Reasonable people make predictions all the time and even most religious people are able to find their doctrines reasonable but religious people are reluctant to admit when prophetic announcements don’t measure up but refer them to an emotion, often to piety.
A prophecy is a prediction of something important that is unexpected, while something so usual as people in orderly fashion going out of a classroom when the bell rings is hardly even a prediction because it is so routine. A prediction is calling who will win a presidential contest or whether the stock market will languish but saying it will go up and down is too general, like saying the weather begets cold in winter and hot in summer. Weather predictions are correctly said as much when they are within close ranges offered just a few days earlier. It is important to make predictions because what will effectuate has consequences for you and so you can carry an umbrella or smell across the serengeti that game is coming nearby. It is in the nature of people that they can time travel into suppositions of the future just as they can recall how it was to be a child within one’s family. So it is not surprising that people have devised and divined technologies to penetrate into the future.
A simple and scientific explanation of prediction is that past events predict future events. The sun will come up in the morning because it always does. An exception would require an eclipse or an apocalypse, neither likely to happen. A Senator or governor is likely to be the next President, but not always. An arrow previously aimed and shot with strength will hit the target this time and at a later time. Ethnic groups will hate one another unless there is great social pressure to have them coexist. Controlled experiments are nothing else than comparing situations identical to one another except for one factor to differ and, if so, then call the distinctive factor “the cause” of the change, just as a different animal can have a slightly different smell and so be mistaken for a different animal.
Conducting an experiment or watching how politics unfold in ways similar to the way it happened thousands of years ago means looking at the procedures for observing or constructing an event to be regarded by these procedures as a prediction of the future: air, fuel and a spark can ignite a fire and a constitutional order can prevent an illegal succession to power. Mostly. Then abstract the process of prediction. Two matters concerning prediction are objective: an announced goal and the procedures for bringing about that goal, the outcome regarded as the prediction of having gone through the procedures. If I go through the steps of building a birdcage, from drawing a design and then cutting the wood and gluing it together, you will get a birdcage. The same is true with intellectual enterprises. If you want to arrive at a description of a community, then you have to consider the major institutions of the community such as the factory, the school system, City Hall, the family and stratification. You can neglect the medical system in Lynd’s “Middletown” because medicine wasn’t as important as it came to be. You couldn’t neglect health care when describing Boston’s community or describing American health care because it takes up twelve percent of GDP. Turnbull’s “The Forest People” didn’t describe stratification because maybe pygmies didn’t have that, too primitive for that as a characteristic of communities. So far, so good.
Here is the problem that makes prediction, that very straightforward aspect of reasoning,become paradoxical. Looking at objective procedures and objective outcomes can lead to inferences of attributions of motivation. Go through the procedures to accomplish changing your password with a credit card. You can objectively evaluate whether the procedures will be successful. But what if the procedures don't work? Then you can blame the credit card people for being incompetent in managing the software, or that they were malicious, as when we say that gremlins got into the software, or that it was dumb luck that it worked when you fooled around with the controls and got it to work and don’t remember what you clicked to make it happen. So what I am saying is that the attribution of a motivation can be assessed by forgetting the intentions, where the menu is always available, but by looking at objective matters. Now apply this analysis to Trump's tariffs, the purpose of which is to give economic prosperity to America. But the mechanisms of tariffs will not lead to that outcome, as all experts attest. So you can attribute to Trump either incompetence or malignity for the failure of tariff policies or else, if for some reason tariffs work for Trump's end, then to blind luck, and so hardly to his credit. Those three alternative interpretations of outcomes can be attributed to any creature of free will and therefore to Trump however much he seems like a bear in a circus outfit.
I daresay the same goes with God to the extent that He is thought to be like a person in that His plan of universal happiness, a goal of benevolence, is jettisoned because humankind has much woe to endure, and God is either of limited competence and so could make the world as best He could, as Leibniz thought, or that God was malicious, which Christopher Hutchins thought, or that somehow, miraculously, it would all work out, which is what believers think, putting aside that God's plan was not a very good one or that, as happens in the early parts of “Genesis”, God was just fumbling along to get the world and humanity set just right, recalibrating with the expulsion of Eden and the need for a flood.
A prophecy is very different from a prediction because it foretends something unusual, at least among those who do not know what scientific predictions have made will happen. So a Connecticut Yankee can predict an eclipse by having consulted an Almanac but his medieval court will think that a prophecy which attests to a personal ability to pronounce of upcoming and spectacular events rather than events to be treated as ordinary predictions.Prophets can site past remarks from Scripture as prophesying or an omen of future events or construct pseudo technologies, which are sets of procedures like the examination of entrails or the stars or oracles to tell what will happen, but those are to b e dismissed as the way a clergy deludes itself or others that it can manufacture a prophecy despite its procedures having nothing to do with the eventual outcome, the prophecy, other than the wish to believe the future can be forecast about important things like God or love.
Rather than look at expertise in science to guide predictions, consult with authority to announce what is to happen. Jesus is certainly such an authority and He is even more pronounced as such when He has arisen from the dead. But His behavior is peculiar given that standing. His magisterial announcements were made, as in the Sermon on the Mount, when He was still alive and His pithy insights to local congregations or in family or street setting. Having arisen from the dead, He does not go into a Jerusalem square and give a final oration worthy of the Gettysburg Address or Washington‘s Farewell Address. Catholic students might say He became visible to a number of people, but there were few of His followers who saw Him. Jesus met some people on the road and others He met were cloaked from Him, revealing Himself towards the end of their exchange, and then only meeting with the remaining disciples rather than facing a crowd. And what Jesus had to say was anodyne. He'd just said that His followers would sermonize and handle snakes, which they had also done previously. He did not offer new teachings or tell what would happen in future history, people trying to read from “Revelations” what those images foretold about history, Jesus not having provided that. Even Hari Seldon in Asimov’s “Foundation” accurately predicts the future for at least a little while.
Moreover, those who meet the risen Jesus are so awed with Him, Jesus artfully displayed in the Gospels as a figure who was obscure and only fleetingly alluding to His feelings, as when He said “God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, that His holiness requires those who meet Him not to intrude and inquire about what one might ask of someone who rose from the dead. I would wonder what it was like to be dead. Did He have no experience during those three days? Did He see what Heaven was like? What is it like to be a disembodied consciousness, was that your status?
And so what is said in the Gospels about the resurrected Jesus is rather lame. In “Luke” Jesus only after a while reveals Himself to be Himself to the people around Him and all He says is that a rereading of scripture foretells only of what has already happened to Him, that He was crucified and then rose from the dead, not what the future will be like. The apocryphal end of “Mark” says only that His followers will handle snakes, drink poison and raise the dead, the things Jesus has already done or the followers claim to do, not about the state of the world in Palestine, much less the world. The end of “Matthew” is also anti-climactic. Jesus says to spread His teachings and that He will be with you to the end of the age, leaving ambiguous what “with you” means and how long the age will be. No big revelation.
The lack of substance of the remarks of Jesus after having arisen from the grave is therefore reminiscent of people who communicate with dead people in seances. They comment on the lives and fortunes of the living bujt never reveal what it was to be dead, to give some detail to the afterlife even if just to authenticate that the disembodied voice was from there. It can therefore be inferred that the claims are fraudulent because they cannot provide new information only of information meant to authenticate that they are indeed in touch with Aunt Sally. No prediction even from the authoritative.
The most detailed description of the events concerning Jesus after He was resurrected is in “John”, a narrative a generation after the other Gospels, and those a generation after the events that were to be recorded. “John” is particularly cagey in providing the basis for moving on from Jesus seen to afterwards will be followers who had not seen him. There is drama as the clues are compiled that Jesus has arisen. There is at first only the linen that served as his shroud and then more clothing nearby. Then Mary Magdalene meets someone she thinks to be a gardener who is revealed to Him as the risen Jesus, which plays with the idea and which is repeated when Jesus meets near the sea at Tiberias, that he is not at first recognized as Jesus at first and then the veil is lifted, which mea ns that there is an ambiguity whether this is a person to be taken as Jesus rather than Jesus Himself, for why this subterfuge? Maybe it means thaty an ordinary person can become Jesus-ike and that is what it means that Jesus is with His followers, only a symbol of the spirit of Jesus that is still alive. Then the meaning of the resurrection unfolds further in that Thomas has to finger the hole in the side of Jesus to assure Thomas believes this person is indeed Jesus rather than an imposter and the response of Jesus is to say it is alright to be a doubter but it will be even greater for people to believe in Him when there is no longer evidence of His resurrection. And then, on another occasion, Jesus provides fishes for his disciples. A trick He has done in the past, when Jesus was alive. Can’t Jesus do something fresh? And then Jesus speaks to Peter so as to indicate that Peter is the important one in sustaining the Jesus following, but still fails to see anything about the afterlife, only that there could be books and books filled with what Jesus had done after His resurrection, but those are none of them named, another way of saying that faith is more important than fact. What is left wight is a sense of poetry about the figure of Jesus, the figure himself removed from the scene, piety an object for itself as a good, the aura of Jesus, that has sustained itself for two thousand years.
There is much to be said of piety as an emotion. It is unlike a prophecy, which can be wrong, as when a sect thinks the world will end at a certain date or when followers of Jesus thought the Second Coming would occur in their lifetimes. Piety stays with us because it makes people think they are respectable and responsible and can bear obedience readily, thinking it natural to be subservient to a leader even though that is an obsolete notion tracing back to when a god was like a king or visa versa that a king was like a spirit from a mountain or a river. Modern day piety is loyalty that is akin to a family or a nation. The object can change but the feeling persists at least until people no longer feel the need to be subservient, and that will be a long time. Similarly, some prophecies can be displaced with a different emotion as happens when the prophecies of “Revelations” have references no longer easy to decipher, are read as evocations of great spectacle attendant at the end of days.
Another way of assessing prophecy is to study people who make prophecies. Three social psychologists of the Fifties wrote “When Prophecy Fails” to see what would happen to a doomsday cult which had outlasted its claims. The result was that people would still adhere to their beliefs despite inherit disproof, which seems contrary to common sense. Never mind that the surviving group was ridden with plants themselves studying the group and so influencing it, the real point was what the psychologist was trying to find out about the nature of prophecy, which was that it was hardy and overcome disproof so as to show that religious people were on a different wavelength than were people who responded to common sense empiricism, and interesting for that reason. Yes, it is true that Mormons, like the ancient Israelites, persisted despite their adversity, and resettled into a new place, but that is not prophecy except in “Deuteronomy” where after the fact they prophesy what they now know will have happened. The question is what people say about what really takes place. A friend of mine gave up on Communism because it was predicted but never came to America. Catholics left attendance at church because of the clergy child abuse scandal, though believers seem to have returned, costing in the deficits for its advantages. People can become disillusioned with Trump because prices are higher and tariffs have a bite. Prophecy cannot sustain itself in the face of disproof though people can sustain a formula of words that do not require any false prophecies, only very long extended ones, such as a world eventually won over to Jesus’ principles or short term transformations whereby good fortune can be regarded as a miracle.
The point of the social psychological study was to show that religious people think and feel differently than non-believers do, who presumably operate in a more rational manner than do religious people who persist in believing what has been discredited. But think again. A religious ideology, its point of view, can create an alternative reality that does not conflict with actual evidence by failing to specify the religious claim, as when a person hears the word of God and mean only that it is only metaphorical that God “speaks” to you as opposed to treat what a wise man or an inner moral sense says that God “spoke” to you, or that a term that seems to have exact meaning does not as when people say that all people suffer from original sin and evidence it by noting how some people are really really bad or that everyone has a bit of a larcenous heart or say, to the contrary, that people can lead perfectly respectable lives and that original sin is an inherent property of no practical significance but party of a theological framework. Catholic church attendence fell off during the child abuse scandal of priests and attence may have recovered because the abuses can be chalked off too original sin ort to priests being only human and therefore capable of doing bad. The parishioners made up their own minds about how to deal with those transgressions. The prophecies of the faithful are on a very different level: about the long term destiny about humanity and the short term satisfactions of being obedient to honorable feelings and ideas rather than the relatively trivial matters of who has besmirched a religious belief. Prophecy is a big deal and not so easily abused.