Scientific progress

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Newsweek Magazine – Dec. 17, 1956 (click on picture to zoom in)

This is an essay analyzing William Branham's Seven Visions of 1933. It was written by a former message follower.

Click on the links below to go to a specific section within the essay. You are currently on the topic below that is in bold:

An Introduction to the Analysis of the Seven Visions of 1933
What were the Seven Visions?
How many Visions?
Why were the Visions given?
Why did the Visions fail to change men’s religious ideas?
A Comparison of the 1960 Sermon and the Church Age Book
A Critique of each Vision

1. Mussolini
2. Hitler
3. Three ISMs
4. Scientific progress
5. Women and morals
6. Powerful Woman in America
7. America destroyed

The Prediction
The sequence of the visions
Two views of the Seven Visions
Summary of the discussion

Scientific progress

Church Age Book statement of the vision
The fourth vision showed the great advances in science that would come after the second world war. It was headed up in the vision of a plastic bubble-topped car that was running down beautiful highways under remote control so that people appeared seated in this car without a steering wheel and they were playing some sort of a game to amuse themselves.

This vision depicted the great advances in science after 1945. The phrase ëit was headed upí implies that there were more examples of great advancesí in the vision (but they are not described and one would have to wonder, ëwhy notí) but that the leading example was the bubble-topped driverless car . The vision was first cited in a sermon in 1953 and hence may have been post fact depending on when the driverless car was supposed to have been developed.

The ëcarí will be discussed in detail later but what about actual scientific achievements post World War II? Here are some highlights:

• Medicine

• Influenza vaccine 1945
• Polio vaccine 1950
• First leukaemia drug 1954
• Chickenpox vaccine 1974
• First test tube baby 1978
• Heart transplant 1972
• Kidney Dialysis 1985

• Computers

• Invention of the silicon chip 1958
• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• First quantum computer 2007
• Summit super computer ñ 122.3 thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second, 2019

The invention of computers has changed the way the world works. Computing has enabled most major technical development of the last 50 years - the Internet, smart phones and space travel. Computers underpin our industry and financial systems. It is the basis of Artificial Intelligence which itself is set to transform the world yet again. Computers reside not only in our pockets and on our desks but are increasingly embedded in the artifacts that we purchase. It would be difficult to name an area of human endeavor that is not reliant, today, on computing.

• Communications

• Communications gateways (hubs, routers, modems) 1973
• Global positioning systems (GPS) 1978
• Definition of TCP/IP protocol 1983
• The World Wide Web (WWW) 1990

Communications is the glue and the plumbing which allows the interconnection of people, business, information and the Internet of things. Communications includes the hardware that provides the infrastructure and software which provides the logic for the seamless transmission of video, text, speech and hyperlinked information to everyone and everything on the planet. Communications underpin the seemingly miraculous ability for thousands of people in a city to be browsing the web, playing games, watching movies, sending messages and talking to their friends a continent away all at the same time (and things not getting mixed up!).

• The Space Program

• Sputnik 1 1957.
• Men on the Moon 1969.
• First communications satellite (Telstar) 1962.
• Robots to Mars.
• Space probes to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, to their Moons and to the Asteroids 1960s.
• Robotic instruments landed on the Moon, Mars, Venus, asteroids and Saturnís largest moon Titan.
• Hubble Space Telescope and other space-based observatories, 1990.

The space program has allowed the Earth to be mapped and catalogued in a wide variety of ways: the ozone layer, surface temperatures, the sizes of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, crop yields, hurricanes and climate cycles. It has allowed the solar System to be explored, water to be found on planetary moons and the rings of Saturn to be explored and explained. The Space Program was hinted at during the last year of World War II but has now achieved goals that could not even have been imagined then.

• Science

• Radiocarbon dating 1949.
• Lasers 1960.
• Human Genome Project 2003.
• Prediction (1950) and discovery (1978) of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.
• Discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe 1998.
• Detection of gravitational waves 2015.
• Particle accelerators 1970s.
• Genetic engineering of life 1972.
• Creation of the first synthetic life ñ Craig Venterís Mycoplasma laboratorium bacterium 2010.

Basic science has transformed our world. The results have been staggering from ëthe green revolutioní to the discovery of the basic building blocks of reality (the Standard Model of Particle Physics). Future discoveries will eclipse those of the past.

But sorry, no items anywhere here about plastic bubble-topped cars without steering wheels.

The reason for listing some of the incredible scientific advances since World War II is not only to make the point that science has achieved great things but to highlight that an omniscient God had a cornucopia of choice in 1933 of developments that would have proven to be unimpeachable evidence of his existence and soon coming had he wished to reveal it.

This is basically because the advances are so astounding (smart phones, the Internet, artificial intelligence, a robotic visit to Pluto, creation of a new living bacteria) that no man could have even thought of them in 1933. Instead we have William Branham highlighting a technology which was the subject of speculation and futuristic designs even before he first mentioned in a sermon. It could not be construed as the technology which ëheaded upí all of the developments that we have seen and it certainly could not be construed as a scientific advance that followed World War II. ëAfter the second world warí is not 2019! In this sense the vision has already failed because its time has expired.

We also see that William Branham made a number of very naÔve claims about the technology that would underpin driverless cars. He claimed that they wouldnít be able to ëwreckí on the highways because they would be under remote control and would have in-built magnets that would repel other similarly-equipped cars. He claimed that you would be able to ëdial iní the destination and radar would take you there. He claimed through the 1960s that ëtheyíve got the carí. All of this, of course, was nonsense. The development of technology to support driverless cars has had to wait until post-2010. Today (2019) we are probably about 3 years away from the development of a ëgeneral purposeí driverless car and it certainly will never look anything like the cars in his vision, will not be enabled by his technology and will not have been developed ëafter the second world warí.

The SAE International standards body defines 6 progressive levels to describe ëself-drivingí cars (0-5). The technology today is at level 2 with some level 3 capability.

The current technologies that support the concept of driverless vehicles are:

• Laser imaging
• Video imaging
• Image recognition software (via artificial intelligence (AI))
• A Global Positioning System (GPS)
• A detailed digital mapping of roads (such as Google Maps and other commercial navigation systems)
• A knowledge base incorporating an AI which allows the control software to make decisions in unusual or unexpected situations.
• Digital computers and graphical processing capability

Here are the hardware specifications for Teslaís Autopilot self-driving system (as of 2019). AI based on Hardware 3 (see specification below).

Components	Specification	Details
Forward radar		170m (558ft)
Front/Side Camera Color Filter Array	RCCB
Forward Cameras	3	Narrow 35deg 250m (820ft)
		Main 50 deg 150m (490ft)
		Wide 120 deg 60m ( 195ft)
Forward looking side cameras	Left	90deg 80m (260ft)
	Right	90deg 80-m (260ft)
Rearward looking side cameras	Left	100m (330 ft)
	Right	100m (330 ft)
Rear view camera	Human use not automation	50m (165ft)
Sonars	12 surrounding	8m (26ft) range
Platform	FSD with two Tesla-designed processors (Hardware 3).	3 quad-core Cortex-A72 clusters @ 2.2 GHz, GPU @ 1 GHz, 2 Neural Processing Units (NPU) @ 2 GHz, other hardware accelerators

The sensors: radar, camera and sonar, collect ëimagesí of the environment around the car. The software and AI components synthesise this information and create a ëmapí of the situation at an instant in time (similar to the ëmapí that the brain generates when you open your eyes). This ëmapí includes estimates of the speed and direction of other moving objects, captures static signs any safety cautions and incorporates the carís own trajectory. Then the software models the passage of time and assesses what the new ëmapí would look like in half a second, 1 second, 5, 10 etc and makes decisions based on its goals.

This system is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is emulating the functions of the driverís brain. It has nothing to do with magnets and it certainly wasnít available in the 1960s. These specifications and capabilities are nothing like William Branhamís ideas of how self-driving cars would work but if he was really prophesying, they could have been!

William Branhamís vision was of a self-driving plastic bubble-topped car running down a beautiful highway could have been something like this:

Insert Believe the Sign picture here This picture appeared in Newsweek Magazine 17th December 1956. But in fact, the vision as stated in the sermons from 1953 right up to 1958 did not include self-driving at all. They talked of cars becoming more and more egg shaped. In 1958 we find the first mention of a ëremote controlí car and over the next few years we find more references and a fuller description of the car. This vision is more about the egg shape of cars than it is about the driving technology. (in this picture the dotted lines overlay the controllers that keep the cars going straight!)

There are 16 other references to this vision and they are can be reviewed in Appendix 1 under the heading ë4 Scientific progressí.

Sermon statement

Finally they will invent a car that they won't have to have a steering wheel in it. I seen a family going down the... Call it, 'road,' in a glass-top car, great big fine-looking roads and fine car. And they were sitting, looking at one another, and the car was running by itself, going right on around the curves and everything." And they've got the car right now, it's already invented. They've got the car. The Laodicean Church Age 11th December 1960

So, in 1960, he claimed that the car of the vision had been developed. This is simply false. Why does he tell people that the vision has been fulfilled when it wasnít? His description looks a lot like the Newsweek picture!

Sermon statement
I said, "Just before that time comes, that automobiles...They'll look like an egg. They'll be shaped. That's a vision. Be something on the shape of something like that." And that's the way they'll be just before the rapture. Israel and the Church 26th March 1953

It is clear from later similar quotes that he considered the egg-shaped car to be one of the 1933 visions.

Sermon statement
And at that time, automobiles, just before the coming of the Lord, will be in the shape of an egg." Now, remember that; keep it in mind. See? That was in 1932, or something like that. And look how they're shaping down every year, right to it. We're nearer the end time; we are. The faith that was once delivered to the saints 1st May 1955

Again, the question is, if the 1933 vision was about self-driving cars then why is he introducing egg-shaped cars? If the 1933 vision showed egg-shaped self-driving cars then why was that not identified in the Church Age Book?

And it is clear that cars never were egg-shaped, they are not egg-shaped now, they never were ëshaping down every yearí (to egg shapes) and if egg-shape is a pointer to the ëcoming of the Lordí and the Rapture then neither event will happen any time soon!

There has never been a serious movement towards developing egg-shaped cars. Streamlining is the claimed reason for them but there are other factors that affect the viability of a shape ñ accommodating people in comfort and fitting luggage. Egg-shaped cars are not good at either.

But this is an extra detail. Did the original vision actually replay a trend, a trend which in hindsight has never been observed?

Sermon statement

And I saw an American family driving down a highway in a car that... They were setting facing one another, and had a table, and were, look like, playing checkers or cards. And they didn't have any steering wheel in the car. And it was controlled by some power without a steering wheel. How many remembers me prophesying that (See?), that's been here? Now, at the World's Fair they've already got the car on the market. Here is the... It's sold now; some big company has taken many of them. And this car, here it is. Paul Boyd remembered the prophecy, looked into his book what I'd said, and took the picture in there. The Lord's Word is perfectly accurate. That was in 1933. That would be... Let's see, what would that be? Thirty-two years ago, wouldn't it? This is '64. Yeah, thirty... Yeah, thirty-one years ago. Thirty-one years ago the Lord told me that, and here it is. And the company's here that's already ordered them; and the--and trucking companies and things are getting trucks made like them. They can control it right from their headquarters like that, don't even have to have a driver in it. And here it is all already made, and there it is with the cars. Questions & Answers 23rd August 1964

These statements are false and are simply fantasy! There were no companies purchasing trucks in 1964 that didnít need to have a driver in them. There were no companies purchasing self-driving cars in 1964. He also relates these statements to the ëLordís wordí and to its perfect accuracy saying that these false claims were vindication what God said in 1933!

It is impossible to understand what might have been going through his mind to have made these statements. They appear to have been made up. Maybe Paul Boyd said something to him along these lines. But a prophet has no licence to repeat or be influenced by the imaginations of others especially when it comes to visions.

He had no right to say these things and no right to mislead people about the fulfilment of one of the visions.

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