Help me remember the criteria for valid prophesy

[AdamWho]

I cannot remember who originally mentioned a list of criteria for a valid and fulfilled prophesy.


It went something like...

Specific (cannot be too vague)

Timely (cannot have an open-ended time frame)

Can only be fulfilled by the the claimed mechanism

Must not be able to be brought about by the natural course of things


I know there is a good list of these criteria but if you google 'prophesy' you get MOUNTAINS of garbage.

Thanks in advance

 

[Elixir]

if you google 'prophesy' you get MOUNTAINS of garbage

Is that a prophecy?

 

[AdamWho]

if you google 'prophesy' you get MOUNTAINS of garbage

Is that a prophecy?

It is a testable claim.

Do you remember the criteria?

 

[bilby]

Religions Wiki has a list of criteria at https://religions.wiki/index.php/Prophecy#Criteria_for_a_valid_prophesy

Is this what you were looking for?

 

[AdamWho]

Religions Wiki has a list of criteria at https://religions.wiki/index.php/Prophecy#Criteria_for_a_valid_prophesy

Is this what you were looking for?

Yep, that looks right,

 

[Politesse]

Whose criterion is that? It sounds ridiculous. If a prophecy "cannot be brought about by the normal course of things", what is it? People look to prophecy to understand what does happen, not what cannot happen. If two armies collide, either side could win. The king wants to know what side will, or how he can strategize differently to bring about that outcome.

 

[Elixir]

I need the technical definition of “mountain”. Googled prophecy, and got a lot of garbage links, but no discernible mountains.

 

[AdamWho]

A valid prophecy must meet several criteria:

• It must actually be a prophecy. Not a documentation of events that is misinterpreted as a prophecy after a similar event occurs later.
• It must be written before the events that it predicts.
• The predicted events must actually occur.
• The prediction must be both falsifiable and verifiable.
• It must not be overly vague.
• It must not predict a likely event.
• It must not be self-fulfilling.
• Must be timely (must give a time frame for fulfillment) <- My addition

 

[AdamWho]

Whose criterion is that? It sounds ridiculous. If a prophecy "cannot be brought about by the normal course of things", what is it? People look to prophecy to understand what does happen, not what cannot happen. If two armies collide, either side could win. The king wants to know what side will, or how he can strategize differently to bring about that outcome.

If you want to add something useful, then add it.

But the link answered the question I was looking for.

A valid prophecy must meet several criteria:

• It must actually be a prophecy. Not a documentation of events that is misinterpreted as a prophecy after a similar event occurs later.
• It must be written before the events that it predicts.
• The predicted events must actually occur.
• The prediction must be both falsifiable and verifiable.
• It must not be overly vague.
• It must not predict a likely event.
• It must not be self-fulfilling.
• Must be timely (must give a time frame for fulfillment) <- My addition

 

[bilby]

Whose criterion is that? It sounds ridiculous. If a prophecy "cannot be brought about by the normal course of things", what is it? People look to prophecy to understand what does happen, not what cannot happen. If two armies collide, either side could win. The king wants to know what side will, or how he can strategize differently to bring about that outcome.

I suspect that "Must not be able to be brought about by the natural course of things" is an intrusion from a set of defining features of miracles, included in the list of features of prophecy in error.

A prophecy is a description of the future that is sufficiently unlikely as to be impressive when it occurs; while a miracle is a description of a past event that contradicts what we consider likely (or even possible). So they're related concepts, and one could even say that a fulfilled prophecy is itself a class of miracle.

Hence a man walking on water ceases to be a miracle if that water has frozen over, in an environment where the freezing of water is "the natural course of things".

 

[Politesse]

I suspect that "Must not be able to be brought about by the natural course of things" is an intrusion from a set of defining features of miracles, included in the list of features of prophecy in error.

A very fuzzy and ill-thought through approach to theology is quite typical of Christian fundamentalists and atheists, if I may say. All basically "the same sort of thing", so why bother developing specific, comprehensible arguments about it, eh? If the only question is "all or nothing" and the "all" is defined vaguely at best, the decision of which to side with is, for most, quite easy to make. You're either on God's side and everything is sort of vaguely true as long as it came from a man waving a Bible, or you're on Reason's side and everything is sort of vaguely false unless it came from a man with a lab coat. Why bother learning anything?

But miracles and prophecies are not identical or even strongly related concepts; they come from wholly different cultures, and have been syncretized into Christianity and Western philosophy on very different terms over the millennia.

 

[Elixir]

You're either on God's side and everything is sort of vaguely true as long as it came from a man waving a Bible, or you're on Reason's side and everything is sort of vaguely false unless it came from a man with a lab coat. Why bother learning anything?

At least the Bible side believes enough in science to trot out guys in lab coats waving PhDs from Patriot U.
Presumably this helps reinforce the faithful's belief in the superstitions they peddle under labels like "Intelligent Design", "Irreducible Complexity" and other pseudoscientifical creationist weaselry.
OTOH, one rarely sees presenters at science conferences or symposia, bringing in Priests to reinforce the Truth of their presentations...
So we can tell who is more close minded, right?

 

[bilby]

But miracles and prophecies are not identical or even strongly related concepts; they come from wholly different cultures, and have been syncretized into Christianity and Western philosophy on very different terms over the millennia.

Their history notwithstanding, there remains a clear similarity between the two.

A fulfilled, divinely inspired, prophecy of a highly unlikely event is clearly a kind of miracle, according to the way that the terms "prophecy" and "miracle" are most commonly used today.

That this conclusion brings together ideas and concepts with very distantly related etymologies is typical of modern monotheistic religion. And for that matter of modern secular thought.

One of the most powerful tools of the post-enlightenment era has been the ability to relate apparently disparate ideas to form new modes of thinking and understanding.

There's nothing vague about this. We have achieved a rigorous mathematical description of reality in which the application of a handful of simple rules can fully describe any phenomenon, and correctly predict how it will develop and interact with the rest of reality.

It's not surprising that even the handwavium and vague nonsense that is religious belief has become tainted with this way of thinking. Religious thought reflects the wider world, even while its practitioners believe the arrow of causality to be reversed. The world may not be the creation of the gods, but the gods are very much the creations of the humans who inhabit, and examine, the world in which they find themselves.

 

[Politesse]

So we can tell who is more close minded, right

What a contest! I do not personally aspire to the goal.

 

[Politesse]

There's nothing vague about this. We have achieved a rigorous mathematical description of reality in which the application of a handful of simple rules can fully describe any phenomenon, and correctly predict how it will develop and interact with the rest of reality.

We have? Who is "we"? I don't think this statement is true in the slightest, and I know a lot of scientists.

 

[bilby]

There's nothing vague about this. We have achieved a rigorous mathematical description of reality in which the application of a handful of simple rules can fully describe any phenomenon, and correctly predict how it will develop and interact with the rest of reality.

We have? Who is "we"? I don't think this statement is true in the slightest, and I know a lot of scientists.

We is everyone who worked on it - the subset of humanity who are scientists in the broadest sense of the word.

You're of course permitted not to know that my statement is true; That'd put you firmly in the majority of humanity, who still haven't caught up. Your ignorance doesn't make it untrue though.

Literally everything except (so far) gravity can be described by Quantum Field Theory; And gravity can be described by General Relativity, both giving exactly correct results to within the level of accuracy measurable by our most sophisticated technology.

Of course, most important phenomena are sufficiently complex as to be only efficiently describable by emergent properties that summarise and approximate the precision of the underlying quantum mechanics, but there's no doubt that these emergent fields (chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, history, etc. etc.) are underpinned by a physical reality that is purely quantum mechanical (and/or relativistic) in nature.

Many people are still stuck in a medieval mindset in which each mystery is unique and unrelated to any other. But that's known (by those who have taken the time and effort to learn) not to be true, despite the widespread ignorance of the public at large.

 

[Politesse]

Literally everything except (so far) gravity can be described by Quantum Field Theory; And gravity can be described by General Relativity, both giving exactly correct results to within the level of accuracy measurable by our most sophisticated technology.

The predictions scientists are actually capable of making fall far short of the accuracy you were claiming: as you say "a rigorous mathematical description of reality in which the application of a handful of simple rules can fully describe any phenomenon, and correctly predict how it will develop and interact with the rest of reality". There are actually all kinds of phenomena we either don't understand at all or don't understand well enough to make valid predictions about, from ecosystems to the weather to criminology to those pesky damn neutrinos.

And that's not a knock on the sciences, which in practice rely utterly on a human being's willingness to set aside the assumption that the "truths" they've inherited are the only truths they need. We make no assumptions of our data save that inference and empirical observations will continue to be a valid means of sorting out good ideas from bad. Science isn't a "grand theory of everything", or a lab-coat-wearing substitute for the priesthoods of old. It is something far more powerful: a practical methodology for testing whether a hypothesis can accurately describe the universe in a consistent and reproducible fashion. Science isn't powerful because it makes superior assumptions, but because it makes almost no assumptions at all, or as few as necessary to posit an explanation for a phenomenon. I have very little respect for "scientists in the broadest sense of the word" (which I call pseudo-science) because like all fundamentalists they kill their object of worship by trying to turn it into something it isn't. There's nothing wrong with the Bible just being a very old book with some good advice mixed in with messy politics, or the eight-fold path just" being a helpful tool for building up mental discipline, or science being "just" a tool for explaining the natural world. Inissiting that science is a magic source of explanations that can explain away everything, accesible only to an elect few who understand its precepts, you are adding nothing new to human knowledge; that is the exact same claim priests have been making about their ideologies for these past ten thousand years or so, and it has always been hubris leading to folly. The world is actually much more complicated than our minds, and it is certainly more complicated than our models. If you think a model is telling you The Ultimate Truth (tm), you're misusing it, full stop.

 

[Rhea]

There's nothing vague about this. We have achieved a rigorous mathematical description of reality in which the application of a handful of simple rules can fully describe any phenomenon, and correctly predict how it will develop and interact with the rest of reality.

We have? Who is "we"? I don't think this statement is true in the slightest, and I know a lot of scientists.

I’m surprised by this reply. Politesse, my impression of you, lo, these many years, is someone who makes thoughtful, detailed well supported posts. I thought Bilby’s point, that modern society has developed repeatable, replicable and predictive understanding of physical phenomena around us, was well said and demonstrably true. So I was surprised by your reply.

Are you implying that the ”science” of social science belies this? Is that what you mean by

? I don't think this statement is true in the slightest, and I know a lot of scientists.

I mean, semantically, that is true; but the underlying premise that all the sciences, including the social sciences, have reached a level of sophistication that expects fundamental understanding that leads to reliable predictive capabilities is indeed true of our era, IMHO.


His point is (clearly, in my biased engineering perspective) describing the physical sciences directly and the social sciences indirectly, so I am trying to decide if your reply is a little bit of wry humor, or if you actually disagree with his statement in the context of: Science verifies and reliably predicts, religion does not and never has.

Can you explain more why you think it is

? I don't think this statement is true in the slightest,

that we, as a set of humanity living today and with an established scientific community

have achieved a rigorous mathematical description of reality in which the application of a handful of simple rules can fully describe any phenomenon, and correctly predict how it will develop and interact with the rest of reality.

 

[Politesse]

I mean, semantically, that is true; but the underlying premise that all the sciences, including the social sciences, have reached a level of sophistication that expects fundamental understanding that leads to reliable predictive capabilities is indeed true of our era, IMHO.

I did not just mean "social science". I am a social scientist, but the language of the physical sciences is not some foreign country to me. I started out in them, and indeed reject with a whole heart the idea that a dichotomy exists between the physical in the social. This assumes the very flawed nnotion that a human being is some magical exception to the observable constants of the universe, as is manifestly untrue.

Science verifies and reliably predicts

is simply untrue. Science is not some Bosonic God passing down universal truths to humanity. There are no prophecies in science, whether by the OPs definition or any other. It is an extremely powerful methodological tool when its rules are folllowed. Chief among those rules being that one should never assume anything is true before you've tested it, or even after, really. It should not be confused with either faith or mathematics, though it can certainly help you test ideas from religion or mathematics against the harsh field test of the observable universe. Scientism is science abuse, worshipping that which was only ever meant to be the handmaiden of organized collective minds.

 

[bilby]

Inissiting that science is a magic source of explanations that can explain away everything, accesible only to an elect few who understand its precepts, you are adding nothing new to human knowledge; that is the exact same claim priests have been making about their ideologies for these past ten thousand years or so, and it has always been hubris leading to folly.

I am doing no such thing; Indeed, apart from this one paragraph which doesn't appear to relate to anything I actually believe, I agree wholeheartedly with your post.

My whole point is that science isn't like religion in this regard. It's accessible to everyone, and can only explain that which has been rigorously examined and tested.

But one thing that has become clear in the last century or so is that there's nothing else. There are and can be no other ways to understand reality that don't ultimately boil down to quantum field theory and it's successors.

That's an interesting, but fairly useless, observation - we know that the causes of the First World War boil down to QFT, but we cannot and never will be able to use this fact to help us to understand European politics between 1848 and 1914.

Where is does have some small utility is that it allows us to summarily dismiss any claims of supernatural phenomena. A lot of people get truly upset about this, but their impotent rage doesn't alter anything.

We can argue endlessly about whether Princip's assassination of the Archduke was a necessary step, or whether war would have broken out anyway due to the inherently unstable situation. But we can dismiss instantly as nonsensical any hypothesis that invokes the possession of Princip by demons as a trigger for war.

Reality is real, and the physical reality underlying everyday life is completely understood. The gods of the gaps have run out of gaps.