This free e-book seeks to prove the divine authorship of the Bible through archaeology, eschatology, and Messianic prophecies.
In this book the author surveys the proof of supernatural realities in a way that doesn't require travel to exotic lands; we are going to view the divine finger which is evidenced in the written Word of God. Our study has a simple, five-point outline. First, since deep agnosticism and crass materialism are currently the norms in academic circles, we are going to point out some of the major flaws in these theories. Second, having taking these modern stumbling-blocks out of the way, we are going to investigate the Bible as to its authenticity and overall reliability. Third, having proven the historicity of the Scriptures themselves, we shall then examine in detail the extensive prophetic passages that were fulfilled with the coming of Jesus Christ nearly 2,000 years ago. Afterwards we will consider the divine patterns that are displayed in nature and the Scriptures, while the final section will discuss what the Bible predicts for the future.
Excerpt:
We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is.
That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand those laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.
—Albert Einstein
1. The Anthropic Principle
The more scientists study the universe the more it appears that things are adjusted for life in a way that defies all explanation. Even Stephen Hawking has written of this phenomenon and the conclusions one could draw from it...
The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. We cannot, at the moment at least, predict the value of these numbers from theory—we have to find them by observation. It may be that one day we shall discover a complete unified theory that predicts them all, but it is also possible that some or all of them vary from universe to universe or within a single universe. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life...Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty. One can take this either as evidence of a divine purpose in Creation and the choice of the laws of science or as support for the strong anthropic principle.
Information theorist Dr. William Dembski sums up the odds of such occurring randomly...
What happens when we try to assign a probability to the fine-tuning of these constants? Such a probability would look like 1/N (one over N). How big is N? Oxford physicist Roger Penrose concluded that if we jointly considered all the laws of nature that must be fine-tuned, we would be unable to write down such an enormous number because the necessary digits would be greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe.