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The discussion revisits the criticisms of Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory by indicating alternative explanations of disconfirmed prophecy and adherence to irrational beliefs. Subsequent empirical research on actual prophecies show Festinger’s original perspective to be flawed. Charismatic organizations that give rise to prophecy provide whole lifeworlds of activity and meaning that go beyond a single prediction. Groups, like Unarius, with repeated prophetic failure develop coping mechanisms and specific methods of interpretation that explain away the reality disjuncture connected with such disappointments. One Unarian method is to account for the non-arrival of the Space Brothers in terms of past lives.

Literature has not neglected the fact that millennial expectations have hitherto always been defeated. Leon Festinger developed his theory of cognitive dissonance in part to explain the persistence of belief in the face of disconfirmed prophecy. This chapter examines numerous literary examples of defeated millennium under the hypothesis that literature replaces cognitive dissonance with what I call reflective dissonance. It analyzes fictional texts’ rhetorics of reflection vs. persuasion, the types of possible worlds they construct, and the contribution these make to millennial discourse in the Americas. Three types of millennial defeat are posited: 1) defeated millennium nearly always takes historical examples as its objects of mimesis, and thus simply documents the defeats of millennial outbreaks by real-world forces; 2) pseudo-millennium shrinks millennial activity down to a simulation exercise, as in Ahab’s elevation of a whale hunt to a “final battle” between good and evil; and 3) dystopic millennium allows the millennial movement to “succeed,” but with a result far from the joy and plenitude promised by Revelation, and with the eschatechnologies of the New Order resembling those of a prison.

The discussion takes issue with Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails and cognitive dissonance theory by providing alternative explanations of disconfirmed prophecy. Ernest Norman lays the groundwork for Ruth Norman with visions and channeled messages from outer space. The evolution of Unarian prophecies and their failures shows how members come to view the phenomenon as a reliving of past lives and a healing process. Melvin Pollner’s theory of mundane reason indicates that believers find errors in the interpretations of others rather than seeing the flaws in their own logic.

A short background on the phenomenon of extraterrestrial contactees helps explain the beliefs of Unarius. A section on Leon Festinger’s study of a group of flying saucer believers introduces his theory of failed prophecy. As an alternate explanation, the theoretical perspective of the social construction of reality is addressed in terms of phenomenological ethnomethodology. Melvin Pollner’s work on mundane reason and fact-finding is cited along with references to the Azande to illustrate the significance of interpretation in defining what is real. Several theoretical perspectives (e.g., those of Alfred Schutz, Harold Garfinkel, Thomas Theorem, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard) and methods (surveys, interviews, and participant observation) are discussed.

Natural theologians who aim at confirming the theistic hypothesis by adducing empirical evidence are confronted by the dilemma of God-of-the-gaps. Either theism predicts no specific phenomena at all, or these phenomena may be accounted for in the future by superior scientific explanations, so that theism will be disconfirmed. A pessimistic induction concerning the history of science and natural theology will convince sophisticated natural theologians that they should avoid this risk of God-of-the-gaps. Richard Swinburne uses the following immunizing strategy: theism should purport to explain only phenomena that are either ‘too big’ or ‘too odd’ for science to explain. But this strategy fails with regard to miracles (too odd), as is argued by a detailed examination of the case of Christ’s bodily resurrection, and it is problematic with regard to instances of ‘too big’, such as fine-tuning, or the explanation of the universe as a whole.

Theism can be a theory or existential hypothesis to be confirmed by empirical evidence only if it has some predictive power. Theists should (and do) prefer a purely logical definition of predictive power, according to which a hypothesis h has predictive power with regard to evidence e iff the relevance condition P ( e | h & k ) 〉 P ( e | k ) is met. But theism can have predictive power in this sense with regard to existing evidence only if one can non-arbitrarily attribute creative intentions to God. The auxiliary hypotheses attributing these intentions should be independently justified. It is argued that Richard Swinburne’s solution to this problem of theism’s predictive power on the basis of his moral objectivism (or moral realism) fails, and that his attributions of creative intentions to God are anthropomorphic projections.