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
If
that's your test for valid prophesies, we are drowning in them.
Example: "I predict that tomorrow, 29 February 2023, China will have a bigger population than Kansas."
Example: "I predict that tomorrow, 29 February 2023, IBM will not declare bankruptcy."
Example: "I predict that tomorrow, 29 February 2023, it will rain in some parts of the world."
Example: "I predict that tomorrow, 29 February 2023, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will go either up or down."
If those aren't examples of what you mean by
valid prophecy, then you need additional criteria.
I think you missed a step here:
It must not predict a likely event.
Also, you may want to sack whoever supplied your calendar; The day after 28 February 2023 is 1 March 2023*.
*Not a prophecy - It's been March 1 for ten and a half hours here...
And does that not make February 29 unlikely?
Yes, I did overlook that criterion. So let's take it into account:
I got this story from some stock market book. Something like this:
Joe sends out 64,000 fliers to people who play the stock market.
In 32,000 of these, he predicts that IBM will go up next week, and in the other 32,000, he predicts that IMB will go down.
Now lets say that IBM goes down.
So Joe scratches those who got the prediction that IBM would go up off of his mailing list.
To half the spamees who remain on his list, he predicts that Apple will go up next week. To the others he predicts it will go down.
He scratches the ones who got the bad Apple prediction from his list.
To the people who got two good predictions, he repeats the exercise, this time sending half (16,000) the prediction that the NASDAC will outperform the DOW. The other half get the opposite prediction.
And so on, until, after six rounds, Joe can tell his 1000 remaining spamees that he has correctly predicted the stock market six times in a row, and that they should therefore subscribe to his expensive newsletter.
Question: Does Joe's feat of correctly predicting the market six times running amount to a
valid prophesy?
I don't think it should.
Yet it seems unlikely. And it passes the other tests too.
[Wait, let me go back and read the list of criteria this time. Yes, this meets all of the other criteria.]
Why don't I think this is valid prophesy? Because it's not based on magic. Real gods didn't tell Joe which way the market would go. Joe didn't base his prediction on an actual functioning dowsing stick or weejee board. Joe's predictions weren't real prophesy.
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Many will have a different objection. They'll say Joe's predictions aren't real prophesy because they contradicted Joe's other predictions. But that's hardly the point. If 64,000 people make six stock market predictions, about a thousand of them will get six right in a row. There's nothing magical or prophetic about this. It's just statistics.
So let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, this:
Joel is a prophet of repentance who is crying out for his nation of Judah to repent of its sins. As the nation mourns the devastation of a locust invasion, Joel warns that if they do not repent, God will send something worse than the locusts — namely an army that will destroy the nation. --
https://christinprophecy.org/articl...Pa2X0VlH78t617DmgLBwwPIKCKI4Ue7YaAj5DEALw_wcBhttps://christinprophecy.org/articl...Pa2X0VlH78t617DmgLBwwPIKCKI4Ue7YaAj5DEALw_wcB
If we stipulate that Joel made this prediction, and that an army did destroy the nation, and that the claim was falsifiable and not too vague and so on, does that make Joel's prediction a
valid prophesy?
Joel's religious prediction seems to me no more
valid than Joe's stock market prediction.
- There's no reason to think a god sent the army.
- If a god did send the army, there's no reason to think it was Joel's god.
- Even if a god sent the army, and even if it was Joel's god, there's no reason to think the god sent the army because of the nation's sins.
All that Joel has over Joe is that Joel isn't
on record as having made contrary predictions.
But surely there were predictions being made right and left, just as happens today.
If 32,000 people predicted an army would destroy the nation, and 32,000 predicted that it wouldn't, that means that 32,000 of these
valid prophecies were right.
Joel's prophesy, then, was just one such
valid prophesy cherry-picked from a mass of similar prophesies that happened to be right in that case.
That doesn't make it magical. It doesn't make it unusual or unlikely. At least not more unlikely than Joe's correct predictions.
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Statistical Example: The Rolling Doughnut Disease
- 1000 people are tested for rolling doughnut disease.
- The accuracy of the test is such that, of those subjects who have the disease, about 20% will test negative.
- The accuracy of the test is such that, of those subjects who do not have the disease, about 5% will test positive.
- Of the 1000 people tested, 57 tested positive.
Statistically speaking, how many of the people who tested positive actually have the disease?
And how many of the people who tested negative actually don't have the disease?
In case you want to do the math before you see the correct answer, I put the answer lower down the page.
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And the answer is:
You can't tell from the information given. You'd have to know what portion of the tested population actually has the disease.
In this case, I know that nobody actually has the disease, because I made the disease up. So all 57 of the positive results are false positives.
Why is this relevant?
Because the
VPT (valid prophesy test) assumes that magic-based prophesies exist, and that magic-based prophesies are more accurate than regular prophesies.
In other words, it assumes the thing it tries to prove.
Thus, it is a circular argument.
Unless we know that two kinds of prophesies exist, magical and non magical; and unless we know that the likelihood of correctness of the two types of prophesies; and unless we know what proportion of the prophesies in the tested population are magic-based; and unless we know that tested prophesies weren't cherry picked (in other words, they weren't included in the bible
because they were right, but would have been included regardless of whether they were right), then we can't draw any legitimate conclusions from the VPT.
