A Guy’s View: Prophecy and nature
“Tell us, you idols, what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare to us the things to come, tell us what the future holds, so we may know that you are gods. Do something, whether good or bad, so that we will be dismayed and filled with fear.
But you are less than nothing and your works are utterly worthless; whoever chooses you is detestable.” (Isiah 41:22-24).
It is usually impossible for human beings to see what lies ahead of them. Many people would be willing to pay a fortune if they could find out what is in their future.
The three main monotheistic religions with which most people are familiar, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all claim acceptance of the Bible as the word of their God. Of course, this may be more a group generalisation than individual lifestyle, for adherents to all three of them engage in practices which run contrary to what that book says.
Most religious observers practice the religion of their parents and their immediate community. This is so because not many people actually investigate what they believe. In many cases, investigators move away from what they traditionally believed, either by converting to another faith or becoming irreligious.
One reason why believers in the God of the Bible continue to be believe that there is a god, even if they move away from their religion, is the evidence of his ability to predict what would happen in the future. In fact, the ability to accurately forecast what will come in the future has been used as evidence of godness. People have always worshipped other gods, but the way to distinguish other gods from YHWH, the living deity of the Bible, is to examine which one can tell the future.
Disproving biblical writings has been the most significant project of many scientists of various specialties for many years. In a number of instances they concluded that some prophecies were so detailed that they must have been written after the fact, only to find other evidence to cause them to conclude that their original conclusion was wrong. They concluded before they reached the proper conclusion.
Men have developed surveys, called polls, to try to tell them what the future holds. Polls have now become a standard feature of political activity. The evidence that these are not of God is that there are often wrong.
Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, enjoyed a comfortable majority in her Parliament. Polls told her that if she were to call an early election she would win by a landslide and sink the Labour Party. Her advisers, probably the ones who commissioned the polls, told her that she should take advantage of this great opportunity to trample the Opposition while they were down. She believed the polls and followed the lead of her advisors.
Under the guise of wanting a stronger bargaining position when sitting down with the European Union to negotiate Britain’s exit from that arrangement, she called an election. She lost her majority and is now Prime Minister only because she has been bailed out through an alliance with a small group in Parliament. Had she been paying attention, she would have realised that there have been a number of polls in recent times which did not reflect anything like the truth.
At the time of our last elections in Barbados, polls predicted that the Opposition would win a comfortable majority of seats. While trying to influence the date of the poll, one pollster prophesied that the later the election was called the worse it would be for the Government. We know the outcome of that election.
About three weeks ago, the same combination of newspaper and pollster again teamed up to produce another poll immediately after the passing of a difficult austerity budget. The findings of the poll sent some people into heavenly rapture. Time will soon tell whether they will soar in Paradise or burn in hell.
But there are some events that one need not be prophetic to predict. Devine intervention is not needed to explain that if you plant potatoes you will not reap corn. No one needs to come from above to tell us that if we continue to strip away our moral underpinnings we will end up in social and cultural place that is very different from where we are now or may wish to be.
Every time our young people are caught engaging in some shocking behaviour, we, adults, cry out in pretended disbelief and recite the biblical observation of a coming generation of vipers. Are our young people that prophesied generation of vipers, or were we that generation?
If our young people are acting out what we taught them, who are the vipers? We were the ones who broke the mold in which our parents casts us because we wanted something different for our children than what we had during that stage of life. As a result, we brought them up differently from how we were raised.
For us, church was compulsory, even if we hated it. Whether or not our parents were going, we went. But we were wiser than our parents. We gave our children the option of church, or no church at all. I am not equating church with God, but it is not difficult to see that the principal differences which exist between Barbadian life in 1970 and 2017 may be traced back to the influence of the church, or lack of it.
A teenaged boy in 1970 Barbados would not dare lift up his eyes in lustful admiration of a mature woman. That is no longer the case. Boys in that age group are looking at women and telling them how good they look. And adults are entertained by scenes of little boys gyrating behind women older than their mothers and who could probably fit them back up in their womb.
No prophecy was needed to predict this because we laid the foundation for it. Given where we are now, if present tendencies continue, we know where we will be in the future. It is just as predictable where we will go by accepting the other practices which we are encouraged to embrace. When someone plants a potato slip and a corn stalk shoots up, I will revisit this theory. There is nothing prophetic about this. It is just common sense.