From Climate Change to Nukes to Plagues: The Coming End of the World as We Know It

            The end of all things has become a secular fascination.

            Consider, for example, just Margaret Atwood, all by herself. She’s written The Handmaid’s Tale—now an award-winning TV show on Hulu, and The Testaments, a Booker Prize short-listed sequel. Atwood has also written the MadAdam trilogy about a world destroyed by climate change, genetic engineering, and pharmaceutical malpractice.

            Post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world fiction is all the rage. There’s Cormac McCarthy’s On the Road and the Hunger Games trilogy and Station Eleven and all of Hugh Howey and Stephen King and movies like World War Z and Resident Evil with their zombies and the Mad Max franchise, Deep Impact and Armageddon, TVs Walking Dead and on and on. 

            And now post-apocalypticism is an academic discipline too. So, for example, this week I read Bryan Walsh’s End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World, a summary of the existential angst that scientists are expressing. He writes:

            The end could be an asteroid. This has happened before. About 66 million years ago, an asteroid of about six miles across slammed into the earth. That explosion was 6500 times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Dinosaurs that had ruled the earth for 180 million years went extinct. Meanwhile, thousands of asteroids continue to orbit the sun. NASA is tracking them, and we think we’re okay for the next few years, but nobody is saying it can’t happen again.

            Or, the world as we know it could end with a super volcano blowing its stack. One such volcano, Toba, blew its top about seventy-five thousand years ago. Global temperatures fell by about twenty or thirty degrees for several years after, bringing humans to the brink of extinction. Perhaps as few as three or four thousand survived, in Southern Africa, our ancestors. There are still about twenty active super volcanoes today. On average one erupts every 25,000 or 50,000 years. We’re due. 

            Third, Bryan Walsh also suggests that we could end the world as we know it by nuclear war. We thought that the end of the cold war reduced this threat. But now Putin and Trump have cancelled the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and things are looking rather dicier. And there are the other nuclear powers chomping at the bit: India and Pakistan have gone to war six times in the last 70 years. Israel has nukes. North Korea has nukes and threatens to use them every week. Iran wants nukes. This week Turkey threatened to go nuclear too. 

            Fourth, we could also end the world as we know it via climate change. The five hottest years in recorded history have all been in the past ten years. We are seeing more horrific tropical hurricanes like Dorian. We are going to see massive movements of people from areas in the world too hot to live, too flooded to live, or too arid to live, and, they all love to come here. 

            The end of the world could be a pandemic. It has happened before. Justinian’s plague in fifth century killed half the world’s population. The Black Death killed 200 million people. New diseases caused by animal infections jumping to humans, as in SARS or Ebola, are an annual event now. Eventually, one is going to be really deadly. 

            Bryan Walsh isn’t finished. He writes further long chapters about the dangers of bioengineered pathogens and terrorism, as in the MadAdam trilogy. He writes about Artificial Intelligence about which no less an expert than Stephen Hawking said, “could spell the end of the human race.” And he writes, only half-seriously now, about antagonistic aliens invading earth. Thankfully, he doesn’t mention vampires or zombies.

            So, how does all this gloom and doom make you feel?

            I find it fascinating that at the end of the book, Walsh says that he nevertheless has hope we’ll somehow make it, anyway. They thing is, Walsh doesn’t anchor his hope. He doesn’t give readers any good reasons for hope. Walsh just hangs hope out there, unsupported, as unlikely as a baby managing to hold onto a helium balloon on a windy day.

            In fact, Bryan Walsh actually gives us a reason for abandoning all hope. It is called scope neglect. Scope neglect describes how humans deal with tragedy—or rather, refuse to. When personal, as in the death of a loved one, tragedy may overwhelm us and even break us. But when larger and more extensive tragedies are distant—as is the case with the Bahamas, this week, for example—we tend to mostly ignore that tragedy, and carry on as if it never happened.

            Scope neglect. Paul Slovic, a Psychologist, found that our “sympathy can begin to fade as soon as we’re presented with two needy people, rather than one.” This counterintuitive arithmetic of compassion makes it hard for us to empathize with or prepare for huge natural disasters. Our brains do their best to push such thoughts away. “Instead of our worry increasing as the size of the consequence increases, it degrades. Our attention is scarce, and so is our ability to worry.”    

            So, Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said, after starving nearly four million Ukrainians to death: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths just a statistic.”

            And that is how it is when it comes to the end of the world. Scope neglect. We can’t get our heads around oceans rising, nuclear weapons falling or pandemics, even though the risks are very real. The scope of such disasters is just too large for us to think about. So, our brains ignore or actively deny such risks. 

            Even those we pay to look after the bigger picture, our politicians, seem totally paralyzed. Scope neglect, you see, also means their re-election depends on giving you what you want rather than all of us what the world most needs.

            One more thing, stands out for me, in Walsh’s book, something that is ironically hopeful. He discusses the prepper phenomenon. Preppers are people who prepare for the end of the world by provisioning themselves with food and survival gear, guns and more guns, hidden shelters and caches full of fuel and more food and even more guns. Preppers plan to survive the end of the world by hiding from it while living on in their shelters with their families, killing everyone who comes near. Preppers. It’s a big thing in the USA.

            But it was Walsh’s analysis of Prepper strategy that got my attention. He writes that, “Sociologists who study post-catastrophe societies report that communities often grow tighter, like scar tissue that forms following a wound, even as they endure what seems unendurable.” What is remarkable about all the past disasters that almost drove humans to extinction is that it was human cooperation that saved them, human kindness for their neighbours, human struggling to carry each other’s loads that got humans through these crises. It was the village that survived, rather than the individual prepper; the community that created the conditions for survival, not hidden caches of food.

            Which brings me to one of Jesus’ (several) failed predictions about the coming apocalypse. In making one of those predictions, in Mark 8, Jesus said, in the same breath, “if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus added, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

            The point worth remembering here is that as Jesus faced the end of the world as he knew it, Jesus turned his back on scope neglect by picking up a cross on behalf of his neighbours to save their lives rather than his own. And he invites us to do the same, to save other lives, rather than our own.

            You see, cross carrying, Jesus’ crucifixion, was a subversive political act by one for the many, in the face of injustice, theological incompetence, and the painful suffering of his compatriots. Cross carrying is the invention of nonviolent resistance of the sort that Martin Luther King or Gandhi engaged in. Jesus’ cross was his refusal to be cowed by scope neglect and his insistence on doing something, even if it was costly to him personally, for the sake of all. Jesus’ cross was his way of saying we can make a stand when the odds seem impossible, and our stand can make a difference, if not now, then in a generation or two or maybe even a thousand years. Jesus’ crucifixion laid the groundwork for a new kind of morality that would eventually subvert Rome’s oppression by prioritizing neighbours.

            Scope neglect is people who refuse to think more deeply about the world than the taxes they must pay or the pleasures they do not wish to forgo. But humans are not bound by that approach. We can, for the sake of the world, carry each other’s—the world’s—crosses, doing whatever it takes artistically or business-wise, politically or at our service clubs, doing whatever it takes religiously or in our schools or labs or by donating or volunteering or in our FB posting--doing whatever it takes to see to not only our comfort but the world’s survival.

            Look. I don’t have a blueprint for where your area of skill or opportunity is. Discovering it will take your own act of imagination. Making your contribution might well involve a change of priorities or habits or generosity.

            But go for it. Pick up a cross and do your small but costly part to save the world.

The Fear and Dread of You: A Modern Flood Story

            Post-apocalyptic, dystopian novels are all the rage right now. One of the best-known ones is Margaret Atwood’s early book The Handmaid’s Tale. Hulu’s television series based on the novel won five Emmy’s this year, including Best Dramatic Series. But there is also Atwood’s more recent Maddaddam trilogy, Stephen King’s The Stand, Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games, and the Silo series of books by Hugh Howey. Even The Game of Thrones is in its own way dystopian and alt-apocalyptic. These books are all about the end of the world and how people do—or don’t—survive it.

What a Pleasant Story!

            The best-selling post-apocalyptic story of all time is found in the Bible. It is the story of Noah’s Ark. In the Flood story, nearly all the world’s population is killed in a global flood that makes Hurricane Harvey or Irma or Maria seem like spring showers by comparison. Only a dozen or so people, Noah’s family, survive Noah’s flood. The Flood Story is told with a minimum of detail, but it is easy to imagine what it suggests: doomed humans crying for mercy at the shut door of the Ark. Drowned bodies floating everywhere. As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, not a bird or butterfly nor even a windswept leaf flitters across the sky. In the Bible’s post-apocalyptic Flood Story, everyone and everything dies, except for Noah and his family and a few animals.

            So, it’s interesting, don’t you think, that we rarely think of the Noah’s Flood story as a post-apocalyptic, dystopian story. In fact, we mostly remember it in the exact opposite way. The story of how animals, two by two, enter or exit the ark is found in every children’s Bible story book. And the pictures are pretty, aren’t they! So many happy bumble bees and monkeys, parrots and chameleons!

            There is no hint, in these pictures of the Flood Story, that it was a cataclysm. Given the actual story in the Bible, these pictures make about as much sense as putting party dresses and tuxes on Hurricane Irma survivors holed up in some stadium. In doing so, these pretty pictures also deny the hard practical and theological issues at the core of the Flood Story.

            At first glance, the hard issue at the core of the Flood Story might seem to be the question, “How can a loving God do such an evil thing?” Theologians call answers to this sort of question, “theodicy.” But actually, that is not the hard question the flood story tackles—at least for whoever wrote it.

            That’s because the Biblical Flood Story, and its earlier Babylonian and Akkadian versions, were written in an era, more than four thousand years ago, when people just presumed that the gods were responsible for everything that happened. Religious scholars call this stage of religious development the “Age of Enchantment.” The gods made babies and decided when old men and women would die; the gods sent plagues and droughts and rain and harvests. They might be persuaded but they were also unaccountable. In that prescientific tradition, the only way to tell the Noah’s Ark story was to make God the one who sent the flood. And while we might find that portrait of God objectionable today (I certainly do), the writers and audience of that time could not even have imagined a different scenario.

            What did surprise the first audience for this story, I think, was its emphasis on human morality and responsibility. In chapter six, before the flood, we are told that humans did evil things. They did so much evil that it stunk all the way to heaven. The earth was, quote, “filled with violence.” The world’s population was corrupted to the core and needed to be cleansed, says the writer of Genesis.

            This is a new thing in the Hebrew version of the Flood story. In the more ancient Babylonian and Akkadian versions of the same story, God destroys the world with a flood not because humans are doing evil, but because there are too many of them, and because their partying and noise making were keeping the gods awake.

            In Noah’s story, however, not only does God want more humans—we twice read that Noah’s family should be fruitful and multiply—but God wants humans to be good. This concern with morality, with human righteousness, is a near first in human literature. And in the Flood Story, it is the main, surprising point of the whole narrative. God sees that “the wickedness of humankind was great, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil.” So, for that reason, God decides to destroy the world. Except that, “Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.” Noah was, quote, “a righteous man, blameless in his generation.” He did, quote, “all that God commanded him.” In Noah’s story, both the evil that most humans do, and the good that a few humans do, are the story’s central concerns. And so, along the way, we learn that doing good is what God wants from humans.

            Now, according to this myth, after the flood, and after Noah pleases God with aromatic burnt-offerings, God promises never to destroy the world’s population and flora and fauna with a flood again. God gives humans the rainbow, too, as a sign of his promise to make sure the earth is never destroyed again. But then, in chapter nine, there follow some very strange words. God says to Noah, “The fear and dread of you [humans] shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered . . .”

            As the story of the flood ends, with its focus on human responsibility to do good, God warns humans that because they are powerful, because they are moral agents who can bless or curse the world they live in, the dread of humans lies over creation. Or, to put it in plainer English, because humans are powerful, all of creation is going to be afraid of humanity. God promises that he will never destroy the earth again, but the story doesn’t say—just warns--what people might do. And creation’s plants and animals know it, and so they are afraid. The Flood Story ends with a reminder that it is up to humans to do good—or bad, for better or for worse, for all of the earth.

            Hurricanes like Harvey, Irma, and Maria are in the news. For weeks, now, headlines have been all about people on rooftops, people drowning, levees breaking, record rainfalls, islands evacuated, and more on the way. We’ve also heard President Trump say he would do a better job of rescuing people than any president ever before . . . though he said nothing about what humans have probably done to influence this run of bad weather in the first place. So floods are on our minds.

            And the central concern of the Biblical Flood Story—human agency and responsibility, human power to do good or ill to the earth—ought still be our central concern. Because, figuratively, anyway, the dread of humanity continues to rest on every animal of the earth, on every biome, on every forest and sea. And for good reason.

            We have given creation lots of reasons to dread us. We have ravaged this planet. From the collapse of the cod stock in Atlantic Canada to the poisoning of Pacific salmon stocks through the inadvertent release of farmed Atlantic Salmon on the West Coast last month; from global warming due to human greenhouse gasses that are likely a factor in the increasing number and severity of hurricanes, to the die off of tens of thousands of square miles of Western forests due to the fact that winters are no longer severe enough to kill borer beetles; from the lack of building regulations that make Houston a trap for flood damage to the excess of plastic garbage in the seas, killing all sorts of flying and swimming and creeping wildlife—no wonder the dread of us humans lies heavy on creation because we have shown, again and again, that, overall, taking care of creation is not a human priority.

            And matters will improve only if we understand one of the key themes at the heart of the story of the flood: the plight of this planet is our responsibility, and not God’s. We are this planet’s moral agents. We are the ones who can pass laws and change habits and create infrastructure, and only we can pay the price—in personal habits and taxes—to make things right, or not. We are the parents and aunts and uncles of the children and great grandchildren who will live with what we do fifty and a hundred years from now. Our lifestyles and choices about whether foreign aid should be measured in tanks and guns or schools and agricultural technology make all the difference in Sub-Saharan Africa, and make the difference for how many refugees from Africa will trek to Europe or here to escape hunger, poverty, and violence caused, in no small measure, by our economic choices, our global warming, our power politics and consumerism. 

            The Flood Story, in its historical context, wasn't concerned with theodicy. But the Flood Story,  in our era, does invite us to reflect on anthrodicy--on explanations or justifications or condemnations for the evil set loose in the world by we humans.

            I wish I could write, “don’t worry, God will never destroy the world again. All dystopian post-apocalyptic novels and movies are just fiction.” But I cannot, because the point of the Flood Story is that even if God isn’t going to destroy it all, it is actually now up to us to decide whether we will usher in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future for our planet—or bless it and our descendants after us.

The End of the World

A few months before Jesus was supposed to return, at least according to Harold Camping, I wrote an article for Northumberland Today about predicting the end of the world. It follows here:

In the wake of the tragic earthquake, tsunami, and reactor accidents in Japan this past week, several people asked me if this portended the end of the world and Jesus' second coming.

I don't think so. Besides, the Bible itself warns Christians that, “about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 10:32).

Still, the history of Christianity is littered with mistaken predictions of Jesus' return. For example the great Scottish Mathematician John Napier, who first worked out the concept of logarithms, predicted Jesus would return in 1688 or 1700. He didn't.

About 100 years later, Sir Isaac Newton, the first person to describe the theory of gravity as we now know it, and perhaps one of the greatest geniuses of all time, predicted that the end of the world would come in 1944. It didn't.

The great Puritan Reformed scholar Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the greatest revival preacher and Christian philosopher in the history of the church, predicted that Jesus would return in the year 2000. In spite of Y2K, he didn't.

Many well-known contemporary prognosticators, including Hal Lindsay, Jack Van Impe, Benny Hinn, and Chuck Smith have been wrong about Jesus' return at least once. They respond to their mistakes by revising their numbers and publishing new books or by cannily substituting "soon," for a specific date, not wanting to be wrong twice. Not so, however, Harold Camping, who has been wrong more than once before. He predicts the world will end this May 21 and now has a fleet of RVs out on America's roads to get the news out.

Of course, end time predictions excite our curiosity and unbridle our appetite for mystery. I wonder how people breathlessly waiting for the skies to roll back can be very motivated to do the hard work of loving God and neighbors or seeking justice. We don't need more Christians getting the end of time wrong; we need more Christians responding to human need and tragedy on time. The right response to the recent tragedies in Haiti, New Zealand, or Japan isn't trying to read these disasters back into the Biblical books of Daniel or Revelation. We ought, instead, pray for those nations' relief and dig deep into our pockets to provide some.

(This article first appeared in Northumberland Today. Click the article title to go directly there).