answer and the number meant something — you could draw a line and throw out everything under it. These do not. It is not a measure of whether the thing is true. So, a wrong answer and a right one arrive in the same voice, in the same paragraph, at the same temperature. You end up building the scaffolding yourself: fence off what must not be touched, put a firewall round what is settled, ask the question backwards to see if the answer falls over, make one model check another. That last one helps least. Two machines trained the same way are wrong in the same places. And over all of it, one rule that is not a technique at all: it may not contradict Scripture.
So, in the end it came down to documents.
It would find an article and half-believe it, then hand it to me with the confidence of a man who had read the original. Press it and things came apart. So archive.org became my friend, and I checked every reference and every quotation in this book myself, back through centuries, some of them not in English.
I could not have driven to a great library in Washington to look at a folio from the fifteen hundreds. I would never have seen those pages. Sitting where I am, I opened them. Whatever else is wrong with this age, that is a wonder and I do not take it for granted.
And here is what the checking found, which I did not expect. The quotations were usually accurate. The use was wrong. A sentence would be on the page word for word as I had been handed it, and then the next sentence — the one that had not been fetched with it — would turn it round completely. Quoted short, it argued against me. I threw out good material more than once, including material I had gone a long way to get, because with the whole page in front of me it was a weapon pointed the other way.
No machine caught that. A thing can be perfectly true and perfectly useless, and the only way to know is to open the document.
Which raises the fair question. How do I know my own checking caught all of it? I do not. One man went through five hundred pages several times and one man misses things. There will be errors in it still. That is not modesty, it is arithmetic, and it is the main reason I want a reader.
It also cannot hold a book. Five hundred pages will not fit in its head, so it sweeps and re-reads in passes and forgets in between. It will write you a great many words. Good prose is something else.
Put anything it produces beside Norman Maclean — “In my family there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing” — and the gap is not subtle. Twelve words. Two solid nouns. No clearing of the throat. Stephen King spends half of On Writing on the same point from the other side: kill the adverbs, use active verbs. His diagnosis of why writers reach for the weak ones is that they are afraid they have not been clear.
That is what the machine’s prose is. Frightened writing. Here is the kind of sentence I cut by the hundred:
It is important to note that while this interpretation is not without its difficulties, the evidence, though not conclusive, is arguably suggestive of a reading that many scholars have found compelling.
Thirty-one words that commit to nothing. It means:
The evidence points this way. It is not proof.
Nine words, and the whole job done. Every hedge in that first sentence is the machine covering itself in case I disagree. Pages of it, and a reader gets tired and stops.
I’ve spent more than a decade writing screenplays, then another decade on prophecy, then the last three years writing these articles and still I cannot write like the best do.
Two more it was weaker at than I expected. Structure, which I had assumed a machine would be good at. And reaching across the whole Bible for the verse that actually bears on the point. Sixty-six books, and it would hand me the obvious one every time.
A tool. A remarkable one. Not a silver bullet, and not a writer.
Two things I cannot tell you
There is a lot of fear about. Superintelligence and what it might do to us. A cyber event that takes the lights out. And on the other side, men who are certain we are going to Mars.
None of that is in prophecy. Not in the parts I have spent years on.
At best I can tell you what was written, and these things are not written. It may be that prophecy concerns itself with worship, and a rocket does not touch worship.
What I can tell you is where my confidence comes from, and it is not from what is missing. It is from what I checked. I went at this the way you go at a claim you want to break — the dates, the manuscripts, the empires, the men who wrote centuries before the events and the record of what happened — and I could not break it. That is the part a stranger can test, and it is the part that moved me.
So, I am more confident than I have ever been. Not because nothing surprised me. Because the things I could check, checked.
whydoneit?
Because prophecy changed me.
I did not come to it for comfort and it gave me none. It took apart what I thought I knew and handed it back in a different shape, and it cost me the easy version of my own religion. I would not go back.
Jesus did not leave us to work it out. When they asked Him how it ends, the first thing He said was not a sign but a warning — “Take heed that no man deceive you” — and then He described what the deception would look like, centuries ahead, in enough detail that a man at a kitchen table can go and check whether it happened. He did not have to do that, but He did, because He loves us.
Take the book, or do not. But do not leave this subject on the esoteric shelf because of the men who put it there.
I stand astounded.