1LoverofGod
Well-known
By Hal Lindsay
January 8, 2024
Human beings mostly learn about the future by remembering the past. Whether five minutes ago or five millennia ago, history gives us patterns that we expect to continue. For Christians, history’s great pattern is that God is always right. That means we can completely trust His word. But both believers in Jesus and unbelievers expect to see the sun rise tomorrow morning primarily because it has always risen in the past. Humans can’t see beyond “now,” but we do make good guesses.
We predict the movement of heavenly bodies based on their past movements. That’s proven to be quite reliable. We expect the stock market to move according to forces that we can see and understand. That one is hit and miss. But, based on the past, we feel entirely certain that there will at least be a stock market tomorrow — though that could be wrong. We don’t know how well crops will do, but we know things planted and watered in the right soil and the right climate will tend to grow. We sow, and we reap.
All this works well… until it doesn’t. Sometimes something comes along that no one (or almost no one) predicted. We call it a Black Swan Event.
The idea started with a 2nd-century Roman poet known as Juvenal. He characterized something as being “as rare upon the earth as a black swan.” At that time, no one believed black swans existed. In English, “rare as a black swan” came to be a metaphor for something that never happens. In his 1902 book, Proverb Lore, Edward Hulme said people used the phrase “rare as a black swan,” to express “the greatest impossibility the speaker could imagine.”
More
January 8, 2024
Human beings mostly learn about the future by remembering the past. Whether five minutes ago or five millennia ago, history gives us patterns that we expect to continue. For Christians, history’s great pattern is that God is always right. That means we can completely trust His word. But both believers in Jesus and unbelievers expect to see the sun rise tomorrow morning primarily because it has always risen in the past. Humans can’t see beyond “now,” but we do make good guesses.
We predict the movement of heavenly bodies based on their past movements. That’s proven to be quite reliable. We expect the stock market to move according to forces that we can see and understand. That one is hit and miss. But, based on the past, we feel entirely certain that there will at least be a stock market tomorrow — though that could be wrong. We don’t know how well crops will do, but we know things planted and watered in the right soil and the right climate will tend to grow. We sow, and we reap.
All this works well… until it doesn’t. Sometimes something comes along that no one (or almost no one) predicted. We call it a Black Swan Event.
The idea started with a 2nd-century Roman poet known as Juvenal. He characterized something as being “as rare upon the earth as a black swan.” At that time, no one believed black swans existed. In English, “rare as a black swan” came to be a metaphor for something that never happens. In his 1902 book, Proverb Lore, Edward Hulme said people used the phrase “rare as a black swan,” to express “the greatest impossibility the speaker could imagine.”
More
