On Prophecy

Prophecy is another subject improved greatly by refusing to discuss it with prophets. Verified precognition exists, and is no longer seriously disputed: controlled experiments have demonstrated that certain individuals can obtain information concerning future events at rates exceeding chance. What remains disputed is nearly everything else.

Prophetic visions are notoriously imprecise, symbolic, conditional, and vulnerable to interpretation after the fact. A seer announces that “the crowned lion shall drown beneath a blackened sun,” and when a king later dies of pneumonia during an eclipse, scholars congratulate themselves upon the accuracy of the prediction. Had the same king fallen from a bridge, they would have done precisely the same.

The most reliable prophetic subjects are mundane ones: card draws, weather changes, mechanical failures, the arrival of letters. Accuracy declines dramatically as the predicted event becomes politically or emotionally important. This has led theologians to propose divine interference. It has led me to propose that prophecy functions badly under complex conditions, and since one of these explanations requires fewer gods, I leave the reader to decide which is more economical.