In Johnny Came Home, I explore the concept of super heroes [and villains] from a Biblical Creationist point of view. In that soon-to-be-published novel, John Lazarus must fight for the future of Midwich and possibly the world as we know it. The premise of the book is that the generally unrealized pre-Flood potential of humanity has occasionally surfaced in people we read about in myths and stories who could perform super human feats. These men and women have gone down in man’s writings as demi-gods, heroes, witches and mentalists.
I naturally wondered whether the ability to predict the future could be a potential power.
Of course, Johnny can’t really predict the future, which is why he often makes mistakes. And unlike Superman, he can’t just make the Earth spin backwards on its axis to reverse his mistakes [please, no comments on what a sci-fi blunder that was; it was just a movie, guys].
Lots of sci-fi television programs explored the possibility of predicting and averting the future, but I want to look at two in particular.
The first is NBC’s Heroes, which is a bit like the X-Men without the idiot spandex costumes. Pretty cool show, if a bit on the gory side. The basis of the first season was that the Heroes had to thwart a nuclear disaster predicted by the paintings of Isaac Mendez. Over the course of the season, they saved a cheerleader [Claire] to save the world and “stopped” an exploding man, though it wasn’t revealed how until Season Two. By the end of season One, the murderous villain Sylar had killed Isaac to steal his powers, but Isaac had the prophetic foresight to make other paintings, comic books, et cetera to guide the Heroes. With Isaac dead, only two people are known who can paint the future: Sylar and Peter Petrelli, the latter of which collects the powers of those he comes into contact with without having to kill them. [Unfortunately, as when he absorbed the powers of the Radioactive Man and became the Exploding Man, the very nuclear disaster the Heroes were trying to thwart, he initially has less control over his powers than Sylar.] Of course, there are those like HRG, Bob and others who know of Issac’s works and study them to try to understand and attempt to avert the future.
Except they can’t. Everything Isaac reveals is written in stone. It happens. Sylar kills a cheerleader. New York explodes. The world is infected with a virus that kills off most of the planet. Sylar fakes being Nathan Petrelli in order to finally kill Claire and take her power of invulnerability. A man explodes. HRG is shot in the head and killed. Only sometimes these things are in alternate futures, which can be averted so that the Heroes do not have to live in those awful futures. And sometimes the future occurs as painted but it does not end up as everyone supposes it must. The cheerleader who dies wasn’t Claire. Peter Petrelli explodes, but the healing factor he absorbed from Claire when he saved her resurrects him. HRG dies but a transfusion of Claire’s blood revives him. But in each case, they actually happen.
Then there’s ABC’s Lost. After the Hatch explodes and the sky turns purple, Desmond wakes up buck-naked in the middle of the jungle. He then starts having flashes about Charlie Pace dying. He cleverly averts the first few fates, but finally admits to Charlie that he can’t keep saving him forever. Eventually he will die. While Desmond’s flashes begin like Isaac’s visions, as things to be averted, they do not remain so. Dezz sees a vision of someone coming to the Island, possibly to rescue them. He suspects it’s his sweetheart Penny Widmore. Hurley, Jinn and Charlie are also in the flash. In the flash, Charlie is killed by one of Rousseau’s jungle traps. Knowing Charlie will die, Dezz convinces him to join their camping expedition, but doesn’t tell him he will die as a result! And Desmond used to be a priest! Ouch! At the last second, Dezz comes to his moral senses and warns Charlie, saving him. The future is averted again, though Desmond wonders if he’s made a mistake this time. Especially when Desmond continues to have visions of Charlie dying in various ways, and continues to keep saving him each day…
Yet in the grand scheme of things Desmond hasn’t really made a mistake by saving Charlie. You see, later Desmond has a vision where he sees Charlie push a button and then drown, after which a rescue helicopter comes to get his girlfriend Claire and her son Aaron. This time, Desmond tells him, he has to die. And Charlie goes to his fate willingly for a grander purpose than mere accidental death. That’s where the future vision as a warning becomes instead the future vision as direction or guide for redemption or salvation.
Heroes taps this positive potential for prophecy when it has Peter going to Claire’s high school to save her based on Issac’s paintings. Saving the cheerleader doesn’t really keep New York from suffering a nuclear explosion. The irony is that Peter is actually the cause of the explosion because he absorbed the powers of the Radioactive Man and was unable to control those powers. Before he goes nuclear, his brother Nathan flies him high above New York where Peter explodes harmlessly. The irony for Peter is that by saving the cheerleader so long ago, he absorbed her healing powers which allowed him to survive and heal after he exploded. Save the cheerleader, save yourself… Of course, Peter doesn’t know that by trying to save Claire he’s actually saving himself.
That’s the real rub here. We never know what the future holds, whether good or evil. Even if we had flashes or snapshots of the future, would it be enough to determine whether we should seek to avoid them or fulfill them? That’s what makes shows like these so much fun. They keep you guessing because the future is certain to God alone. In fact, God speaks through the prophet Isaiah:
“Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me; declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done.” Isaiah 46:9-10
So again, God alone can predict the future years in advance of its fulfillment. Aside from divine revelation, we can’t know the future at all, much less whether to fight it or fulfill it.
In a real world example, let’s say we go back in time and kill Hitler thereby eliminating the Holocaust and WWII. Would that create a better future? Or was Hitler the lesser of another evil we were mercifully spared from? Or let’s say we go back and save JFK from assassination. Does that create a better future or does it lead us down a darker path? We’ll never know, because alternate futures are only accessible to prophets, time travellers and God Himself. In fact, in the Bible God proclaims that He alone knows the future and uses this as evidence that He is superior to the false gods man has has imagined.
In Johnny Came Home, I realized that if I’m writing from a Biblical worldview, there’s no such thing as an alternate universe, so either a prophecy will come to pass or it won’t. Furthermore, only a true prophet of God would be able to unfailingly predict the future. Of course, there are always some who can fool others into thinking they can really predict the future apart from God: palm readers and carnival fortune tellers, for example. Of course, that’s simply a contrast between a prophet and a false prophet. [For more on false prophets, see my comments on Benny Hinn & the Archko Volume: One Fraud Promoting Another] A true prophet of God really didn’t fit into my storyline [sigh] because true prophecy is the result of special revelation, so it could never be a natural ability.
A third possibility presented itself when I was contemplating statistical probabilities. Supercomputers can calculate what is statistically probable [or improbable] based on the factors they are aware of. Of course, the limitation is that neither humans nor computers are omniscient. We can’t know everything. Only God can know everything which is why God alone can predict the future with unfailing accuracy. So our predictions of the future can only be probabilities not certainties. More to the point, they can be dead wrong if we have not taken into account some critical factor. This is why brilliant military strategists and meteorologists inevitably fail at some point, even if they have an otherwise impeccable track record.
While anyone with this super power would simply be making nothing more than an educated guess, their predictions would seem superhuman when compared to the average guy’s guesses. Especially if they were able to process most of their calculations on a subconscious level.
Thus was born Destiny Pascale’, one of the villains of my book, a mathlete [if you will] who can predict probabilities in the manner I’ve described. Like false prophets of old, the self-proclaimed Oracle takes full credit for her predictions (and makes excuses whenever her prophecies fail).
Sci-fi ruminations aside, you should be aware of the fact that about 27% of the Bible consists of prophecy, both fulfilled and yet-to-be fulfilled. This is a powerful evidence that the Bible is the revealed Word of a God who knows everything: past, present and future.Through fulfilled prophecy, we can see that it is in fact the Word of God, not just a book of stories and moral lessons. For example, King Cyrus of Persia was prophesied 150 years before he was born, as was the fact that he would release the Jews from their first exile and pay for the rebuilding of the Temple out of Persia’s coffers in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy [Isaiah 44:28; Ezra 1:2]. We could also mention Messianic prophecy fulfilled in Christ Jesus, the birth of the nation of Israel in 1967 [Isaiah 11:11] and the fall of Tyre fulfilled by Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great [ref. Ezekiel 26:3-14]. God uses fulfilled prophecy to show that there is no other God besides Him and to demonstrate that we should trust His Word is true in all that it says.
[...] In Johnny Came Home, I explore the concept of super heroes [and villains] from a Biblical Creationist point of view. In that soon-to-be-published novel, John Lazarus must fight for the future of Midwich and possibly the world as we know it. The premise of the book is that the generally unrealized pre-Flood potential of humanity has occasionally surfaced in people we read about in myths and stories who could perform super human feats. These men a … Read More [...]