The prophecy of Daniel was written 200 years before Alexander the Great became a power and ruled as he did. The prophecy even described him as dieing young as he did. It also foretold what would happen to his 'kingdom' after he died.
Was it, though? The prophecy is very impressive...
But it falls prey to the same significant problem many "ancient" prophecies fall: it's impossible to verify when it was written. Not only do we have nothing to truly pin Daniel to that time period, but in fact, there are a lot of very good reasons to think it was
not written in 600 BCE, as described in the text itself, but rather was anachronistic, written during the events predicted.
For starters, the most obvious piece of evidence: that it is so accurate in its predictions, and where it makes mistakes. Let me analogize a bit... Say I provide you a letter which I claim I found in my attic. The letter is written by my great-great-grandfather in 1900, and it predicted, among other things, WWI, WWII, the holocaust, the rise of rock & roll, and the exact placements of the 2005 world series. However, it says some things about some events in the late 1800s that are clearly wrong, and for some reason the predictions seem to stop at the point we found the letter. My great-great-grandfather then proceeded to explain that he knew all of this because Allah beamed it into his brain. Would you believe that this was actually written by my great-great-grandfather? I doubt it. I think the sheer fact that its predictions are so eerily on-point, but the things my great-great-grandfather really
should have known about were not, would lead you to believe that it's a fake.
So what does this have to do with Daniel? Well, Daniel, writing as a historian in 600 BCE, makes some very significant errors about the contemporary history. Furthermore, his predictions cease in their accuracy later on - he gets the details of antiochus's death wrong, which is kind of weird if he's getting his information from god. Not only that, but there are numerous anachronisms within the text which do a lot to date it long after the point it was written in (for example, referring to Jeremiah as "scripture" when it was not canonized until centuries later). Daniel is also notably missing in the canonization of Jewish prophets (around 200BCE) and the wisdom of Sirach (180BCE). With this information, there is no reasonable claim to the prophetic status of Daniel. In fact, given what he got right and wrong, we can actually pinpoint the authorship very precisely between 167BCE and 164BCE. It's not prophecy; the author is a fraud.
Going back to that letter. How much evidence would you need to believe that my grandfather's letter
wasn't a fake, to accept it and kowtow to the god of Islam? Probably a lot, right?
Prophetic claims need to fulfill certain conditions. The prophecy has to be specific, discretely fulfillable, have some sort of time limit, unlikely to occur by chance or guessable, must not have people explicitly working towards it (this is where the prophecy about a nation being born in a day sort of falls apart) and must have clearly and demonstrably been made
before the event it prophecizes. Daniel gets most of the way there, but falls flat on the historical side of things. There is no evidence that Daniel was written in the 6th century BCE. There is very good evidence that it was written around the middle of the 2nd century BCE,
after the events it correctly "predicted".
To be honest, this is going to be the case 100% of the time. I'm not sure if you've had one of the conversations before, but his is always how it goes (sarcasm). Aethists are "always right" about their position...always...and those who do believe in God or a God, are considered wrong because it doesn't "science".
Well, what do you have to offer? Scientific empiricism is the
only consistently reliable mechanism we have for determining what is and is not real. When you propose the existence of a being that cannot be detected by that mechanism, I'm left wondering - how did you ever establish that?
I'm perfectly open to evidence for your god (although I'd ask you first to
define your god). However, there needs to actually be something there. And believers do a very poor job of actually demonstrating any phenomenon attributable to god.