No Sacred Cows

by David G. McAfee

  One common example of an alleged biblical prophecy is the so-called mark of the beast,14 which many modern believers have concluded must actually be a reference to government-ordered microchip implants in the right hand or forehead. In order to believe this, however, adherents must completely ignore that the Bible says nothing about microchips and that such a system has never been instituted by any governing body. Just like most alleged prophecies, this mark-of-the-beast idea has been shown to be nothing more than a vague line of text that has been interpreted in numerous ways by people of various times.

  In 2013, as President Barack Obama sought congressional approval to attack Syria for its use of chemical weapons, another biblical prophecy resurfaced as seemingly being fulfilled (if only in the minds of believers). The events in Syria were seen by many believers as a sign of the End Times, but I have to be honest in saying their evidence for this connection, a passage from the Bible,15 isn’t impressive or chilling. Here’s the quote: “See, Damascus will no longer be a city but will become a heap of ruins.” Let’s look at the facts: Damascus was first settled in the second millennium BCE, so how many times since then do you think it has been threatened by some sort of military action? If a city in that region didn’t see some sort of threat after more than two thousand years, that’d be impressive—not the other way around.

  ISLAM AND SCIENTIFIC FOREKNOWLEDGE

  A lot of Christian prophecies are rooted in Judaism, which is also the source of Islam and its heavy reliance on predictions and foreknowledge. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and many other Muslim apologists suggest their holy book, the Qur’an, foretold everything from fingerprinting to genetic engineering16 to the speed of light. But it seems as though Allah has cleverly disguised these prophecies in vague pieces of text that could only be interpreted in that way once a discovery has been made. In other words, while many Muslims believe the Qur’an predicted modern communication systems, none will show proof that cell phones and social media websites were believed in and understood hundreds of years ago when the text was written. Instead, they will likely point to Qur’an 81:7, which in some translations reads, “And when various people are brought together.” Is suggesting at some point in time some group of people will be brought together really a clear “prophecy”? Does it show the authors of the Qur’an had intimate knowledge of future events? My basic reasoning skills tell me no.

  These religious predictions are often intentionally vague and therefore difficult to completely debunk, but one common piece of alleged scientific foreknowledge in the Qur’an is particularly interesting because it’s blatantly false. A surprising number of Muslims claim that the Qur’an made accurate scientific predictions about “two seas meeting together” with a “barrier which none of them can transgress,”17 sometimes in conjunction with a photograph of what looks to be two oceans coming together but refusing to mix. There are common stories that go along with this prophecy, including that French explorer Jacques Cousteau discovered the phenomenon and that it made him accept Islam,18 but even just a small amount of research shows us that this is merely a myth supporting more myths. Firstly, Cousteau didn’t discover the spot where oceans don’t mix, because it doesn’t exist. And secondly, he never converted to Islam. This is a fact that has been proven and accepted by nearly everyone, including the Cousteau Society, which stated in 1991 that its founder “has not become a Muslim” and that the rumor was passed “without foundation,” and even certain Muslim groups. Cousteau, who was alive at that time and did not repudiate his foundation’s statement, had a Roman Catholic funeral when he died years later.19

  This piece of alleged Qur’anic prophecy is further called into question by the fact that the false story is often passed along with photos purportedly showing two oceans with different salinity levels that touch but don’t mix. The problem with the pictures, taken by Ken Bruland, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz,20 and photographer Kent Smith,21 is that they don’t depict two oceans meeting at all. According to Bruland, the interesting shot is actually the result of “glacial rivers” that carry sediments into the ocean. Experts say this is not a static place “where oceans meet” and that, despite appearances, the waters are mixing together all the time.22

  There is a seemingly never-ending stream of claimed prophecies stemming from the Qur’an, and every year there are more. With each new scientific discovery, apologists for Islam (and other religions) from around the world jump at the chance to say their holy book predicted it hundreds of years ago. When modern astronomers said ancient supernovas were a source of Earth’s iron,23 some Muslims pointed to Qur’an 57:25, which says, “We sent down iron, wherein is great military might and benefits for the people…” Because the Qur’an states that iron was “sent down,” they reason, its writers must have been predicting the source of the material in 10-billion-year-old exploding stars. This happened again with the 2016 discovery of gravitational waves,24 ripples in the curvature of spacetime that were predicted by Albert Einstein.25 Instead of marveling at the real “prophecy,” which was foretold by Einstein through his theory of general relativity, Muslims all over the world pointed to the Qur’an hoping to claim credit. But Qur’an 21:33, the verse most often put forth alongside this claim, doesn’t say anything about gravitational radiation or binary star systems. Instead, it says, “And it is He who created the night and the day and the sun and the moon; all [heavenly bodies] in an orbit are swimming.” Once again, to anyone thinking critically, this verse does not meet the standards of a statement that predicts anything—let alone the direct observance of gravitational waves.

  The fact is that none of these scientific discoveries were predicted by the Qur’an or any other holy book—it’s always post event rationalization and pattern detection. These are simply findings that, in hindsight, people forced into their religious texts to give the illusion of scientific accuracy. No one has ever read the Qur’an and, through that process, discovered a new scientific theory. It has never provided any new information as far as science is concerned. Furthermore, the Qur’an doesn’t describe any novel discoveries with specificity that could actually be helpful, and you can find nearly identical “predictions” in every religion and holy book. For these reasons, vague verses pulled out of context are more like horoscopes than scientific predictions. Believers can make them mean whatever they’d like with a little mental gymnastics.

  MAKING A PROPHECY

  The beautiful thing about prophecies, the trait that grants them such wide appeal, is that they can be made out of anything or nothing at all. All you need is your imagination and any book, speech, cinema scene, tweet, etc. can be endowed with predictive meaning and world-changing importance. We could take any poorly written teen romance novel, Twilight for instance, and, using scientific facts, make it seem as though it is prophetic to anyone who wants to believe. That process looks like this:

  1. Stephenie Meyer, formerly a receptionist, had little or no knowledge of bats and their biology when she published the first Twilight book in 2005.

  2. Meyer’s book contained vampire characters that sparkled when exposed to sunlight, as opposed to being destroyed by it as traditional vampires would be.

  3. Certain types of insect-eating bats, because of their diet heavy in shiny bugs, produce sparkly feces or guano.26

  4. Therefore, Meyer must have had some form of subconscious knowledge of bat anatomy and habits that was given to her by a god.

  The prophecies don’t usually stop after one. If Twilight predicted sparkly bat guano, what else could its author have foretold? Perhaps the struggle between werewolves and vampires represents contentious elections between liberals and conservatives. Or maybe a child born to the two main characters predicts the coming of a savior figure to the world. When your imagination is the limit, any prophecy can seem reasonable.

  I’m not the only one to create my own prophecies using popular books. Dr. Carl H. Fischer, a chief technologist known as Atheist Engi
neer,27 compiled a fascinating list of Dr. Seuss works that could be interpreted as prophetic texts. In his post,28 Fischer shows how Green Eggs and Ham could actually have been a prediction about genetically modified foods or about mankind finding the value in molds like penicillin,29 and that One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish is really a prophecy for “evolutionary changes in species and the discovery of the Tiktaalik fossils.” Fischer lists more than a dozen examples, including prophecies from books like The Cat in the Hat and Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

  “See how it’s done? Simply pick a verse and find something plausible that it could be an analogy for after-the-fact,” Fischer wrote. “There are enough flowery and non-specific verses in the Bible to satisfy nearly any event.”

  ALLEGED PROPHECIES OF NOSTRADAMUS

  There are countless alleged prophecies that people have accepted and promoted throughout human history, but perhaps none are as commonly known or believed as those of French apothecary and astrologer Michel de Nostredame, more commonly known as Nostradamus. Nostradamus is often credited with foreseeing large-scale events, including the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the coming of Hitler, and the sinking of the Titanic. But let’s look at what Nostradamus the man actually wrote before analyzing the predictive capabilities of Nostradamus the legend.

  Claim: Nostradamus predicted that the World Trade Center towers in New York would be attacked and destroyed on September 11, 2001.

  What Nostradamus actually wrote: “Earth-shaking flames from the world’s center roar / And make the earth around a ‘New City’ quiver.”30

  What it sounds like: To me it sounds as if Nostradamus was telling a story about a volcano eruption or an earthquake, but nothing indicates special knowledge of a terrorist attack.

  Claim: Nostradamus foretold the coming of the atomic bomb.

  What Nostradamus actually wrote: “Near the gates and within two cities / There will be scourges the like of which was never seen, / Famine within plague, people put out by steel, / Crying to the great immortal God for relief.”31

  What it sounds like: Nostradamus is clearly writing about some sort of disaster involving two cities, but what do the gates represent? And couldn’t these lines just as easily be describing any large-scale fatal event?

  Claim: Nostradamus wrote about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy hundreds of years before they actually occurred.

  What Nostradamus actually wrote: “The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt, / An evil deed foretold by the bearer of a petition. / According to the prediction, another falls at night time. / Conflict at Reims, London and a pestilence in Tuscany.”32

  What it sounds like: This could refer to any great leader, and the “prediction” makes no mention of the second to fall as a relative. The terms are vague enough to fit with anything, but specific enough that we wonder how the assassinations could have caused infectious diseases in Tuscany.

  Claim: Nostradamus prophesied the fatal explosion of NASA’s Challenger space shuttle, which killed seven people in 1986.

  What Nostradamus actually wrote: “Nine will be set aside from the human flock, / Removed from judgment and counsel: / Their fate will be determined on departure / Kappa, Thita, Lambda, dead, banished, astray.”33

  What it sounds like: The Challenger disaster killed seven people, not nine, and although the crash was caused by defective parts from a company called Thiokol, nothing in the prophecy seems to relate to this event at all.

  As you can see, Nostradamus wrote his prophecies each in four-line poems often using ambiguous language, so the brief poetic sentences can be interpreted in incredibly varied ways by different readers. His quatrains were ultimately published in a book called Centuries, and people all over the world were free to interpret them, using their own preconceived notions as a basis, for more than four hundred years after the author’s death. This format has allowed believers to forge their own meanings and to shoehorn current events into short, often nonsensical lines. To make matters worse, due to his popularity, there are thousands of fake Nostradamus prophecies being circulated and many people unquestioningly accept them as legitimate. The key to understanding Nostradamus’ popular appeal and reputation as an accurate future-teller lies within his writing style. Benjamin Radford, science writer and author of Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment, says Nostradamus was “clever enough to couch his quatrains in such vague terms that people read whatever they want into them.” The famous seer “wrote in Middle French, using vague words, metaphors and obscure, badly dated references,” according to Radford.

  “Despite his legions of followers, a close analysis of Nostradamus’s writings reveals that he did not make predictions (statements that come true after you read them) instead he makes post-dictions (statements that appear to come true only after the events happen),” he wrote for Live Science.34 “If Nostradamus had truly predicted the September 11 attacks, World War II, or the Challenger shuttle accident, for example, the world should have known about them decades (indeed centuries) before they occurred.”

  OTHER PREDICTIONS

  Not all predictions are as old or mysterious as those put forth by Nostradamus. When I said you can make a prophecy out of anything, I meant it. A good example of this is Rick Joyner, the founder and executive director of MorningStar Ministries and Heritage International Ministries, who disclosed a prophecy related to the Super Bowl 50 football championship in 2016. According to Joyner, Bob Jones, an evangelist and founder of Bob Jones University, prophesied in 1988 that “black panthers are coming to the lumber yard in Charlotte.” Jones and Joyner initially thought this meant “some kind of attack was coming,” but after Charlotte got a National Football League team that built its stadium on an old lumber yard, they “knew it was a God thing,” Joyner said.

  “Bob then got more on this, and how they would be prophetic of something that would break out in Charlotte when they won the Super Bowl. If they do win this 50th Super Bowl it will be a sign to us, and the beginning of a great Jubilee,” Joyner wrote.35 “I understand if you did not know Bob and think this is a real stretch, or even crazy, but we witnessed him a number of times tell us who would win either the World Series (which he called ‘the world seriousness,’ and it was often a remarkable sign of things that would happen in the world,) or other sporting events. Occasionally he would even get scores to games before they were played, which were often signs indicating certain Scriptures etc. that turned out to be prophetic and accurate.”

  The Carolina Panthers ended up losing the game, with the Denver Broncos scoring 24 points to the Panthers’ 10, but there was no follow-up from Joyner. He didn’t tell us what a loss meant, how common these misses are in prophecies, or why Jones would have had a prediction about his city losing a Super Bowl. He just moved on, like all fortune-tellers must when their guesses have failed, and continued to preach his prophecy-based message.

  This failed prediction was just a bad guess, but other alleged prophecies are more like good guesses. For instance, some people say Ralph Epperson, a conspiracy theorist who published a book called New World Order in 1990, actually prophesied the coming of a global government controlled by powerful elites. This belief is based on the fact that, in Epperson’s book, he describes what the New World Order would look like. He says a number of outlandish things, including that religion and private property ownership will be “outlawed,” but what most people know about are his notes regarding “the family.” Epperson did predict that “homosexual marriages will be legalized,” which happened in the United States in 2015, so that could be considered a good guess. Within that same paragraph, however, the author suggests that “parents will not be allowed to raise their children” and that “all women will be employed by the state and not allowed to be ‘homemakers.’”36 Given that none of these other predictions have come to fruition, and only one line of Epperson’s New World Order prophecy has even remotely come to pas
s, I think it’s safe to write this off as a lucky accident.

  While good and bad fortune and vague terms are factors to consider when analyzing supernatural future-telling, occasionally a seemingly realized prophecy comes down to fraud. In other words, some prophecies appear to have been fulfilled only because they were secretly written after the event they intend to describe. These hindsight “predictions,” also called vaticinium ex eventu (or prophecy from the event), are intentionally misleading and can be found throughout religious and secular writings all over the world. One of the most popular examples of this is found in the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, when he allegedly foretells the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. Because of the fact that the Gospels were all written after the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE in which the temple was destroyed, historians consider this prediction to be vaticinium ex eventu.37

  “Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.”

  —C. J. Sansom

  NOTES

  1. Acts 2:20 and Revelation 6:12.

  2. Sarah Bailey, “‘Blood Moon’ Sets Off Apocalyptic Debate among Some Christians,” Washington Post, April 15, 2014.

  3. Adam Gabbatt, “Christian Group Predicts the World Will Be ‘Annihilated’ on Wednesday,” Guardian, October 6, 2015.

  4. Richard Singelenberg, “It Separated the Wheat from the Chaff: The 1975 Prophecy and Its Impact among Dutch Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Sociological Analysis 50 (Spring 1989): 23–40.

  5. Hanna Rosin, “As Jan. 1 Draws Near, Doomsayers Reconsider,” Washington Post, December 27, 1999, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-12/27/069r-122799-idx.html.