The Just Response To False Prophecies

Every person who claims that God told them something about the future is--sincerely or insincerely, and truthfully or deceptively (even self-deceptively)--giving more than just a probabilistic prediction of what is to come, a speculative but honest verbalization of what might genuinely seem to loom ahead.  They are saying that God himself, the supreme being because a true god is an uncaused cause, told them something about the future that ordinary human limitations would keep them from.  Now, there are still great epistemological barriers to knowing if God actually gave someone a prophecy even for the person who received it, and even if it really was a message from God.  Just because God legitimately tells someone what the future holds does not remove epistemological limitations about the future, though it would provide new forms of evidence pointing to or away from specific logically possible events.

Just because God legitimately gives someone an accurate prophetic vision or message would also not eliminate the epistemological barriers to even knowing if the information came from God in the first place: whether it is an introspective state of mind or a sensory experience, all one could know beyond that the prophecy is logically possible or not is that one is immediately experiencing (or remembering) a seemingly prophetic message.  Literally anything that does not contradict logical axioms and other logical truths, though, is indeed possible.  Even if a prophecy is bizarre, seems unlikely, or concerns events so far in the future that those hearing about them would not be alive, an inability for someone to know by logical necessity what will happen in the future, as opposed to what might happen, does not disprove the possibility or eventual veracity of the idea.

A fully rationalistic person would not assume anything about the future.  What this wholly entails is not believing anything about the future except that logical truths will remain true by necessity, that certain events are possible, and that some events seem likely in light of mere perception-based evidences.  Most Christians, like most non-Christians, are not remotely close to being rationalists.  How many times does a modern Christian hear about people claiming God told them they would marry someone or that the Second Coming will be on a specific date within the next year or so?  Regarding the latter, there is the added stupidity of the contemporary world, as horrible as it is, being the objective best time in recorded history by Biblical standards and thus not at all having all the conditions of Matthew 24.  All the same, even someone who assumes that God told them to marry someone because they "know" it will happen is believing a false or ungrounded prophecy, and the Biblical reaction is not what he or she would probably like.

The just response is to kill the false prophet who sincerely or insincerely makes extra-Biblical claims about the future on God's behalf.  In the words of Deuteronomy 18:20, "a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded him to say, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, must be put to death."  Of course, this obligation would apply not just to men, but also to women, as all moral obligations do, but the wording here is otherwise very concise.  Anyone who presumes, a synonym for assumes, to represent God through prophecy is an irrationalistic egoist or malicious deceiver, and he or she deserves to die.  Everyone who makes false or baseless predictions about a Biblical apocalypse occurring on a specific date, as happened in 2011, deserves not just to eventually die of natural causes for this sin of irrationality and the illusory pretense of knowing God's foresight, but to be directly killed by fellow humans.  The same is true of everyone else who would make a false prophecy about even the most casual, trivial of things.

The verses right after Deuteronomy 18:20 specify the only way for beings with human limitations to actually access the evidence that a prophecy is true or false.  One must simply wait to see if the predicted thing actually occurs at the promised time.  A set of deep epistemological limitations will still be present, nevertheless.  Sensory perceptions, with one exception [1], prove only that one is having subjective perceptions within one's immaterial consciousness, and the moment an event has already happened, one cannot even have sensory perceptions of it.  One must then rely on memory.  Memories of events, as well, prove nothing more than that one has memories within one's mind.  There are still genuine evidences that someone is or is not truthfully or sincerely claiming to detail future events on God's behalf, as potentially illusory and subjectively perceived as they are.  The full metaphysical and epistemological complexity of prophecy aside, it is very directly stated in Mosaic Law that the just treatment of a false prophet/prophetess is execution.  The Biblical deity does not take deception lightly.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html