Any nominal Bible student will tell you that many of the Bible's prophecies are meant to describe a yet-unrealized future. That many Biblical prophecies are INTENDED to be unclear until their fulfillment is built into the text; so I think it premature to discount the argument that some of the prophecies may yet come true.

However, with regard to your point about the open-endedness of the time-frame of their fulfillment, I think I can understand where you are coming from. That someone can just indefinitely say that "Hey, it might come true somewhere in the future" - I believe you are justified in some skepticism at this point.

For analogy's sake, let's try this: the battered woman who for years refuses to leave her abuser because she says, "I know that he is a good man at heart." Well, that may be so, but that does not justify her faith that he will indeed change. Anything is possible, but the MERE possibility does not count as evidence on which to base a conclusion, particularly in light of evidence to the contrary. To be absurd, suppose I say that "Pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent mice from another planet who are bent on destroying the Earth MIGHT show up tomorrow." No one can PROVE that it is IMPOSSIBLE; that does not make it in the least bit credible. I think that is akin to the point you are making (correct me if I'm wrong).

Still, I think this misses the point. It is not the POTENTIAL fulfillment of any individual prophecy on which Bible apologists make their stand, but rather, the fulfillment of myriad. Suppose you are right, suppose, to be fair, we disqualify the handful of prophecies which have been pointed out. That still leaves an explanation wanting for the HUNDREDS of others that were fulfilled.

There are, unless I am mistaken, at least two (related) claims at stake here: 1) The Bible proves to be an authoritative Divine revelation because of the sheer quantity and accuracy of its fulfilled prophecies and 2) The Bible is to be considered 100% trustworthy because ALL of its prophecies have been/will be fulfilled. Let us, for argument's sake, strike the latter of these two claims, assume that #2 is unverifiable. That still leaves the first. I do not see how your arguments adequately deal with that; perhaps I am wrong?

You are saying, if I understand you correctly, that one is not justified in lending credence to the Bible on the basis of prophecies which have yet to be fulfilled or seem to be inaccurate. Ok; what about the ones that have been fulfilled? What about the ones that were PIN-POINT accurate? Does that not raise a question?

You have also said that Bible-apologists claim this as "proof-positive." I humbly submit that there are strikingly few things in this life that we can assert with 100% certainty - that does not mean that we are not justified in coming to provisional conclusions based on evidence and reason. I take this task to be not too dissimilar to forensics. My argument then, would look like this: "Given all the available evidence, what are the best explanations to account for the various fulfilled prophecies in the Bible?" My answer is, "Provisionally, as I am unaware of any natural human capacity or human agency that could orchestrate a volume of fantastic and purposeful coincidences to this extent, I conclude that this represents information intentionally organized and directed by a supra-human source." I believe that is a JUSTIFIED explanation.

Can you furnish a BETTER one?

We might find evidence in the future of life on Mars, therefore there must be life on Mars. Do you see why that doesn't work? If you argue that prophecy has not yet been fulfilled, you can't then argue that the Bible is true because of fulfilled prophecy.

I say again, find a better argument, apologists!

The real problem with the way you're thinking is that Christians put forth prophecy as proof positive for the inspiration of Scripture. And yet those prophecies haven't panned out. Even if they only apparently haven't been fulfilled, they still are apparently unfulfilled. What makes that good evidence that the Bible is the "Word of "God"?

It's notoriously difficult proving negatives. For instance, take that Matthew 10:23 prophecy. I realize you weren't providing it as an example of an unfulfilled prophecy, but it's a great example of my point.

It has two parts: A command ("When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another.") and a prediction ("I tell you the truth, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes."). The command cannot possibly be proved false since it's not making any claim.

The prediction is that a certain group of people will NOT do a certain thing before He returns. Do you have proof that they actually did do that thing? You'd need a list of the cities of Israel, a list of the people He was talking to, and a travel history for each one of those people.

Seems to me that if there's a single city that those people did not flee to, then no matter how long He takes coming back He'll have kept that promise.

Since the probability for any one of these [2000] prophecies having been fulfilled by chance averages less than one in ten (figured very conservatively) and since the prophecies are for the most part independent of one another, the odds for all these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance without error is less than one in 10^2000 (that is 1 with 2000 zeros written after it)!

Even if one accepts (on faith - hah!) that this guy isn't lying or wrong, as yunshui pointed, it seems he only has a rudimentary grasp of probability, and is not capable of properly analyzing the data.

Find a better argument, apologists!

Yes, the idea that anyone would think biblical prophecies are even vaguely correct, much less "fulfilled to the letter — no errors", is amazing and incomprehensible. Say what you will about the ontological argument, or the argument form design, or even the execrable Pascal's Wager: they run rings around this sort of idiocy.