What if the Deity you are speaking of, does Not intend to convince?
Assuming you mean that the deity doesn't want mankind to have a convincing reason to believe in it, then it has been successful in my case at least. Does that make sense to you that a deity is sending prophecies to mankind through prophets because it DOESN'T want to convince?
But let's take a giant step back here. What are we discussing when we discuss biblical prophecy? These prophecies are offered as evidence of divine prescience. They are efforts to convince readers that a god authored them. That's the opposite of believing by faith. That's the kind of thinking that people who reject faith-based thought engage in. They believe to the degree that the evidence supports.
Let's consider the scenario as a Deity who has created us with free will. If this Deity brings signs on us in such a way that, we have no choice but to accept and believe, then that free will is taken from us.
Are you suggesting that if you believe something based on supporting evidence that your free will has been taken from you?
Faith and free will are two topics that come up repeatedly in religious discussions. They are both offered as virtues, as long as the free will choice is to believe by faith. If your free will choice is to not believe by faith, then you are considered rebellious.
To me, this smacks of an effort to get others to believe that for which they cannot offer sufficient evidence, and to whom they cannot control their choices.
Moreover, let's consider if this Deity rather wants those who truly make an effort to find the signs, become successful, and as for those who do not want God, let them be busy with other things they want. In this case, this requirements are met if He has given signs in a symbolic language, with hidden signs and evidences, as with these symbols, He has gives the option to people to reject or accept...to find God in them for those who search, or ignore and reject them by those who do not want God.
All of these mental gymnastics trying to show that these prophecies have been fulfilled, and maybe the deity isn't trying to convince because it wants your faith in it - all of these laborious machinations can be dispensed with simply by rejecting the idea that there is a deity trying to be known, and recognizing that these prophecies, like all scripture, are the words of ordinary, fallible men. Problem solved.
"When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense" - Edward Abbey
God requires faith because if you can prove everything there is no basis for faith.
There already is no basis for believing by faith. It's nothing more than the will to believe a guess.
How about if I have faith that there is no god? If you permit belief without sufficient supporting evidence, then any belief is as valid (or invalid) as any other. How about if I just guess that there is no god because of a will to believe that. Forget that I lack supporting evidence to justify that belief - I just guess and leave it at that.
Prophecies have to be cryptic to maintain any sort of credibility in most cases.
If cryptic, they lose persuasive power. Biblical prophecies such as the one in Daniel 2:31-48, where, Daniel interprets the prophetic meaning of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, are an example of something too vague to be considered any kind of prophecy. It is about a huge, horrific-looking, immense, man-like figure made of clay, iron, brass, silver, and gold, which was pulverized to dust by a stone that became a huge mountain, and was then carried away by the wind.
According to Daniel, this allegedly foretold of a series of lesser kingdoms to come in the future. If one wants to do that convincingly, he needs to use specific language, not poetry.
You (I believe it was you) say that that permits corruption of the prophecy. OK, then if the choice is between vague, unconvincing prophecy and specific prophecy that is also not useful, then prophecy is not a good method for revealing the existence of a supernatural deity - another reason to believe that prophecies are human creations, as a deity would understand that and not offer them.
Even science can't live up to your standards. You can always question if the data was tampered with, or the witnesses had reason to deceive, or there were typos in the report, or they had an intentional political agenda, or blah blah blah, etc.
The proof is in the pudding. NASA built the New Horizons probe and launched it to Pluto. They correctly predicted (prophesied?) the path of the probe and the path of Pluto's orbit during the journey out, such that they would meet at a specified time and place, and lo and behold, as it was written, so it was done.
Science doesn't use prophecy to convince us of anything. Scientists convince themselves that a theory is accurate when it can predict such unlikely things as the cosmic microwave background, an excellent example of high quality prophecy - specific (frequency, temperature, distribution), not something that could have been guessed, etc., and yet, this is not offered as evidence of supernatural prescience.
So you don't think it is supernatural to claim that a photon experiences no time or distance when it travels? Yet claim that light travels at a constant of C.
Why would that be considered supernatural? All pronouncements of science are about nature and its properties, that is, about natural law.
I consider the idea of the supernatural to be incoherent, and invented to explain how something could exist yet not be detectable even in principle. Whatever exists is part of nature. If you want to posit the existence of substances and forces not seen within our universe, then you have merely expanded the realm of the natural to beyond our universe.
And if we wish to consider realms causally disconnected from our universe and therefore undetectable even in principle, then we can dismiss the idea as irrelevant, since it would have the same qualities as the nonexistent - none.
So to claim that there are realms that can affect us, that we can travel to after death, but that they are not natural and undetectable even in principle is incoherent.
Not all faith is blind faith.
To the extent that one's belief is justified by evidence, it is not faith in the religious sense*. It is justified belief, justified by evidence, and therefore not blind (evidence is evident).
To the extent that an idea is believed more or less than the evidence supports, that belief is religious-type faith, which is blind. Blind is a reference to lack of discernible evidence, like crossing the street without looking in the belief that that will be safe.
*[The word faith is also used in an empirical, non-religious sense, as in faith that the car will start the next time it is tested as it has the last several hundred or thousand times the key was turned in the ignition - an evidence-based belief that is justified and not blind.]
Believing by faith is not a virtue. It is not a path to truth given that any idea or its polar opposite can be believed by faith, and at least one of these ideas is wrong. Faith is what is asked of you by others who want you to believe what they cannot demonstrate, and the supernatural is given as the reason something can exist and affect you, but cannot be found. Then you are forced to deal with all of the problems that come from believing a wrong idea, like trying to explain why biblical prophecies are of divine origin when they are flawed and unconvincing.
It is possible to believe without evidence (guessing) and guess right. The theory of evolution has the evidence needed to justify belief, but suppose you had never seen that evidence, and were told about the theory and biblical creationism, and you guessed and picked one to believe without evidence. If you guess correctly, reality will conform to your beliefs. If you guess wrong, you have go into that mental gymnastics mode to defend yourself from the onslaught of contradictory evidence.
This is the position I see religious apologists in, and why their answers are so contorted and tortured.
