Unexpectedly Foretold Occurrences: Scientific Evidence that there is a God who Loves You (and why scholars don’t discuss it)

Colin S. Morrison is a science graduate and freelance philosopher with a lifelong interest in the book of Daniel. He gained his honours degree in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in 1995, and currently lives in the UK, where he teaches mathematics. Puzzled by the incompleteness of the mainstream account of Daniel 7 and Daniel 9, and concerned that pressure from religious or anti-religious institutions has led scholars to misinterpret these passages, he has spent the last ten years examining the evidence to identify the view that a scientist under no such pressure would regard as most justified. His conclusions about the book of Daniel differ radically from those of both critical and conservative scholars. Whilst accepting the mainstream (critical) viewpoint that Daniel was completed in the mid-160s BC, he argues that by far the most reasonable interpretation of Daniel 2, Daniel 7 and Daniel 9 is that these passages were included by the book’s compiler to predict the distant future of his own time (their purpose being to counter scepticism about the book’s authenticity). If so, they may well have come from a source that the compiler believed was a genuine seer. He points out that this possibility appears to be never considered by critical scholars despite the fact that Jewish readers in the 160s BC were bound to interpret these passages as predictions that were yet to be fulfilled. He also points out that the proposed compiler would have had good reason to include such predictions in a book of this nature. In view of this, he suspects that critical scholars are ignoring this possibility for fear that they might otherwise be labelled ’religious’ or ’conservative’. In support of this conjecture he draws our attention to certain obvious pieces of evidence that he believes have been neglected in critical discussions simply because they favour this ’prediction hypothesis’. And to demonstrate motive, he reveals just how stunningly accurate a portrayal of the rise of Christianity, and the end of Temple-based Jewish worship, emerges when these three prophecies are interpreted in their most justifiable way. He argues that, if this is no accident, critical scholars are doing the public a disservice by neglecting this very plausible explanation for their content.