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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that astrology is in principle testable and it should be able to make concrete predictions. Obviously, popular astrology uses such woolly terms that all of the predictions can be interpreted as accurate to the believer.

However, the few times that anyone has tried to verify astrological predictions, it's turned out to be false.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-30007-001

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If we get into this territory all major religions struggle as well. Petty gods from the canon somehow fail to deliver unambiguous punishment for clearly worded insults. The outrage over Bible or Quran burnings is largely driven by the demonstrated impotence of the deity rather than the sacrilege itself. The stories themselves are completely bonkers and self-contradicting in many aspects.

But I guess ignoring all religious people in the world is simply impractical.

I can't think of any religions that make any clear predictions, so they're not even wrong (as opposed to astrology which is clearly wrong). So-called punishments are typically enacted in some other realm (e.g. after-life, rebirth into a lower form etc) which leads to some experimental problems in verifying the claims.

I disagree about your interpretation of burning of religious books - surely that's more to do with people getting angry about their beliefs and culture being deliberately insulted. Burning a flag doesn't get people angry because of the impotence of whatever grouping the flag represents - it's because it's a direct insult to the people who value what the flag represents.

In college a Christian friend readily gave "evidence" of predictions in the bible as reason why he believes that religion. I think a lot of religious people do think there are clear predictions. I wish I remembered his examples (which I found uninteresting at the time) — I think one was a prediction of an invasion of Tyre?

The problem with a lot of historical predictions is that they were too vague to be useful i.e. could someone armed with a bible have known enough about an invasion of Tyre to make a bet with someone before it happened? e.g. I bet they get invaded in the next two weeks.

Predictions of that nature are usually just re-interpretations based on knowledge after the fact.

Israel was recreated in one day. As prophesied.

"Who has ever heard of such things? Who has ever seen things like this? Can a country be born in a day or a nation be brought forth in a moment? Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than she gives birth to her children." Isaiah 66:8

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day.[1]

[1] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-isra...

A prophecy is different to a concrete prediction.

People in the 1930s weren't able to use the bible to predict that Israel would be created in a day in the next 20 years. There's also the doubt over how long a "day" is in the bible, so it seems more a case of it only being a prediction in hindsight.

There's a better critique here: https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/does-the-state-of-...

This prophecy also has a self-fulfilling prophecy nature to it, because plenty of groups in America (alone) had good and (maybe mostly) terrible reasons to follow the prophecy "like a blueprint".

And yet,

Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled....

It could have also been about Jesus and his death

Flag burning is a great example in fact: the outrage simply never reaches the levels it is with holy text burnings. Not to stone-the-tourists, burn-the-embassy levels of outrage: possibly (speculating here) because flag burning does not assault one's identity in a way similar to demonstrating the futility of one's beliefs.

If we get to the punishments, things were clearly handed swiftly in the Old Testament. The Biblical concept of Hell as we know it (the place of eternal punishment) didn't emerge until the New Testament as it was in a way redundant.

And come on, we know holy texts are full of things which are clearly wrong, in exactly the same way astrology is. The temptation to gloss over them as ornamental bits is huge, but to believers they are doctrinal.

> And come on, we know holy texts are full of things which are clearly wrong, in exactly the same way astrology is. The temptation to gloss over them as ornamental bits is huge, but to believers they are doctrinal.

I can't think of any precise statements that are clear enough to be proved true or false. Usually holy texts have vague enough language that it's very much a case of interpretation. e.g. The Genesis creation story states that God created the universe in 6 days, but any attempt to demonstrate that it is false will have believers declaring that a "day" is not a precise measurement of time.

Walking on water (or parting it at will) is rather unambiguous. The whole resurrection thing also would be mocked as taking Walking Dead seriously if not most people grew up seeing that believing this is acceptable.

An account of someone walking on water or parting it is clear enough, but is meaningless without supporting evidence. Of course, supporting evidence would need to be stronger than our everyday experience of people not being able to walk on water.

It reminds me somewhat of James Randi's debunking of psychic powers - despite people having witnessed miraculous feats of spoon bending etc. no-one could replicate it under controlled conditions.

>The Genesis creation story states that God created the universe in 6 days, but any attempt to demonstrate that it is false will have believers declaring that a "day" is not a precise measurement of time.

The Bible is rather clear that God doesn't measure time like humans do.

"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."

2 Peter 3:8

The bible is a clear about a lot of things that are utter nonsense, I wouldn't use it as a guide for anything related to things like measurements of anything.

And a day is a day, no matter how you try to spin it after a couple of thousand years of peddling nonsense to try to make the gravytrain go a little farther.

This is no different than the Jehova's witnesses changing their 'due date' whenever it doesn't work.

Not at all! Let God be true, and every human being a liar. As it is written: “So that you may be proved right when you speak and prevail when you judge.” Romans 3:4

> This is no different than the Jehova's witnesses changing their 'due date' whenever it doesn't work.

Or much different than the excuses science's fan base will trot out whenever it gets caught speaking untruthfully, like their Theory of "Everything" Motte and Bailey.

It seems humans have to worship something, and what they worship is usually what is pushed by the mainstream, and whatever it is will be defended aggressively.

Welcome to planet Earth, please enjoy your stay.

... and thus some Christians claim the six day chronology in Genesis is really a six thousand year chronology... which still doesn't square with science.

To say nothing of the fact that 2 Peter was written centuries (if not longer) after Genesis, and there's no evidence the Hebrews themselves interpreted the account that way. The existence of the Sabbath falling within a single week rather than multiple millennia suggests they interpreted the six day chronology as... six days.

And the context of that verse clearly describes time from the human perspective relative to God's promises. The author isn't making a declarative statement about the way God experiences time, but pointing out that God doesn't operate on human timescales. That God may lay plans that take a thousand years to unfold.

That particular retcon doesn't make Christians look any better, it actually makes them look even worse.

Okay, so are the 6 days actually 6 thousand years?

I take it to mean the creation account is from God's perspective not ours.

I don't have the slightest problem with modern science and it's reckoning of creation.

The universe started with light in both accounts.

> The universe started with light in both accounts.

First light was estimated to be about 240,000 to 300,000 years after the big bang, so I would hesitate to say that the universe started with light [1]. You could determine that the first "day" started 300,000 years or so after the big bang, but then that throws off the other timings of creation. This demonstrates how the bible isn't even precise enough to be proven wrong as the "day" can seem to mean whatever people want it to mean.

> I take it to mean the creation account is from God's perspective not ours.

This sounds to me almost like a get-out clause as presumably God's perspective can be interpreted to be anything you want and cannot be proven false (similar to how an invisible pink unicorn's perspective can never be proven false).

[1] https://phys.org/news/2016-11-universe.html

That's just a bizarre definition of light. By that definition the center of a star is dark because the photons keep getting reabsorbed immediately. Which is always true from a photons point of view anyway, so what's the difference? In fact you might as well say that the universe was dark until the first eye evolved.

Your view of the six days of creation is backwards. It is a story that is meant to justify the division into weeks and the concept of Shabbat, a day off once in a week.

It is probably the most widespread social policy that had ever been spread by any religion.

You can look everywhere in the world, including the non judeo Christian parts, and see the work week with a day off implemented.

It is such an intuitive and effective policy that nearly everyone forgot where it came from - but back then, it took a lot of effort to get people on board with it.

So don't judge the merit of the story by whether it's physically how the world was created, but by how the message and the consequences it teaches the reader have changed the world.

Every time you have the weekend to look forward to, remember that without some people believing God created the world in 6 days, you would be working non stop, or without the same day as your family to stop and rest.

It's definitely debatable whether that's how the world was created (I don't think it was that way), but the merits of the message of story are also undeniable. And it is the kind of message you can only get people initially on board with using drastic beliefs.

>The Biblical concept of Hell as we know it (the place of eternal punishment) didn't emerge until the New Testament as it was in a way redundant.

The OT did have a concept of Hell. It is called "Sheol"[1].

"Therefore Sheol enlarges its throat, and opens wide its enormous jaws, and down go Zion’s nobles and masses, her revelers and carousers!"

Isaiah 5:14

"As drought and heat consume the melting snow, so Sheol steals those who have sinned. "

Job 24:19

I could go on.

[1] https://biblehub.com/hebrew/7585.htm

...but they're not even self-consistent doctrines. See: the problem of evil.

Astrology benefits greatly from the pigeonhole fallacy. With as few as twelve pigeonholes in most astrological predictions, of course there are going to be enough people overfitted to the model that any prediction "succeeds" for enough people that you can claim all the failures were within the bounds of statistical error.

It's related to why MBTI lasted so long as "science" because it proved many concrete predictions through overfitting and hand-waving away errors as statistical anomalies rather than the pigeonhole principle at work. There are still plenty of people that think it valid. Perhaps ironically, MBTI even seems to making a comeback among many of the same people that are flocking to Astrology. If you're going to live by one pigeonhole fallacy you might as well live by more than one, I suppose.

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