The Old Testament / Tanakh has prophecies about the date for the Messiah's arrival (Daniel 9), his death (Isaiah 42 according to Maimonides, Isaiah 53 according to Christians), and the future resurrection (Isaiah 26). The Biblical prophecies and blessings are very appealing, so I would like to evaluate how likely they are to be factually true.
What reasons are there to think they are reliable? I see that the prophets were moral, faithful, and divinely inspired, but does that mean if they make a prediction, it must turn out correct? i can see that God inspired civil rights activists, but I don't know that it means if they made predictions with deadlines for civil rights laws and freedoms to be enacted, their predictions must come to pass.
Another theory could be that there is a real gift of prophecy or foretelling, and that the Lord gave it to the prophets and then guided them in it.
A third theory for their reliability is that the Israelites carefully checked the prophets to make sure that they were the kind of people whose prophecies occurred, and would reject prophets whose predictions failed.
A fourth theory could be that the prophets of ancient Israel were quite wise and gave solid reasons for why one should believe these particular predictions.
In this thread, I would like to ask about the reasons for the prophets' reliability, especially about the reason that I underlined above.
In his article Is Precognition Real?, Ben Goertzel discussed scientific testing on "precognition", the ability to foreknow the future, by a researcher, D. Bem. Goertzel explained that Bem's tests purported to show a small but significant amount of effect from precognition. He asks "If Psi Exists, Why Aren’t the Observed Effects Stronger?", and then writes:
^Click on the link above to read a few stories on the difficulty of measuring the phenomena in studies.
Next, he goes into what he calls "Evidence for ESP", discussing the work of Honorton, another researcher:
Next, Goertzel considers what scientific, logical, physical explanations could allow for the possibility of precognition:
One company made a program called "Intuition Tester" and discusses the value of "USING INTUITION TO SELECT THE BEST BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES":
In their book The New Science of the Paranormal: From the Research Lab To Real Life, Carl Llewellyn Weschcke and Joe H. Slate write about a survey of 500 college students who were asked to answer Yes or No to the question:
"I have had at least one experience of knowing, for no apparent reason, what was about to happen or what was going to happen in the near future." 427 respondents answered "Yes."
The authors explained:
Let me also share with you the famous psychologist Carl Jung's explanations of three forms of synchronicity, the third category of which he considered to be precognition:
^Click the SPOILER TAG above to read about the three categories.
The problem that Jung came up against was the problem of "causality", that an event in time may cause that which comes afterwards, but not events preceding itself in time. In order to address this problem, he proposed a principle of Acausality.
Click the SPOILER tag above to see the article's discussion on this.
I took an online precognition test that you can find here:
Free Online Precognition Championship
My results the first time I took the text were:
The second time I took the test I answered 50 questions and got 27 right, with this result:
What reasons are there to think they are reliable? I see that the prophets were moral, faithful, and divinely inspired, but does that mean if they make a prediction, it must turn out correct? i can see that God inspired civil rights activists, but I don't know that it means if they made predictions with deadlines for civil rights laws and freedoms to be enacted, their predictions must come to pass.
Another theory could be that there is a real gift of prophecy or foretelling, and that the Lord gave it to the prophets and then guided them in it.
A third theory for their reliability is that the Israelites carefully checked the prophets to make sure that they were the kind of people whose prophecies occurred, and would reject prophets whose predictions failed.
A fourth theory could be that the prophets of ancient Israel were quite wise and gave solid reasons for why one should believe these particular predictions.
In this thread, I would like to ask about the reasons for the prophets' reliability, especially about the reason that I underlined above.
In his article Is Precognition Real?, Ben Goertzel discussed scientific testing on "precognition", the ability to foreknow the future, by a researcher, D. Bem. Goertzel explained that Bem's tests purported to show a small but significant amount of effect from precognition. He asks "If Psi Exists, Why Aren’t the Observed Effects Stronger?", and then writes:
You may wonder why the results of Bem’s experiments weren’t stronger. Why only 53%, why not 95%? OK, so he didn’t find any experimental subjects who were so powerfully psychic they could predict the erotic pictures almost all the time — but then couldn’t he have set up a different sort of experiment, yielding a stronger effect?
Of course, outside the lab, outside the lab, people have reported many apparent cases of extremely dramatic psi effects. But the long history of parapsychology lab research, going back far before Bem to Rhine’s ESP work in the 1930s, shows that when you bring psi into the lab, it tends to become more of a systematic statistical biasing factor than a source of individual mind-blowing “miracle events.”
...
I don’t believe I have any particularly strong psi abilities myself, but in my everyday life, I’ve witnessed some rather striking examples of psi phenomena involving others. For instance, one day a few years ago, a friend and I were walking in the forest with her beloved dog, and the dog (as was common) ran far away from us, exploring the woods and chasing animals. Then, all of the sudden, my friend said, “She [the dog] is looking at a turtle. I can see it right now as if it were in front of me.”
I was understandably skeptical: “Yeah right. How could you know?” Turtles were not that commonly seen in those woods.
I was going to call the dog, but my friend asked me not to. Instead we quietly looked for the dog, and she was about 100 feet away staring intently at a turtle, which was sitting there peacefully by a stream.
Strange and striking — and like so many other real-life anecdotes of psi phenomena, damnably hard to replicate in a lab.
I’m reminded of another dog story. My Japanese Chin, Crunchkin, once surprised us by showing how well he recognized himself in the mirror. He looked at himself in the mirror curiously. Then he walked across the room and picked up a sock, and stared at himself in the mirror with the sock in his mouth. Then he put the sock down and picked it up again, all the while observing his mirror image do the same. Finally, he apparently concluded the dog in the mirror was just him, somehow, and lost interest. It was brilliant – but I know if we tried to replicate it in a laboratory setting (or in the house for that matter) it wouldn’t work — the dog would run away or act silly or something. One of the general challenges of laboratory psychology is to bring out, in weak but systematic form, phenomena that occur much more strongly, but much more capriciously, in everyday life situations.
Is Precognition Real? Cornell University Lab Releases Powerful New Evidence that the Human Mind can Perceive the Future - h+ Mediah+ Media
Of course, outside the lab, outside the lab, people have reported many apparent cases of extremely dramatic psi effects. But the long history of parapsychology lab research, going back far before Bem to Rhine’s ESP work in the 1930s, shows that when you bring psi into the lab, it tends to become more of a systematic statistical biasing factor than a source of individual mind-blowing “miracle events.”
...
I don’t believe I have any particularly strong psi abilities myself, but in my everyday life, I’ve witnessed some rather striking examples of psi phenomena involving others. For instance, one day a few years ago, a friend and I were walking in the forest with her beloved dog, and the dog (as was common) ran far away from us, exploring the woods and chasing animals. Then, all of the sudden, my friend said, “She [the dog] is looking at a turtle. I can see it right now as if it were in front of me.”
I was understandably skeptical: “Yeah right. How could you know?” Turtles were not that commonly seen in those woods.
I was going to call the dog, but my friend asked me not to. Instead we quietly looked for the dog, and she was about 100 feet away staring intently at a turtle, which was sitting there peacefully by a stream.
Strange and striking — and like so many other real-life anecdotes of psi phenomena, damnably hard to replicate in a lab.
I’m reminded of another dog story. My Japanese Chin, Crunchkin, once surprised us by showing how well he recognized himself in the mirror. He looked at himself in the mirror curiously. Then he walked across the room and picked up a sock, and stared at himself in the mirror with the sock in his mouth. Then he put the sock down and picked it up again, all the while observing his mirror image do the same. Finally, he apparently concluded the dog in the mirror was just him, somehow, and lost interest. It was brilliant – but I know if we tried to replicate it in a laboratory setting (or in the house for that matter) it wouldn’t work — the dog would run away or act silly or something. One of the general challenges of laboratory psychology is to bring out, in weak but systematic form, phenomena that occur much more strongly, but much more capriciously, in everyday life situations.
Is Precognition Real? Cornell University Lab Releases Powerful New Evidence that the Human Mind can Perceive the Future - h+ Mediah+ Media
Next, he goes into what he calls "Evidence for ESP", discussing the work of Honorton, another researcher:
Under these conditions, Honorton’s experimental subjects were then asked to try to perceive a video “target” that was being played in another isolated room, and being watched by a “sender.” The perceiver was asked to discourse during the session, commenting on the visual images they see in their mind’s eye. Afterwards they were supposed to rate either four still pictures or four moving videos, in order to judge which one they felt the “sender” was watching during the session. The process was completely automated, removing any role for subjective bias on the part of the experimenter.
...
Bem was unable to find any fatal flaw in Honorton’s work. He became more and more interested in extending his research focus from personality and social psychology to psi research. In 1994, Bem and Honorton co-authored a landmark article on psi in the mainstream psychology journal Psychological Bulletin. The article described the results of a thorough statistical meta-analysis of eleven ganzfeld studies. (A meta-analysis involves combining data from a series of similar experiments conducted over a period of time, to come to an overall conclusion.) The result of the meta-analysis was striking: subjects obtained overall target “hit” rates of approximately 35 percent, far above the 25 percent that chance performance would predict.
Is Precognition Real? Cornell University Lab Releases Powerful New Evidence that the Human Mind can Perceive the Future - h+ Mediah+ Media
...
Bem was unable to find any fatal flaw in Honorton’s work. He became more and more interested in extending his research focus from personality and social psychology to psi research. In 1994, Bem and Honorton co-authored a landmark article on psi in the mainstream psychology journal Psychological Bulletin. The article described the results of a thorough statistical meta-analysis of eleven ganzfeld studies. (A meta-analysis involves combining data from a series of similar experiments conducted over a period of time, to come to an overall conclusion.) The result of the meta-analysis was striking: subjects obtained overall target “hit” rates of approximately 35 percent, far above the 25 percent that chance performance would predict.
Is Precognition Real? Cornell University Lab Releases Powerful New Evidence that the Human Mind can Perceive the Future - h+ Mediah+ Media
Next, Goertzel considers what scientific, logical, physical explanations could allow for the possibility of precognition:
But How Can It Be That Way?
Nobody knows yet for sure, but the most likely direction seems to be quantum physics. Regarding precognition, in particular, there is much reason for hope here. Quantum physicists, with no thought at all to psi, are prone to discussing the possible ways in which the future may affect the present (see the recent Discover magazine article, for example.) Strange though it may sound to the layperson, the foundational equations of quantum physics don’t provide much support for the common-sense notion that time only flows forwards.
In 2006, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) organized an interdisciplinary conference of physicists and psi researchers specifically to discuss the physics of time and retrocausation. The proceedings were published as a book by the American Institute of Physics.
Quantum theory itself is not understood perfectly, and its equations can’t (yet) be exactly solved except in very simple cases. So it’s conceivable that psi phenomena can be explained by modern physics as is, once we learn to solve and interpret the equations better.
Is Precognition Real? Cornell University Lab Releases Powerful New Evidence that the Human Mind can Perceive the Future - h+ Mediah+ Media
Nobody knows yet for sure, but the most likely direction seems to be quantum physics. Regarding precognition, in particular, there is much reason for hope here. Quantum physicists, with no thought at all to psi, are prone to discussing the possible ways in which the future may affect the present (see the recent Discover magazine article, for example.) Strange though it may sound to the layperson, the foundational equations of quantum physics don’t provide much support for the common-sense notion that time only flows forwards.
In 2006, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) organized an interdisciplinary conference of physicists and psi researchers specifically to discuss the physics of time and retrocausation. The proceedings were published as a book by the American Institute of Physics.
Quantum theory itself is not understood perfectly, and its equations can’t (yet) be exactly solved except in very simple cases. So it’s conceivable that psi phenomena can be explained by modern physics as is, once we learn to solve and interpret the equations better.
Is Precognition Real? Cornell University Lab Releases Powerful New Evidence that the Human Mind can Perceive the Future - h+ Mediah+ Media
One company made a program called "Intuition Tester" and discusses the value of "USING INTUITION TO SELECT THE BEST BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES":
Do you believe that statistic is reliable?
In their book The New Science of the Paranormal: From the Research Lab To Real Life, Carl Llewellyn Weschcke and Joe H. Slate write about a survey of 500 college students who were asked to answer Yes or No to the question:
"I have had at least one experience of knowing, for no apparent reason, what was about to happen or what was going to happen in the near future." 427 respondents answered "Yes."
The authors explained:
Let me also share with you the famous psychologist Carl Jung's explanations of three forms of synchronicity, the third category of which he considered to be precognition:
In his 1951 Eranos lecture[, Jung] offers a definition which recognizes three categories of events to which the term synchronicity can be applied.
The first category includes happenings such as the scarab incident where a psychic event (the patient's recalling her dream of a scarab) and a physical event (the actual appearance of a scarabaeid beetle) occur at the same time and in the same place (during the analytic session in Jung's consulting room).
Here there is indeed simultaneity between the psychic and physical events (Jung 1951b: 526).
The second category includes happenings where a psychic event occurs and a corresponding physical event takes place more or less simultaneously but at a distance, so that the approximate simultaneity can only be established afterwards (Jung 1951b: 526). Jung cites as an illustration Emanuel Swedenborg's well-attested vision of the great fire in Stockholm in 1759. Swedenborg was at a party in Gottenburg about two hundred miles from Stockholm when the vision occurred.
He told his companions at six o'clock in the evening that the fire had started, then described its course over the next two hours, exclaiming in relief at eight o'clock that it had at last been extinguished, just three doors from his own house. All these details were confirmed when messengers arrived in Gottenburg from Stockholm over the next few days (Jung 1952: 481, 483).
The third category includes happenings where a psychic event occurs and a corresponding physical event takes place in the future. Here there is not even approximate simultaneity (Jung 1951b: 526). An example mentioned by Jung is of a student friend of his whose father had promised him a trip to Spain if he passed his final examinations satisfactorily.
The friend then had a dream of seeing various things in a Spanish city: a particular square, a Gothic Cathedral, and, around a certain corner, a carriage drawn by two cream-colored horses. Shortly afterwards, having successfully passed his examinations, he actually visited Spain for the first time and encountered all the details from his dream in reality (Jung 1951b: 522).
Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal
The first category includes happenings such as the scarab incident where a psychic event (the patient's recalling her dream of a scarab) and a physical event (the actual appearance of a scarabaeid beetle) occur at the same time and in the same place (during the analytic session in Jung's consulting room).
Here there is indeed simultaneity between the psychic and physical events (Jung 1951b: 526).
The second category includes happenings where a psychic event occurs and a corresponding physical event takes place more or less simultaneously but at a distance, so that the approximate simultaneity can only be established afterwards (Jung 1951b: 526). Jung cites as an illustration Emanuel Swedenborg's well-attested vision of the great fire in Stockholm in 1759. Swedenborg was at a party in Gottenburg about two hundred miles from Stockholm when the vision occurred.
He told his companions at six o'clock in the evening that the fire had started, then described its course over the next two hours, exclaiming in relief at eight o'clock that it had at last been extinguished, just three doors from his own house. All these details were confirmed when messengers arrived in Gottenburg from Stockholm over the next few days (Jung 1952: 481, 483).
The third category includes happenings where a psychic event occurs and a corresponding physical event takes place in the future. Here there is not even approximate simultaneity (Jung 1951b: 526). An example mentioned by Jung is of a student friend of his whose father had promised him a trip to Spain if he passed his final examinations satisfactorily.
The friend then had a dream of seeing various things in a Spanish city: a particular square, a Gothic Cathedral, and, around a certain corner, a carriage drawn by two cream-colored horses. Shortly afterwards, having successfully passed his examinations, he actually visited Spain for the first time and encountered all the details from his dream in reality (Jung 1951b: 522).
Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal
The problem that Jung came up against was the problem of "causality", that an event in time may cause that which comes afterwards, but not events preceding itself in time. In order to address this problem, he proposed a principle of Acausality.
Acausality
[/B]
Regarding its existence in the realm normal sensory experience, he says:
Jung's actual argument for acausality involves two stages.
First, he argues that the inability of modern science to predict the behavior of subatomic particles proves that the relationship between the particles is not simply causal but must also involve some element of acausality.
Second, he argues that because this acausality exists in the microphysical world of subatomic particles, it ought also to exist in the macrophysical world of normal sensory experience. Both stages of the argument can be challenged.
It is certainly the case that, in Jung's day and still at present, the behavior of individual subatomic particles cannot be predicted other than probabilistically. But from this fact it does not necessarily follow that such behavior involves an element of irreducible acausality. It is true that subatomic randomness may stem from acausality, but then again it may not. And even if it does, this is not because such randomness itself implies acausality.
The acausal cannot simply be inferred from the merely probabilistic: if event A is followed by event B only seventy-five per cent of the time, this does not entail that B is not caused by A.
Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal
[/B]
"The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other factors which would be necessary for an explanation." (Jung 1952: 421)
This 'other factor' is Jung's 'acausal connecting principle'. He believes the above argument to have proved the existence of the principle in 'the realm of very small quantities' (Jung 1952: 421).Regarding its existence in the realm normal sensory experience, he says:
"We shall naturally look round in vain in the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist. Their existence - or at least their possibility - follows logically from the premise of statistical truth." (Jung 1952: 421--2)
...Jung's actual argument for acausality involves two stages.
First, he argues that the inability of modern science to predict the behavior of subatomic particles proves that the relationship between the particles is not simply causal but must also involve some element of acausality.
Second, he argues that because this acausality exists in the microphysical world of subatomic particles, it ought also to exist in the macrophysical world of normal sensory experience. Both stages of the argument can be challenged.
It is certainly the case that, in Jung's day and still at present, the behavior of individual subatomic particles cannot be predicted other than probabilistically. But from this fact it does not necessarily follow that such behavior involves an element of irreducible acausality. It is true that subatomic randomness may stem from acausality, but then again it may not. And even if it does, this is not because such randomness itself implies acausality.
The acausal cannot simply be inferred from the merely probabilistic: if event A is followed by event B only seventy-five per cent of the time, this does not entail that B is not caused by A.
Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal
I took an online precognition test that you can find here:
Free Online Precognition Championship
My results the first time I took the text were:
The first time I took the test, I used a round of ten questions, with a 50 % chance of getting them right. I answered 7 out of the ten questions correctly, which impressed me. But the test data form said that ten questions were insufficient in number to show precognition. The test wants a larger sample size.
The second time I took the test I answered 50 questions and got 27 right, with this result:
