Really, my thoughts on prophecy extend to religion in general. I agree with you that faith is unreasonable and illogical, and is not a reliable method to arrive at truth. I agree that scriptural interpretation is not something for which any reliable method has been discovered. One person's interpretation is seemingly as justified as anyone else's, namely not justified in any demonstrable way beyond a subjective personal appeal. It's intriguing to me that you realize this and still stick with it.
There's a slight distinction between what I said and what you say above. My claim is that reason and logic aren't truth, nor even a path to truth. Truth is something they have no access to. They have access to facts and inductive inferences based on interpreting empirical observations, but not truth. An atheist, or at least agnostic, like yourself, i.e., Karl Popper, pointed out as much and admitted that reason and logic aren't an avenue to arrive at truth.
Faith doesn't arrive at truth. It doesn't surmise what is true. It doesn't figure out, in any way, what is true. It either accepts it, or doesn't. And if it questions the truth, or tries to test it, then faith fails and falls into reason and logic. Which is why a reasonable man, a man who lives his life by reason and logic, isn't likely to have, nor require, faith.
I see no use for faith and no value in its application. If I cannot use reason, logic, or reliable evidence to justify a proposed belief, then I don't believe it. How is that not the superior epistemology?
Too much is already given in the equation. As Popper and Eccles point out in their book,
The Self and Its Brain (Kant beat them to the punch), every single sight, sound, or perception, is merely the result of "theories" incorporated into the design of the genetic mechanisms that hear, see, and perceive. In other words, what you take as the real world, the simple basic truth, is in truth, the result of billions and trillions of evolutionary guesses and theories about how to interpret the blooming buzzing confusion that's the electromagnetic waves and pulses that your body, by it's genetic design, feeds up to you as the shiny attractive world you swallow hook line and sinker.
It's real, in some sense, but its a lie. It's a terrible lie. And it's faith-perception and theological thought that first got the scientific ball rolling.
In the thread we did here last year on Karl Popper, which got redacted into an essay,
here, I show why all modern science is the product not of agnostics and atheists doing hard science, but that modern science is based on theological inferences suggesting that the world is lying to us. In the thread redacted into the essay I show some semantic gaffs on Popper's part that when corrected show that he concedes that modern science is a product of theological observations and inference.
For me, there is no tension between truth and logic, nor between truth and reason or truth and demonstrable facts. I have no need to struggle under this burden of cognitive dissonance because I'm am free to be intellectually honest. I'm free to set my standard uniformly and simply be reasonable about everything I believe.
At one point everyone believed the earth was flat. And for good reason. And the sun looked like the same size as the moon. And it looked like they both revolved around the much larger earth. But that's an illusion that's not corrected by our natural means of perception. And Karl Popper points out that it was in fact mytho-theological reasoning that first proposed heliocentrism:
Copernicus studied in Bologna under the Platonist Novara; and Copernicus' idea of placing the sun rather than the earth in the centre of the universe was not the result of new observations but of a new interpretation of old and well-known facts in the light of semi-religious Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas. The crucial idea can be traced back to the sixth book of Plato's Republic, where we can read that the sun plays the same role in the realm of visible things as does the idea of the good in the realm of ideas. Now the idea of the good is the highest in the hierarchy of Platonic ideas. Accordingly the sun, which endows visible things with their visibility, vitality, growth and progress, is the highest in the hierarchy of visible things in nature.
Conjectures and Refutations, p. 187.
All modern science derived from theologians, priests, and mystics, who reasoned that the natural world, and the natural human body, conspire, to keep us thinking like animals who are servants of the natural world rather than like a new spiritual species endowed with the mind of God and designed to take over nature and bend it to our almost unlimited imagination and will.
In particular, I can derive my own self-worth, purpose, and meaning without emotional dependency on a seemingly unreasonable doctrine. This is the freedom that comes when we leave religion behind.
Unfortunately, from the perspective I'm espousing, that freedom is merely accepting slavery to nature, and to the lies served up by the genetic frame, in order to live peaceably and comfortably in what to religious minded-men has always been a broken world designed as more as a prison than a garden of Eden.
Instead of squinting at vague words written thousands of years ago by people who were profoundly ignorant by today's standards, why not embrace all the knowledge and wisdom we've found between that time and our present day? There is so much more we can do and explore, and more ways to truly treat each other well, once we sever the ball and chain of bronze age sensibilities and their awkward subsequent reinterpretations. Religion and faith give us nothing we cannot get elsewhere, and it carries a lot of negative, irrational baggage that we would be better off without.
From my perspective this is a modern prejudice with little historical accuracy since nearly every great founder of modern science was a Jew or a Christian. Isaac Newton for instance wrote more written words about what you consider bronze age sensibilities, i.e., biblical exegesis, than he wrote about scientific principles. And he claimed dogmatically and unequivocally that the former was the source for the latter. Einstein was a Jew, and claimed that for him, no man was a greater thinker or scientist than Newton.
Copernicus was a true man of faith and derived his cosmology from theology. Kepler was a devout believer in what you call bronze age sensibilites. None of the greatest of scientific thinkers thought that science was anything but the realization of theology. It's a modern prejudice derived from the shallow indoctrination of the university today that's attempting to create a new world order by denying the reality of the old world order.
John