ApostateAbe

There are many ways to make a prophecy seem fulfilled without miracles. I have developed a list of "Prophecy Pitfalls"--methods for how prophecies can be made to seem to be fulfilled without supernatural agents. I have found that these pitfalls are used by honest and dishonest people alike, by men of various religions, superstitions, and even sciences. Here it is:

Prophecy Pitfalls

1. Making a prophecy that is vague in meaning so that one may specify exact meaning to fit the proposed fulfillment.
2. Making many prophecies, and a mentioned minority of them are fulfilled by probability, but an unmentioned majority of them either failed or remain unfulfilled.
3. Making a prophecy without a time deadline, so that nobody can claim that the prophecy has failed, and the prophecy is probable to come true sometime in the entire future.
4. Falsely claiming a prophecy of the past to fit the proposed fulfillment. This can be done three ways:

   a) Directly lying about a past prophecy and hoping for credulity.
   b) Re-interpreting a past statement so that the statement becomes understood as prophetic though the statement was not actually meant to be a prophecy when it was first said.
   c) Re-interpreting a past prophecy so that the prophecy fits the proposed fulfillment, though the prophecy was at first intended to have a different meaning.

5. Making a prophecy that is naturally probable to be fulfilled--an intelligent person knows that it is likely to come true without the need for any supernatural agent. A variation of this pitfall is that the prophecy is self-fulfilling, meaning that the prophecy causes its own fulfillment, and the event proposed as a fulfillment would not have occurred were it not for the prophecy.

Many proposed prophecy fulfillments have a combination of these pitfalls. The prophet Nostradamus and his present-day adherents make use of all five methods, capitalizing especially on #1 (vagueness).

I am especially skeptical of those who claim that the chance fulfillment of a set of prophecies has a probability of 1 in X, where X is extremely large. This is done by the mathematician Peter Stoner in Chapter 3 of his book, Science Speaks: Scientific Proof of the Accuracy of Prophecy and the Bible, which is cited by Josh McDowell and Campus Crusade for Christ. Stoner claims to have examined a series of messianic prophecies in the Old Testament and finds that the "the chance that any one man fulfilled all forty-eight prophecies to be 1 in 10¹⁵⁷," and Jesus supposedly fulfilled all 48.

Are there variables for vagueness of language for each prophecy? Is there a variable for the larger set of unfulfilled and failed prophecies in the Old Testament? Are there variables for each prophecy without a deadline to account for all the time in the future of intelligent beings? Are there variables for the probabilities of the prophecies having been claimed but never having been said at the time claimed? If there are variables for those extremely important elements, then the designation of quantities for those variables can't be anything but subjective and fatally indefinite. It is better to leave mathematics out of the picture altogether, maybe unless the prophetic claim and proposed fulfillment are extremely scientifically rigorous, complete with detailed recordings, specific mathematical quantities in the prophecy, quantifiable probability of fulfillment, measurements in the proposed fulfillment, and control groups. It turns out that Stoner neglects the necessity of each of those variables. But he puts huge emphasis on the extreme enormity of the value 10¹⁵⁷, devoting paragraphs to blind-folded men, silver dollars on Texas, all the letters in all the library books in the world, and all the electrons in the universe.

It is not necessary to apply mathematics to prophecies, and it is not necessary to dismiss fulfillment claims just because they are not scientifically rigorous. A person just has to examine prophecy fulfillment claims and make judgments keeping in mind the pitfalls, like the five I listed. If a prophecy fulfillment claim does not suffer from any of the pitfalls, then that is probably a strong point in favor of the claim. If a prophecy suffers from one pitfall, then the prophecy fulfillment claim either stands or falls based on the strength of the failure. If a prophecy suffers from two or more of the pitfalls, then the prophecy fulfillment claim probably falls outright, depending again on the strength of the failures.

What do you think?

David B

Nothing very much to argue with there.

There is some coverage of how people can come to believe in prophesies in skepdic.

http://skepdic.com/oracles.html

David B

ApostateAbe

There is one more important pitfall that I neglected to mention:

6. Falsely claiming the fulfillment of a legitimate prophecy.

WishboneDawn

This sort of assumes that the intent of prphecies were to predict events ( unfulfilled and failed prophecies in the Old Testament). That's sort of granting ground to the prophecy buffs, isn't it? I thought most prophecies were actually comments on their current events or warnings for the near future..."If you keep this crap up some chick is going to have a kid that will steal your throne out from under you buddy."

Sven

AFAIK, some prophecies say so. But certainly not most.

And ApostateAbe forgot another one:
7. Writing the "prophecy" down after the event happened and then claim later that you wrote it down before it happened.

ApostateAbe

Maybe that is giving ground, but I am not afraid to do that. It counts as a legitimate prophecy, in my opinion, though maybe it is prophecy without a deadline (see #3).

That is the same as 4a.

Codec

A variant on 5. is the self fullfilling prophecy. Whereby you make a prophecy, and some one fullfills it for you, purely because they want the prophecy to come true.

"I predict an attempt will be made on X's life"
Y makes an attempt on X's life because it was prophecised, and Y felt he was called to fullfill it.

Ahh - I see you already have it now!

aa5874

Apostate-Abe, the word 'prophesy' means to foretell by divine inspiration.(WEBSTER'S)

This actually means that there has never been any prophecies made. Anyone who claims to be able to tell the the future by divine means is a fraud or a false prophet. There is no indication that a God exists, the likelyhood of receiving prophetic words of events about the future is improbable.

ApostateAbe

Yes, that is what I think too, but the list of Prophecy Pitfalls is the way to establish evidence toward that conclusion. Alternatively, you can adapt this list to naturalistic predictions, such as a scientist who proposes a new theory behind earthquakes, and he claims to have predicted the time, place and magnitude of some earthquakes already.

gnosis92

what exactly are the 48 prophecies jesus allegedly fulfilled?
he allegedly was born of abraham, born of david, born of a virgin,