Reasonable Belief in the Bible?

How we are supposed to reasonably know that the Bible is what it claims to be (the true Word of God)?

I start first by saying that we must use inductive reasoning, the idea that we cannot PROVE a conclusion but we can have highly probable support for a conclusion (same as used in science; but our conclusion here is that the Bible is the inspired Word of God), to decide whether or not something is truly what it claims to be.

I will give a brief summary of a few reasons that give credit to the Bible being accurate.

The Bible, like many other Holy books, claims to be the "Word (s) of God."

Now, what do we do with this information?

What we must do is look at the evidence that gives credit to the source being truly what it says it is. First, we will start with the historical evidence. The Bible is the most accurate historical book in all of creation. Don't believe me? Then you should do the research on your own and you will find out that it is. All of the historical kings, geographic locations, detail given to precise architectures (see: Pool at Bethesda John 5:1-2), etc. correlate with history exactly as we know it without ever reading the Bible. You believe that Alexander the Great was who he was because of what the history books tell you. The interesting thought about this is the fact that we don't have nearly the amount of ancient documents about Alexander the Great as we do with the Bible (roughly 5,000 ancient texts). No other Holy book is this historically accurate. In fact, most other holy books are full of contradictions, scientific errors, and historical inaccuracies (I exhort you to look into this also). This is the first step in adding credit to a source, does the belief correspond to the facts.

The second thing we can look at is what the Bible claims about itself. The bible claims that in it there are predictive prophecies that have come true. The idea of predictive prophecy is that God, before the event ever happened, said that some event would come to pass. The bible is unlike any other holy book in this area. There are countless predictive prophecies that have come to pass in actual history! We can look to these to give credit to the Bible as well. I urge you to see below, as I will give two predictive prophecies that have come to be true in history.

The first is in the Old Testament, the book of Daniel chapter 9 verses 20-27 (Daniel 9:20-27) (see the link attached)

http://kylebarrington.blogspot.com/2010/12/daniel-9.html

The second I will explain right here; in Ezekiel 37, a book written thousands of years ago, God, through Ezekiel, predicted an event that actually occurred within this past century. Chapter 37 gives this metaphor of dry bones coming together after being completely broken apart in a valley; bones were scattered everywhere. At the end of the prophecy, God explains to Ezekiel that this prophecy was the regathering of the nation of Israel into its homeland.

In 1948 Israel regathered as a nation in their homeland of Jerusalem under the cultural and religious distinction of the Jews. Never has this been seen in all of history; a nation dispersed completely across the entire world that came back to its homeland, its home city, and became once again unified together under the same cultural and religious background in which it was founded. The bible predicted this thousands of years before it came to pass. People thought this was absurd, that this was some sort of fluke in scripture, the supposed "Word of God." When it came to pass in 1948, the prophecy that the bible claims to be written by God Himself actually was fulfilled (see: history). No other holy book has ever had prophecies that have come true like these two. Never in all of humanity has anyone been able to predict the future exactly like the God of the Bible.

This evidence gives us a probability that the Bible is what it claims to be more than any other holy book, actually any other book, in existence.

This is what converted me from atheism to a believer in the most glorious thing that exists, the one true God.

* For further reading on this topic (belief in God, the Bible, and Jesus Christ) see; The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig, Reason for God by Tim Keller, Christianity: The Faith that Makes Sense by Dennis McCallum.