There are others playing the same card, from Pyramidologists to Ancient Astronaut promoters to Flying Saucers Will Save Us visionaries to Rosicrucians. Regular UFO enthusiasts and Loch Ness monster photographers are much less dangerous. We focus on the prophets: those who, like followers of Nostradamus's prophecies or astrology, must believe that all the little contingencies add up to a grand pattern of the human future and that Fate rules us all.
This is the tribal interpretation of the feeling of free wilclass="underline" it is an illusion, for God already knows our futures. Kismet (the word comes from the Turkish 'qismet' and Arabic 'qisma') rules.
Moreover -a neat twist that gives power over people as well as their money -whether you will be a beetle or a king in the next turn of the cosmic wheel is determined by the balance that you have achieved in this life. This is equally out of your control, in practice, but you can escape to an inner life, making it as far as possible irrelevant to the vicissitudes that attack your outer self, and thereby avoid beetlehood in your next incarnation.
That apparent escape again depends on our ability to construct stories about our future. Here, our future divides, with the soul taking one direction under our own control and freed from the control of powerful others, while the body is manifestly bowed by slavery, starvation, or torture.
Hundreds of millions have found comfort in that apparent control of their futures, following the story of their spiritual selves and denying the pains of the material self.
In the Buddhist literature and practice, something close to that transcendence seems to be achievable. If you believe in fate, or the nearby concept of karma, then wisdom can consist only in foreseeing events, training your spiritual self to accept what happens, and teaching others to do the same. Some authority will provide your map of material events, but your destiny cannot be avoided by fighting it. Your only option is to lead a disciplined spiritual life, guided by stories of previous successes in this quest, notably the Buddha, and to entertain hopes of leaving the Wheel of Life altogether, to exist as a spiritual presence with all ties to the material severed.
This nirvanic view of heaven is not for those who enjoy the material ride too much to want to get off the bus. And the paradoxical nature of the prophetic predictions -of all prophetic predictions
-is disturbing. There is no way at all that a deterministic Earth can be accommodated by today's view of what planets are like, and most of today's more sophisticated religions have no room for an immanent God, tinkering with each life, and its context, to achieve its destiny. Those that do have room for immanence encounter real problems with modern technology, whose basis lies in ways-of-the-universe modelled by science, not by djinns or the whim of a deity or deities. And although we may, with Fredric Brown, be amused that when the djinni that worked the electric light and the radio came out on strike, the steam-power genies came out in sympathy, we enjoy this animistic fantasy as fuel for Murphy's Law and nice Disneyesque animations. We don't buy any of it for real causality.
Joseph Needham brought light to this kind of confusion. He pointed out, in the introduction to his truly gigantic History of Science in China, that the reason why China never developed science as the West knows it is that they never espoused monotheism. In polytheistic philosophies, it isn't very sensible to search for the cause of something, like a thunderstorm, say: you're liable to get a very contingent answer involving several incidents in the love lives of the gods, and an explanation of the provenance of thunderbolts that verges on the ridiculous.51
Monotheists, however, by which we mean someone like Abraham, to whom we shall return later, reckon that God had a consistent set of ideas and causalities in mind when he set the universe up.
One set of ideas. If you expect your one God to be consistent, then it's worth asking how those causalities relate to each other: for example, 'black clouds and rain will be associated with thunderstorms when ..." whatever. The monotheist can predict the weather, even if rather badly.
But the polytheist needs a theopsychologist and a precise account of what the gods are up to at the moment. She needs to know whether a tiff between two gods will result in a thunderstorm.
So scientific causality is compatible with God-causality, but not with gods-causality.
Monotheists, moreover, have a built-in intolerance. The position that there is only one truth, only one avenue to the one God, sets each monotheistic religion in opposition to all others. There is no room for manoeuvre, no way to tolerate the manifest errors of people who believe in some other god. So monotheism laid the foundation for the Inquisition, and for intemperate Christianity through the ages from the crusades through to African and Polynesian missionaries.
'I have the story, and it is the only one' is characteristic of many cults, all of them intolerant.
Faiths, of course, do get along. But they get along because of the hammering they have taken at the hands of science, material development and better education. They get along because of wise people within them who recognise the commonality of humanity. Where there are too few wise people, you get Northern Ireland. If you are lucky.
If the future is not fixed, but malleable, and we can predict the effects of our present behaviour, however badly, then predicting the future can be self-defeating. And that can even be the reason for predicting it.
Most of the Biblical prophets seem, like many science-fiction authors today, to be warning against what might happen if we go on as we are doing. So they succeed when their prophecy is not correct, because people heed it and change their actions. We can understand that; even though the prophecy didn't come true, we can all see that it might have done: it has given us a better idea of the phase space that the future of our culture lives in.
What about the gypsy who prophesies that a tall dark man will come into your life, thus making you receptive to all those future tall dark men? (if tall dark men interest you, of course; it's up to you.) This could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, the opposite of the stories told by Biblical prophets. It's a story that the recipient is sympathetic to, wants to happen.
There are said to be only seven basic story plots, so perhaps our minds are much less varied than we think, so that the newspaper astrologer and the fortune-teller are navigating a much smaller phase space of human experience than we thought. This would account for so many people feeling that the predictions show deep insight.
But when astronomers predict the future, and get it right, people are, paradoxically, much less impressed. When they predict eclipses correctly, every time, this seems less meaningful than the astrologers nearly getting many people right, sometimes. Remember Y2K, the prophecy that planes would fall out of the sky soon after the year 2000 dawned and your toaster wouldn't work? That prophecy cost the world several billion dollars in work to avert the problem -and it didn't happen. A waste of time, then? Not at all. It didn't happen because people took precautions. If they hadn't done, the cost would have been much higher. It was a Biblical prophecy: 'If this goes on ...' And, lo, the multitude heeded.
This recursive dependence of prophecy upon people's responses to it, unlike most of the other kinds of thing that we say, relates back to our facility with our own made-up little futures, the stories that we tell ourselves. They confirm us in our identities. It is no wonder that when someone -an astrologer or Nostradamus, say -pokes his finger into this mental place where we live, and inserts some of his own stories, we want to believe him. His stories are more exciting than ours. We wouldn't have thought, going down the stairs to get a train to work, 'I wonder if I'm going to meet a tall dark guy today?' But once it's been put into our minds, we smile at all the dark men, even some quite short ones. And so our lives are changed (perhaps in quite major ways, if you are a man doing the smiling) as are the stories that we ourselves proposed for our futures.