when people read the bible’s tea leaves

Physics tells us the the future is open-ended and our choices, as well as random chance, will affect what we’ll encounter as time goes by. Unfortunately for us, that’s just not good enough and since the dawn of civilization we’ve been trying to come up with ways to predict the future and failing spectacularly almost every time. But as true believers, we tend to ignore all the misses and focus on the one in a thousand predictions which seem to be more or less correct because they were worded vaguely enough, and with enough creative license and just a bit of wishful thinking, we can stretch the prediction to describe something that happened. And this is one of the tactics used by those who try to justify that religious beliefs should somehow affect scientific research and determine how we view the world. Apparently, the Bible is just filled with prophecies and if we look at a cryptic verse here or there, we’ll see that the people who wrote it could see the future and therefore, the Bible is true.

Now what could be wrong with this line of reasoning? How about the idea of using a random verse torn out of a narrative and used to define a recent event, then making the leap that it must be evidence of precognition? I get a number of comments and e-mails that ding me for ignoring the supposedly obvious predictive powers of a Biblical verse. For example take this recent example of the holy book telling us the future of warfare…

Jeremiah 50 verse 9 predicts that in a future battle, it will be the arrows themselves that will do the aiming, not the person firing them. Guided/homing missiles? How were people back then meant to know about homing missiles and the future hundreds of years ahead of their time?

Good question indeed. But who says they were actually describing modern missiles? Wouldn’t an omniscient deity showing them the future of the world explain what a missile was? Sure, you can describe a missile as a big arrow that sometimes aims itself, but that’s actually a rather oversimplified description of it. The guidance system of a missile isn’t self-aiming but rather, takes commands from human handlers and uses GPS or the laser signal from a bomber to its target to guide itself. Some missiles can use heat to track down aircraft or a surface target but they still rely on a human to point them in the right general direction, even with fire and forget technology which outsources the task of target tracking in flight to the missile itself.

Likewise, missiles have a powerful engine which spews fire and smoke in a trail behind them. They’re not flaming arrows, but rather big arrows with flames shooting out of their tails as big as the ancients’ biggest siege machines. One would think a weapon that powerful would get a more detailed write-up. However, we’re still making a basic flaw in our assumptions here. We’re going by the word of the person who claimed that Jeremiah 50:9 predicted homing missiles in the form of arrows that aim themselves. In reality, if we look up the actual verse, it says nothing of the sort. Instead it reads…

For, lo, I will raise and cause to come up against Babylon an assembly of great nations from the north country: and they shall set themselves in array against her; from thence she shall be taken: their arrows shall be as of a mighty expert man; none shall return in vain.

So in other words, every arrow will deliver a blow to the enemy. The idea of these arrows homing in on enemy targets seems to be in the imagination of the reader who wants to envision the verse foretelling the future. It’s even more unlikely that this quote relates to a modern event when we consider that Jeremiah 50 starts with a furious promise of revenge against the Babylonian hordes and describes an event not at some point in future warfare, but a very immediate concern in the ancient Hebrew world. How can one just take what’s supposedly the world of God, break it up into quotes stripped of all context, and build far reaching conclusions out of that?

I would be impressed if there was a chapter in the Bible devoted to discussing the dynamics of the World Wars or the MAD doctrine while explaining the basic mechanics of thermonuclear warheads, events that would deal with the modern world and its problems, not with the very typical punditry of the ancient world about something happening around the time the texts were written. Vague, out of context verses given meaning by the faithful in the quest to prove their faith to others just don’t do it for me, especially when they’re presented to contain a wealth of scientific information which modern science is only beginning to discover…