"As I see it, YES"
MAGIC 8 BALL
Prophecy
...or prediction, was one of the functions of the prophet. It has been defined as a "miracle of knowledge, a declaration or description or representation of something future, beyond the power of human sagacity to foresee, discern, or conjecture."
Prediction
A statement about what you think will happen in the future
"Fortune-telling is the practice of predicting information about a person's life.[1] The scope of fortune-telling is in principle identical with the practice of divination. The difference is that divination is the term used for predictions considered part of a religious ritual, invoking deities or spirits, while the term fortune-telling implies a less serious or formal setting, even one of popular culture, where belief in occult workings behind the prediction is less prominent than the concept of suggestion, spiritual or practical advisory or affirmation.
Historically, Pliny the Elder describes use of the crystal ball in the 1st century CE by soothsayers ("crystallum orbis", later written in Medieval Latin by scribes as orbuculum).[2]
Contemporary Western images of fortune-telling grow out of folkloristic reception of Renaissance magic, specifically associated with Romani people.[1] During the 19th and 20th century, methods of divination from non-Western cultures, such as the I Ching, were also adopted as methods of fortune-telling in western popular culture.
An example of divination or fortune-telling as purely an item of pop culture, with little or no vestiges of belief in the occult, would be the Magic 8-Ball sold as a toy by Mattel, or Paul II, an octopus at the Sea Life Aquarium at Oberhausen used to predict the outcome of matches played by the Germany national football team.[3]
There is opposition to fortune telling in Christianity, Islam, Baháʼísm and Judaism based on scriptural prohibitions against divination.
Terms for one who claims to see into the future include fortune teller, crystal-gazer, spaewife, seer, soothsayer, sibyl, clairvoyant, and prophet; related terms which might include this among other abilities are oracle, augur, and visionary.
Fortune telling is dismissed by the scientific community and scientific skeptics as being based on magical thinking and superstition
Critical analysis
Fortune telling is dismissed by the scientific community and skeptics as being based on magical thinking and superstition.
Skeptic Bergen Evans suggested that fortune telling is the result of a "naïve selection of something that have happened from a mass of things that haven't, the clever interpretation of ambiguities, or a brazen announcement of the inevitable."[26] Other skeptics claim that fortune telling is nothing more than cold reading.[27]
A large amount of fraud has occurred in the practice of fortune-telling.[28]
Fortune telling and how it works raises many critical questions. For example, fortune-telling occurs through various methods such as psychic readings, tarot cards, and more. What is similar about many of these methods is that they are based on random phenomena. For example, astrologers believe that the movement of stars in the sky can have implications on one's life.[29] In the case of tarot cards, people believe that images displayed on the cards have significant meanings on their lives. The problem is that there is a lack of evidence to support why such things, such as the stars, would have any implications on our lives.
Additionally, fortune-telling readings and predictions made by horoscopes, for example, are often general enough to apply to anyone. In cold reading, for example, readers often begin by stating general descriptions and continuing to make specifics based on the reactions they receive from the person whose life they are predicting.[30] The tendency for people to deem general descriptions as being representative to themselves has been termed the Barnum effect and has been studied by psychologists for many years.[31]
Nonetheless, even with a lack of evidence supporting the various methods of fortune-telling and the many frauds that have occurred by psychic readers, for example, fortune-telling continues to become popular around the world. There are many reasons for the appealing nature of fortune-telling such as that people often experience stress when there is uncertainty and thus seek to gain deeper insight into their future.
