Which movie stars will become superstars? Which celebrities will marry and divorce? Which soft drink maker will prevail? What new technology trend will revolutionize life as we know it? Who will wom the Oscar Meyer Weiner Bowl, presented by Meineke Car Care, featuring the Progressive Insurance halftime show?

Finally, I was right!

An academic sort has spent the last quarter-century tracking predictions from scores of big-name economists, foreign policy gurus and journalists. Just because he wanted to do this, he tracked over 80,000 prognoses on subjects of all sorts.

The result? The wise-among-us were right less than half the time. Liberal, moderate, conservative, whatever – more often than not, they took a swing at the future, and hit nothing but air.

Let’s put this in terms that even I can understand.

If I get a card and write on one side, “Interest rates will rise in the next year,” and I write on the other side, “Interest rates will fall in the next year,” and I flip the card a hundred times, and I make a prediction based on which side lands face-up more often, I am just as likely to be right as the average person in this study.

Doesn’t it make you want to pick your stocks based the culinary preferences of your golden retriever? “If he inhales the beef, buy Microsoft. If he scarfs the chicken, get Apple.”

‘Tis the season for prognostication. In our information-indated culture, we must first catalog and categorize every event of the past year. I am sure we all make one list or another.

Mine might be, “The Top Ten Left-Handed Presbyterian Pastors Who Write Weekly Newspaper Columns Of More Than 500 Words For Newspapers In Counties With Less Than 100,000 People.” Now I feel important.

But once we have exhausted ourselves by looking backward, we entertain ourselves by looking forward. What will the economy do? Whose political fortunes will rise and fall? Will the Executive and the Legislative branches accomplish anything? Will the President lurch left or lunge right? Will Israel bomb Iran, or will the Koreas explode again?

But there is more. Which movie stars will become superstars? Which celebrities will marry and divorce? Which soft drink maker will prevail? What new technology trend will revolutionize life as we know it? Who will wom the Oscar Meyer Weiner Bowl, presented by Meineke Car Care, featuring the Progressive Insurance halftime show?

I am tired already. I question why they do this, and I wonder why we listen to this. As for me and my heart, it feels an awful lot like pride. Somehow we think we are so smart, that we believe we can predict the future. We laugh at the meteorologist who misses the track and total of the latest snowstorm, then we prattle about the prognostications of some man or woman who has been ordained as an “expert.”

Enough already. If you believe there is One who knows it all, as I do, you ought to know that He isn’t telling all the details, and we are wise to join the silence. Whatever you believe, you may predict the future and pander to your pride, but maybe you ought to live in the present, and let the future become whatever it will be.

But I will make this prediction: in another 25 years, when this diligent fellow has accumulated and assessed another 80,000 predictions, my flipping or my Fluffy will still do just as well.

Tom Stein is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and serves as senior pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Indiana. This article first appeared in the Richmond Palladium-Item and is used with permission.