The fundamental position held by humanists is that prophecy does not happen.
The position critical thinkers hold is that biblical prophecy is not evidence of a deity or of foreknowledge of the future. To be convincing, a prophecy must meet a few criteria. Two of them are that the prophecy needs to be specific and not be of something ordinary. To be specific means that it specifies an event or occurrence unambiguously. And if the prediction is of something mundane like earthquakes and wars or people rejecting the teachings of a religious leader, then they do not indicate divine prescience.
There was a movie called "Frequency" in which Dennis Quaid's son living in the future tells his father living in the past the outcome of game five of what is for him the as yet unfinished 1969 World Series from 1998 using a ham radio in order to convince his father that he really knows his father's future. Here's what the son said to the father:
"Well, game five was the big one. It turned in the bottom of the 6th. We were down 3-0. Cleon Jones gets hit on the foot - left a scuffmark on the ball. Clendenon comes up. The count goes to 2 and 2. High fastball. He nailed it. Weis slammed a solo shot in the 7th to tie. Jones and Swoboda scored in the 8th. We won, Pop."
Then the father sees it all play out live on a TV in a bar. Is that convincing? Once one rules out a taped delay broadcast of the game, yes, it is. Why? Because it is very specific and predicted something very unlikely.
I could not have written any of it because one prophet's writing has to fit with all the other prophet's writings.
I could have written the entire Bible and so could millions or billions of other people. It contains nothing that isn't human appearing, including the prophecies.
There is no comparison here to horoscopes or Chinese cookies because God is not that small. We are talking here about the existence of a God who created the heaven and earth.
If God is larger than the authors of Chinese fortune cookies and horoscopes, His words ought to seem larger, too. He ought to say things mere humans couldn't. Otherwise, there is no way to identify that the words aren't anthropogenic.
So, having failed to find God in the physical universe, the humanist has given up hope of knowing the truth.
You must have a different definition of truth than I do. For me, truth is determined empirically and only empirically, since nothing can be called true if it is not demonstrably true, that is, manifest in reality as evidence to the senses. What the critical thinker has given up is unjustified belief, which is belief by faith. But you are correct that I do not expect to find and do not expect science to find evidence for a god. The universe assembled itself materially and runs itself without intelligent oversight. Over and again, jobs thought to be performed by gods have been shown to occur naturally. The universe is exactly as one would expect a godless universe capable of generating intelligent life to be, as it would need to be were there no god.
Theists tell us God gave us free will. Unlikely. That wouldn't serve a god that want humanity to obey assorted commandments. But it does serve the animal kingdom in the naturalistic world in which they evolved. What would a deity need with laws of physics? A godless, naturalistic universe needs them if the universe is to be stable enough to generate life and mind, but not one run by a tri-omni god. Maybe you're familiar with Newton's Principia, in which Newton describes the celestial mechanics of our solar system mathematically. Unfortunately, Newton's math predicted that larger planets would toss planets like earth into the sun or out of the solar system, and so, he added his god as hoc right there where he ran out of knowledge, which nudged the planets back into position. No laws needed when a god is doing it. Then, a century later, LaPlace supplied the mathematics Newton lacked, restoring the solar system to a clockwork needing no intelligent supervision.
Cumulatively, these various observations make a powerful argument against an interventionalist god. You've got a variety of situations that might have been otherwise had there been such a god, but turn out always to be the way we would expect were there none. Flipping a coin to see if it is a fair coin or a weighted (loaded) coin illustrates this. A fair coin can come up heads or tails. A coin perfectly loaded to come up tails will come up tails every time. How many times does one need to flip the coin and have it come up tails before he realizes that it is loaded? No single flip suggests that, but considered cumulatively, 1000 consecutive tails without a single heads is pretty good evidence that heads was never a possibility. This is what we see in our universe. Every time we look, we find the universe behaving as a godless one must, just like the coin.
Relative truth and relative values now rest with the individual humanist, making selfishness, rather than service, the driving force or impulse.
I guess you don't know many humanists, nor what humanism's philosophy is. It's all about selfless service. You also are assuming that theists can come up with better moral sets than humanists. I disagree. The evidence is to the contrary. But yes, values are relative (truth is not as I have defined it above) and evolve, and one's moral choices have always been and will always be his own, even if he chooses to adopt a prefabricated moral code from a church or holy book.
it's up to you to explain how it is that Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies.
Jesus didn't fulfill messianic prophecy. I realize that you believe otherwise, but a dispassionate look at the evidence was sufficient for me to see that Jesus isn't the Jew's messiah. It has been for the Jews, too. Suffering savior comments aren't specific enough, and overlook the other prophecies that Jesus doesn't fulfill.
Even on the cross, whilst dying, Jesus referred the crowd to Psalm 22. Have you ever read this Psalm?
Sure, I have. I'm a former Christian. Are you offering that psalm as evidence that Jesus was the savior foretold in the Old Testament? It doesn't say that to me.