Prophecy Prayer

                The self-fulfilling prophecy claims are one of those claims I always hear from people who don’t seem to have thought much about it.  The claim is that a prophecy comes true if people are working towards making it come true.  There are two major issues with this argument.

The first problem is it doesn’t take the weight of the prophecy into account.  If a prophecy was about your lawn dying, and you go out of your way to make sure you don’t water your lawn, then you can insist there was nothing divine or miraculous about the prophecy coming true.  However you cannot deny the prophecy was fulfilled.  Why is this important?  Well if you take into account that the people were trying to fulfill a prophecy as grounds to deny them then you are practically ignoring the nature of what prophecies are.  Most major and religious prophecies usually serve as a guide for people who believe in them and trying to bring about their fulfillment.  What must be looked it, if to decide objectively, is the likelihood of a prophecy coming true when it was made.  For example, in HADITH ALDAR, when the Prophet () invited the tribe leaders and announced to them what he had been receiving and that he was a prophet, everyone dismissed him except for Ali, who was 15 years old at the time.  The Prophet then proceeded to embracing him and foretelling the entire room, full of people poking fun at them, of his position and how he will be his standard bearer and his caliph after him.  The fact of this prophecy came true can’t simply be discredited because things changed and Islam became more prevalent to the end.  You are completely overlooking the near decade of hardships and persecution the Prophet and his family endured.  The belief of such a prophecy coming true would have made you the laughing stock of the town.  A better case can be made for the Prophet’s prophecy predicting the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire and its conversion to Islam.  The fact that people at the time were motivated by this prophecy and encouraged to try to concquer the city (present day Istanboul), doesn’t take away from the miraculous prediction made by the Prophet to handful of supporters and no army in a distant desert.

And the second reason, which ties into the first one as well, is the fact that every prophecy is a self-fulfilling prophecy by the nature of its existence.  Due to the Butterfly effect, any prophecy that comes into existence becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy if it were to come true.  Because the same argument can always be made that even if nobody was trying to fulfill it, its nonexistence would have changed a chain reaction that would have caused it to not be fullfilled.  So if one was to insist that the prophecy needs to come true without anyone even attempting to make it come about, he would be asking for an impossible event.  You are asking for a prophecy to be fulfilled without it ever being brought into existence and hence nobody would ever know it was fulfilled.  The way I am seeing it, it looks very much like a strawman argument.  You created this new yet nonsensical category of prophecies called self-fulling prophecies and you attacked them on the basis of influencing their own fulfillment, which all prophecies do based on their own nature of existing.  It is a nonsensical category because it does not distinguish between itself and just a prophecy.  You created that distinction which became a requirement despite never being claimed by the proponents of prophetic traditions.  Most prophecies of consequence refer to someone or some people accomplishing a great task.  So using the only possible way of prophecy being fulfilled as the basis for denying it the prophetic meaning is the definition of being closed minded.  Because by that logic you offered no possible event that you are willing to accept a prophecy coming true except never existing in the first place.  You see the hole in this logic?  So keep in mind that this criteria was added on by “magicians” to discredit why all the Prophet’s prophecies came true, completely ignoring the fact they are considered miraculous great not because of HOW they came true, but because they actually DID!  To sum up, the only way to distinguish between fake and real prophecies is by evaluating the likelihood of it coming true at the time it was made.

Prophecies are predictions about future event

True prophecies are predictions of highly unlikely events

All true prophecies are prophecies

All true prophecies are self-fulfilling prophecies