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Re: Legend, Yes, etc
Hi,
> wow, sorry - oops. i was working on what i had thought was the previous
> comment that had inspired the question; namely, the legitimacy of
> prognosticating global events or things technological centuries in advance.
But you don't tie most of these things in with anything else, and the two times
you do (Old Testament?), you're so broad as to be effectively meaningless.
Were you saying that Leonardo's scientific work on aerodynamics is equivalent
to biblical prophecy? Orwell post-dates television. I think you mean
H. G. Welles's _When Sleeper Wakes_ (1899). Anyway, I would make a strong
distinction between these and what I would call "prophecy". These sorts of
things are extrapolations of known physical principles or perceived tendencies
of society. Leonardo wasn't even predicting the future; he was trying to get
something to work in his present. The key feature of biblical predictions that
differentiates them from science fiction or just science is, simply, God.
Prophecy is a divine gift to see something that will be brought about through
God's providence or anger. Looking around you and saying "if we keep going
this way..." and then writing _1984_ doesn't count as prophecy in the biblical
sense. It's extrapolation, and that's different.
Besides which, in this sort of thing, you *always* have to beware of a
posteriori reasoning. It is phenominally unlikely that any particular person
will win the lottery, but it is of high probability that *someone* will. You
can't start out with what we have and look back for prophecies that foresaw
them, because that will naturally lead you into what is called "confirmation
bias", namely, you will tend to emphasize confirming evidence and ignore
contradictory evidence. If you have to sort through dozens of predictions that
don't apply to find the one that does, it's bad logic to then hold up the one
example and say "aha, prophecy fulfilled!" On top of *that*, there is the
specificity problem: many prophecies tend to be vague, which is the
confirmation bias in reverse. If you want to increase your chances of getting
a "hit", you could make lots and lots of prophecies and/or make them
sufficiently vague that you could apply them to lots and lots of different
situations. In evaluating a prediction, you always have to compare with the
odds of getting the same result merely by guessing.
So you can't start with stuff now and go back looking for prophecies. (The
author of the Gospel of Matthew makes this mistake, and ends up altering
Jesus's story to make it match his (incorrect) understanding of the prophecy.
He thinks Zach. 9:9 is referring to two different animals: a colt and a donkey,
and so he has Jesus ride two different animals simultaneously into Jerusalem,
in "fulfillment" of the prophecy. See Matt 21:1-7, and make sure you use a
translation that doesn't correct the author's mistake, like the NIV does. But
I digress...) You have to start with the prophecies, try to determine what the
author was intending to say, and then see how well that applies to what turned
out. Go the other way and you will always find what you are looking for.
As I understood Peter's question, though, he was wondering which biblical texts
could be construed as prophecying the things you mention, not whether or not
prognostication in general was feasible.
Yours,
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"Am I gentrifying my inner neighborhood?" - Dar Williams
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