Wisconsin Public Television University Place  The History of the End of the World  Peter Sobol  2/26/13 UP844  cc >> I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Dawn came and went and came, and brought no day. In 1816 when Lord Byron wrote his apocalyptic poem Darkness, he was of course just one of many, many writers who've been fascinated over the millennia by what it would be like to see the end of the world. If we follow that path of thought from ancient Egypt through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and into modern times, what kind of a pattern do we see? Well, we'll get some ideas from my guest today. He's Peter Sobol, historian of science. Welcome to University Place Presents. >> Thank you, Norman. Good to be back. >> Well, we have a lot to cover here in a fairly short period of time just looking at these speculations about the end of it all. But I think at the end maybe we will see sometime of a pattern emerge. 

How far back do we go? >> Well, I've taken this back to Egypt, ancient Egypt. Other historians who've looked at this have gone back and there among all the papyri that have survived are a couple treatises that look like tales about the end of everything. And they're quite different from what we eventually find in the west, but they're there. I have an image. That image up there is just somebody's fanciful picture of a nice end to the world. A quick bang sort of thing that might have happened had that recent asteroid that passed us with, what, 17,000 miles. >> Right. >> It wasn't that big. >> Or the one that hit was bigger. >> It was bigger, exactly. 

>> A lot bigger. >> No, the Egyptians didn't imagine anything like that. >> This is more like what they had in mind, I gather? >> Well, this is a picture of the snake, Apep, that lived in the underworld, and every night when the sun went down it had to pass through the underworld where it would be attacked by this creature, and the barge of the sun and the guides of the sun would have to fight this thing off. The Egyptians believed that their world was created out of a preexisting and eternal chaos, and it was everybody's job to keep the chaos at bay. And it was emblematic of that fight that this happened every night. >> Sounds pretty modern to me. [LAUGHTER] Born out of chaos and it's your job to keep the chaos at bay. What's new about that today? >> Yeah, I guess. The more things change, the more they stay the same. >> But this concept of the sun going through the underworld... 

>> Well, that was just a sort of emblematic of the fight against chaos. And some people who've looked at a lot of Egyptian literature believe that the Egyptians did believe that after millions of years the chaos would eventually win again and that the ocean, the oceans stands for chaos in a lot of these creation stories, like the Egyptians'. There's this emergence from the ocean. >> Sort of a big unorganized soup. >> Yeah. So, there's also, this snake was known as Apep, but the Greek name for Apep was Apophis, and there is asteroid in orbit around the sun now which has been named Apophis and which will come near the Earth, has come near the Earth before and will come back again. And, in fact, some Russian scientists have predicted that it will hit the Earth on April 13th of the year 2036. >> Pretty soon. >> That's not a Friday. >> Yeah. 

>> So, it's important to point that out. And there's an image of the asteroid Apophis. >> How big is Apophis? >> I think it's about the size of an apartment building. I'm not exactly sure. >> So... >> Big enough that if it hits in the ocean, I guess it won't matter where it hits. It's going to cause a lot of destruction. >> And this would be considerably bigger than the one that hit in the --. >> Oh, yes. >> Which was only, I think, about a hundred... 

>> School bus size. >> School bus size, yeah, right. >> So, the interesting thing about these stories in Egypt is that they don't really talk about destruction. They talk about bad things happening, but mostly it's about the upheaval in the social order that wealthy people have lost their wealth. And I'll just read you a quote from this papyrus. "Indeed poor men have become the owners of wealth, and he who could not make sandals for himself is now a possessor of riches." >> Interesting. >> Yeah, it's not the destruction of the Earth we're talking about, it's the destruction, really, of privilege which would be a consequence of the collapse of the social order. >> Sounds also maybe a little like the collapse of self-reliance though. He can't even make his own sandals and yet he is the possessor of great wealth. >> Yeah. 

Yeah, I think that must be some Egyptian euphemism for someone who has no skill at anything. I'm not sure. >> And so, we proceed from the Egyptians, and not necessarily in a connected way, but if we go chronologically we find, certainly, some biblical prophecies. >> If you don't mind I'd like to just say a brief word about Greek natural philosophy. >> We can't skip the Greeks. >> Please, because there are really several places, I guess I would divide them into three categories that we have used over history to discern how the world will end or if it will end. And one of them is religious prophecy. And that, of course, is the one that will occupy the majority of our time here. Then there's prophecy that's not religious but sort of like astrological prophecies or people like Nostradamus who would predict the future but not based on any sort of reading of scripture. >> Secular prophecy. 

>> Secular prophecies, thank you. And I would put sort of accidental prophets or unwitting prophets in that category in which I would include the late Mayans who were much in the news at the end of last year. >> Who, you're saying, we can get to it later maybe, not really predicting the end of the world. >> They were co-opted. >> There's a terrible joke about the Mayan working on the calendar and somebody comes up and says how about we go out for a beer, and he says, well, I was working on this calendar but I guess if I don't finish, it's not the end of the world. [LAUGHTER] >> Very good. Very good. >> So, interesting, yes. I wouldn't have thought of that. But, yes, accidental or unwitting prophets. 

>> And then, finally, of course, there's natural philosophy and science. Our understanding of the natural world will allow us to make kinds of predictions about where it's all going. So, if you go about as far back as you can to Aristotle, it's worth pointing out that Aristotle believed that the world had never been created and would never be destroyed. >> Always there. >> It was a sort of dynamic equilibrium. But that was not a satisfactory answer. To a lot of people they preferred the idea of cycles, that the world goes through a history and then it's all destroyed and comes back again. >> Sure. >> And there were some Greeks who believe that when it comes back, everything happens exactly the way it happened before. >> You repeated it all? >> Yeah. 

But the cycle idea shows up in other religions too. It shows up in Hinduism and some... >> Is there not any scientific subscribing to that today? Did it expand, contract, expand, contract? >> Yeah, that was, after the discovery of the red shift and the puzzlement over whether the expansion would continue or whether, and this was before anybody knew about dark energy. >> Oh, yes. >> Is there enough mass and is the kinetic energy that's pushing it all apart, can that be overcome by the gravity, and will it all go back together again? And if it does go all back together again, will it bounce back out again? >> And will it hurt? >> Oh, it will hurt. Is there a cyclic universe in that sense. And I'm not sure that ever had any real serious adherence. Maybe a few people have believed that, but Roger Penrose, for one, has pointed out that the entropy of the collapsed version would be much higher than the entropy in the original expansion. And it's hard to see where we would get the energy to even push it all back out again. It's not like you're collapsing springs or something. 

>> I've heard, Peter, that the Greeks favored this cyclical notion of history, whereas the Hebrews thought of it as linear progression from creation to, I don't know, judgment day or something like that. >> Yeah, some of the Greeks, the Stoics notably, believed in cycles, but the Jews did not. Some historians have written that the Jews were being driven from one place to another and being enslaved here and there, and that the idea of this happening to them over and over again was not appealing. They wanted there to be a history. And here they may have been drawing on Zoroastrianism, an older religion which did look at the history of the world as a linear story which had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the plot of which was known by revelation, by prophecies. So, that began to appeal to the Jews, and this literature makes it into the Old Testament beginning with the Book of Ezekiel, but I'd like to jump ahead to the Book of Daniel which is the one that really excited and continues to excite people who want to find out what's going to happen. This Book of Daniel is full of all kinds of interesting numbers. >> Is it having to do with the end of the world? >> Yes, oh, yes. >> Oh. Daniel. 

Okay. >> Oh, yes. So, this is a book that was written in probably 165 BC at a time when the Jews were being persecuted terribly in Jerusalem, and this book was written then but it's set hundreds of years earlier. And this is a hallmark of this kind of literature where it's discovered at a time when people need to believe that if they are true to their faith they will be rewarded. So, here's this book that purports to be very old about people who kept the faith and were rewarded. And there are several stories in the Book of Daniel about people who were so rewarded, and the image that you see there is of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego the three young men who were thrown into a fiery furnace. >> And emerged. >> And emerged unscathed even though some of the men who pitched them in were killed by the intensity of the fire. >> Is that a metaphor for the end of the world and surviving it somehow? Or what does it mean? >> Well, this was a story told so that the Jews who were undergoing this persecution by Antiochus in 165 would be bucked up and hold to their faith. It's the very end of the Book of Daniel where these future prophecies are given. 

Most of what's in there as prophecy was history when this was written. So, if you really believed that this was that old, it looked like the author knew all these things that were going to happen. The author is vague about the fate of Antiochus who hadn't died yet, probably, when this book was written. So the author wisely was vague there. Another image from the Book of Daniel is, of course, Daniel himself. King Darius liked Daniel but Daniel had broken some rule that Darius had signed into law, so they had to pitch him into the lion's den. And there he is with the lions ignoring him. And it's after that, at the very end of the book is full of all these numbers and images. There are beasts. One of them has 10 horns and another horn emerges with eyes and a mouth. 

>> Starts to sound like the Book of Revelation. >> Yes it does. Many such things appear again in the Book of Revelation, and let's go there because that's the big daddy of all the prophetic books. And it has a very checkered history. Probably written in 95 or 96 AD. There is a scholar named Elaine Pagels who has written an excellent book, out within the past year, about Revelation and its checkered history. It's interesting to read in the book by Eusebius in the 4th century, The History of the Church: From Christ to Constantine. And he has a list of all the books in the Bible. And the Bible, of course, as you know, was not graven in stone from the beginning. There was a lot of argument. 

>> Yes. It was decided which books to use. >> Which chunks should be in and which should be out. And Revelation sort of hovers on the boundary line. Eusebius includes it in the books that should be included, but then in his list of spurious books that should not be included, Revelation is there also. >> So he put it in the apocrypha on the one hand but in the Bible on the other. >> He was playing it safely. So, why was it included at all? Some people think that, it's a revelation to John. So maybe this was included because John was mistaken for the John who wrote the fourth book of the gospel. >> Right. 

>> But they were most likely two different people. >> And is the writing attributed to John? Or does that not even matter? >> No, the author of this revelation is supposedly a John of Patmos, whereas the author of the fourth gospel is John of Zebedee. >> But it is considered to be one author for the Book of Revelation? >> Yeah. >> John of Patmos. >> Right. I don't know that anybody's every proposed that it was a conglomeration. >> Some of the others have been. >> Exactly, yeah. So, I have some images of the interesting imagery that is included in the book. In Revelation 12, I'll just read you this bit, there's a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of 12 stars. 

Well, what does that mean? People will spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure that out. And there she is, sitting on her throne. And you'll see that there's an infant in her arms, and an angel is coming down to take the infant away. And that's because this dragony creature with all the heads there. >> Down at the bottom. >> You can probably see him down at the bottom, and one of the heads is turned toward the infant. He would like to devour the child. And the angel takes the child away. And you can also see some stars in the dragon's tail because there's a verse there that says his tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to Earth. These are terrible things that are happening. 

>> Whatever exactly they are, these are terrible things. >> Yeah, we don't know what they mean, but they're obviously something very bad. In the next image, you will see another animal, a beast like a leopard. It's feet were like a bear's. It's mouth was like a lion's mouth. And the dragon, which we saw in the previous slide, gives its power and his throne to this beast. And here's where the number 666 is mentioned. >> Ah, that's the origin. >> Yeah. This doesn't have much to do with the end of the world, but it does continue to come up in these prophetic works because everybody from now on thinks that this beast, which only much later is associated with the antichrist mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, that when he comes along, that means the end is nigh. 

>> Right. >> So there's a lot of energy expended in showing that this particular guy, whom you don't like, is the beast or is the antichrist, or this other fellow is the antichrist. But it's pretty clear that this 666 number refers to Nero. >> Yes. I've heard that mentioned, that it was actually Rome versus Christians. >> Yes. John of Patmos was anxious to keep Christians from becoming Romanized. He wanted there to be a tension because Rome was, of course, Babylon. >> Yes, right. >> And stood for everything that Christians were supposed to despise. 

And the bit of evidence that it is Nero is that there are two ways to transliterate Nero's name into Hebrew. If you call him Neron Caesar, then those Hebrews letter add up to 666 in the Hebrew way of counting. If you transliterate is as Nero without that final N you get 616, and some of the manuscripts of Revelation have 616. >> Instead of 666? >> Instead of 666. >> You have options. >> Well, this convinces people that this was Nero and not something else. But, as we'll see, no one ever tires of this game. So, also in the Book of Revelation, there are stories of Satan being kept in a pit for a thousand years, and that's the millennium, and this becomes very important in prophecy discussion. What does that really refer to? Is it an actual time on Earth where Jesus has come down and Satan is imprisoned in this pit? Or is it some more spiritual looking thing? >> Right. You can certainly, and I'm sure it's been done, write any number of theses having to do with the use of time references in the Bible. 

>> Right. >> A thousand years but a day in the eyes of the lord, that kind of thing. >> You've been studying up. That's good. That's exactly right. Another thing I just want to mention before we leave the Book of Revelation is that there's a passage in chapter 21 that says the first Earth had passed away and the sea was no more. >> Pretty dire. >> Chaos is gone. It doesn't really mean the sea. >> Oh, that's considered to be a positive thing, like in the Egyptian sense. 

>> Yes, that's the positive thing. The old Earth has been destroyed. The new Earth has no sea, so there's no chaos for our happy world to sink back into. Another thing worth mentioning at the end of Revelation is that there are lots of reminders that Jesus is coming back soon. >> Right. >> "Truly, I say to you," this is in Matthew, "there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the son of man coming in his kingdom." So, people expected this to happen right away. >> Yes. >> When it didn't, there were lots of efforts to calculate when it would happen based on all these numbers and things, even though there are injunctions in the New Testament not to try this, don't try this at home. >> Right. >> But lots of people did. 

So, we can skip ahead to the 13th century. I see that's the image that's up there now. >> This fascinating diagram here of these overlapping circles. >> Yeah. It may be hard to make out. You can see the name of Jesus in there. You can see across the top, underneath the arcs of each of the three circles is Pater, Filius, and Spiritus, the father, the son, and the holy ghost. And the smaller type indicates that this is some version of history that --, who was alive in the 12th and into the very beginning of the 13th century, he was one of the first people to try and find this hidden map of history in the different parts of the Bible. And this also becomes a trope of prophecy writing. >> A map of history. 

>> A map of history. >> And then what did he do? Extend that to predict the future? >> Yeah. Exactly. So, as many of these people do, he places his own age very close to the end. Everybody wants to be there for the denouement. Nobody predicts that it's going to happen in 5,000 years. They predict soon. >> Well, we can get into that a little later too, but do you suppose that has something to do with, well, I don't want anybody to have fun after I'm gone? >> Well, that may be. I always thought that people want to be there for that. >> They just want to be there. 

>> People want to be present when this important thing happens that has been anticipated all this time. >> Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. >> Well, good or bad is sort of a dicey issue here. Of course it's meant to be bad for a lot of people, but that's what makes these stories very interesting. We're talking about this as if it's the end of the Earth, but it's only the end of the current Earth. These people all believe that this Earth will pass away and a new Earth will be created. And people who are on the right side of this contention will occupy the new Earth. The rest of us will not. So, it's not really a destruction story. It's sort of a regeneration story. 

>> As we get into the Renaissance, how does that change? >> Well, not much changes in terms of how many people are around that are predicting that the end is eminent. The Bible says there will be wars of rumors of wars and pestilence, which there always was. >> A pretty safe prediction. >> Yeah. You would have thought that around the year 1,000 there might be a lot of people thinking, oh, my goodness, this is it, the is the millennium. >> The millennium, right. >> But it doesn't really rise above the noise of all the other false prophets and wars and disasters. The plague comes along. Everybody thinks that's it. So by the time you get to the Renaissance, you get the Protestant reformation that looks like the end of the world to a lot of people. 

>> To a lot of Catholics, yeah. >> Yeah. They think this is the end. And even to some of the new Protestants, Martin Luther at first doesn't want to have anything to do with the Book of Revelation, which, even then and beyond, has a sort of dicey position in the canon. There are people who want it there, and there are people who think maybe it should not be there at all. And Martin Luther didn't like the use that was being made of it by the sort of third wing of the reformation that didn't like him either. There were these real radicals that were out there who didn't like the new Protestants or didn't like the Catholics. But he goes back to the Book of Daniel and tries to calculate a date for the end of the world. >> Luther does? >> Luther did that. And he actually translated the Book of Daniel, and then was afraid that based on his calculation, his translation might arrive too late, that he wouldn't get it done in time. 

It's also worth mentioning, some of the people that were against the Protestants and the Catholics were the Anabaptists. They were so crazy. Some of them were crazy anyway. They took over the city of Munster for a little while. >> To do what? >> Well, they thought that that was where the new Jerusalem was going to come down. All the prophets have there own idea of where this is going to happen, and every prophet thinks it's going to come down where he is. When we get to the 18th century, we'll see that American divines believe that it was going to land somewhere in New England. So, the Munster Theocracy it was called, they believed that it was going to come down there. They were all killed eventually. And then, in 1524, the image that you see there is a horoscope of a day in the year 1524 when all the planets were aligned in the sign of Pisces which everybody thought meant another huge flood which might mean something. 

>> So, this is a convergence maybe of science and religion or religious prophecy and scientific prophecy? >> Yeah. Because there is no evidence that the original Noah's flood was foretold by some astrological alignment. And, in fact, it was argued even in 1524 that whether this meant there would be another flood of that magnitude. And it does become a dicey business to explain what had always been viewed as miraculous things that were sort of visited on the Earth for morals reasons. Once you begin explaining them naturalistically, you can always say God made that volcano pop up or God made this tornado come through or this tidal wave, but you're starting on a slippery slope that may lead you to say that these really are totally natural events with no divine intervention required. So, in 1524, there wasn't a lot of rain, there wasn't anything near a big flood, so it made people doubt astrology and it made people a little cagey about predicting the end, at least on that basis. But, meanwhile, and I want to keep harking back to natural philosophy and science because this is creeping around in the background, and of course this is the way of looking at nature that will eventually tell us the real destruction story. Not one that anybody's going to survive and walk away from, but destruction. And it's worth mentioning that in 1543 Copernicus publishes his book on the revolution of the celestial orbs. He suggests that instead of the stars being embedded in this sphere and this sphere rotating around the Earth once a day, it's the Earth that's turning and this sphere of the stars doesn't have to turn. 

But, of course, if it doesn't have to turn, they don't have to be stuck in a sphere. And the image that you see there is from a book by a man named Thomas Digges, the perfect description of the celestial orbs, and you see the stars go out to the edge of the page. So, we no longer, at this point, live in a finite cosmos. We live in an infinite universe. >> So, is the implication of that that if assuming that the end of the world comes, it won't be in response to any kind of divine plan for mankind but just because of natural laws taking their course? >> Well, it has that implication. Here's another image. This is William Gilbert's book. And the same thing, stars are not restricted to a sphere but just going out to the edge of the page. It doesn't have any immediate implication, but it's leading us to look carefully at this cosmos, this universe, which is this huge place. It's not this nicely ordered Aristotelian universe where, although the Earth was down at the lowest point, down in the center, nevertheless, it was for the Earth that all this other stuff was rotating around it. 

Now we're living in this big universe, and our location in it is no longer special. And the way it treats us, scripture or not, is no long special. Things can come flying out and we may not see them ahead of time. Or are they stuck in space the way those diagrams show? Or are they moving themselves? That will have some consequence for the age and fate of the universe when that is later discovered. >> So, it becomes, you might say, a little impersonal? >> Yes. >> That scheme of things. >> Yes, indeed. >> How does Newton weigh in on all of this? He was a religious man. >> He was. He was a closet Unitarian and a very religious man and probably did think about the end of the world. 

In fact, the title page of his book on prophecy is up there right now, published in 1733. I should mention that the History Channel once aired, and probably will air again, an episode called the Nostradamus Effect which contains the assertion that Newton believed that the world would end in 2060, and they also claim that his speculations on this prophecy remained unknown until the 19th century. Well, this was published in 1733. So these were well known. I have looked all over the place for this year 2060 and cannot find it. Certainly, Richard Westfall's magisterial biography of Isaac Newton called Never at Rest, and Westfall was the premiere scholar of Newton. This biography will never be surpassed. Westfall held in his hand every paper that's extant that Newton ever had. And according to Westfall, Newton did not believe that there would be a cataclysmic destruction of the physical world at this end time that the Bible predicted. He thought it was just a reference to the final triumph of Christianity. 

No pain and destruction and blood letting necessary. It's also fun to not that Voltaire, having gotten a hold of this book, said that, and I quote here, "Sir Isaac Newton wrote his comment up on the revelation to console mankind for the great superiority he had over them in other respects." So, Voltaire at least didn't think much of this work. >> Not too surprisingly given what his reputation is. >> Yeah, that's true. >> Are there history or theories of various stages of mankind and history that somehow play into this idea that there's an end? In other words, we see various ages in which certain things happen, and then when you get to a certain age you know that, all right, this is the age where it's going to come to an end? You can tell by the characteristics of the times? >> Well, that's a difficult question to answer. There does come to be an attitude toward prophecy that's called dispensationalism where history is divided into the different ways in which God dealt with people, and specifically dealt with the Jews and the Christians separately. But even before that really emerges, there are people like Thomas Burnet, whose frontispiece is now up on the screen there, and he rather arbitrarily divides the history of the Earth based on what he's learned from the Bible into these seven ages. And the interesting thing here is that, again, this is making use of naturalistic explanations for miraculous events. You can see, beginning at sort of one o'clock and then going to two o'clock and then going to four o'clock, you see wavy lines. And if you were here you could see Noah's ark floating in there because that's the Noah's flood. 

The whole Earth is covered with water. He explains in his book that that flood occurred because the crust that God had created over the water collapsed, and so as much water came up from below as rained down from above. >> Kind of the sinkhole theory. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, no longer relying on simply the miraculous application of lots of water and its miraculous removal when the flood is over. Now you've got an explanation that a natural philosopher might even subscribe to. This was probably taken from Descartes idea of why rock strata look the way they do. And if you follow along to about seven o'clock you see an almost flowery-like thing, not as flowery as the one at 11 o'clock, but at seven o'clock that's a big conflagration. And, here again, Burnet refers to volcanoes as the source of this big fire, not miraculous fire just appearing because scripture calls for it, but he's actually decided that these must be volcanoes. 

So, again, going toward this making use of naturalistic explanation. >> But he still has God in this explanation but he's just saying God is using the volcanoes. >> Yes, that's right. >> He's not creating anything special just for us. >> That's right. So, theologians call these secondary causes. God is responsible for this but not directly. He'll make the crust collapse, he'll make the volcano spout up wherever he wants. Okay, charging ahead, we're into the 19th century, and there's a lot, especially in the United States, there's a lot of religious revival, there's a lot of renewed interest in looking at the Book of Revelation and in predicting the end of the world. >> Any special reason for that? The Industrial Revolution? Or what's causing people suddenly to think about the end? >> Yes, that's a very good question. 

And, of course, it's easy to descend into psycho babble here, but what's very interesting about this period is that the people who sign on to these stories come from every walk of life. Early on, back in the age of Zoroaster and even in early Christianity, the people who enjoy these stories are the disenfranchised. >> In other words, they've got nothing to lose if it all ends. >> Not only that, but they believe that after the big fight or the big conflagration... >> They'll come out better. >> They will come out better. Exactly. And that makes sense. So, why is it that well-to-do people, socially, economically well-placed people are taken by these stories and hope that they will turn out true? And I can't answer that. I suspect that if one is a Christian and one knows that this is likely to happen at some point, that it might as well happen while you are alive and you get to see this thing that other people died too soon to be able to see. 

But this will happen in your lifetime, how exciting is that? >> You deserved it. >> Yeah. Maybe. So, it becomes very elaborate, as you can see from the image that's up there now. This is a history of the world. I hope that you can make out some of the numbers. Those are years. And this is a very careful, painstaking study of all the numbers that are mentioned in all the prophetic books. Daniel, as I've hinted at, is full of interesting numbers. There's a period of 2,300 evenings and mornings before the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful place. 

Well, what does that mean? >> Where does that number come from, yes. >> Well, I'm speaking now about a Baptist preacher named William Miller who decided that those days were really years, and if you pick as a starting date the year 457 BC, which is when Ezra was given permission to rebuild the temple by Artaxerxes, and you add that many years, you get 1843 or 1844. Lo and behold. >> Right when he's living. >> Yeah. And soon after that. So, it didn't happen, needless to say, in March of 1844. And by that time he had attracted a lot of followers who, when it didn't happen, were not all that upset. In fact, they were overjoyed because they felt that this meant they had more time to convert people, more time to go out and save people. >> These were all Baptists also? >> Yeah. 

>> The Millerites? >> Yeah. >> So... >> And then the second prediction, which was soon after in October of 1844, that also didn't happen and that is referred to as The Great Disappointment, believe it or not. A great disappointment that the world didn't come to an end. But it did bring to an end most of the Millerites who had ruined themselves by either given away all their worldly goods or donating them. >> We sort of have to at least believe that if Miller had believed that he had nothing to gain from this and he was setting the date so close to a time that could be proven or disproven. >> Oh, I don't think Miller was a fraud in any sense. I think he did believe it. I think many frauds have followed in his footsteps, but he was not one. And neither was Charles Taze Russell, who also had a scheme of history. 

His diagram, this is the third of these diagrams that we've now seen. Perhaps you can make it out. The two big arcs under the heavy black line at the top of that. There's the second dispensation, the third dispensation. So, as I mentioned before, these are sort of arbitrarily drawn divisions in the history of the world that are delimited by how God related to the Jews and the Christians at different times. >> Sure. >> So, Russell believes that the end is coming soon and tries to work it out in this diagram. He started to hedge his bets a little bit. He believed that Jesus had actually returned in 1874 but would only actually intervene in the world in 1914, and that's when the millennium would begin and the dead would come up out of the graves. As one historian has put it, it's too bad that what happened at that point was a lot of dead went into graves. 

>> Yes. That's what I was thinking. It went the other way. >> That was the beginning of the first world war. So, when Russell dies in 1916, his followers sort of split up and go with different people, and some of them eventually become Jehovah's Witnesses. In fact, Zion's Watchtower began publication under Russell when he was still alive. The Jehovah's Witnesses have learned not to pick a date. Maybe they come to your house. They used to come to mine. I used to look forward to their visits. 

And they will tell you that it's going to happen any day now, but they've learned not to pick an actual date. Meanwhile... >> In the world of science. >> In the world of science, remember those stars out to the edge of the page. Astronomers are looking at them, and they're discovering something interesting. They've learned that elements, like sodium say, if you take sodium here on Earth and you heat it up and you take the light that comes from it and put it through a prism, sodium emits these lines, emission lines, that are like a fingerprint. Only sodium emits lines in that pattern. And if you look at a nearby star, you can actually see, if there is sodium in that star, there are those lines. >> The composition of the star. >> But if you look at something that's far away, you see the same relative pattern of lines, but they're shifted toward the red. 

And the further away your object is, the further toward the red this pattern of lines, this indicative pattern of lines has shifted. So, this comes to be called the red shift, and it suggests that the further away things are, the faster they're moving. Things are all rushing away from each other. And if that's true, it suggests that there was a time when everything was all together in one little primordial atom. >> I hear the big bang any second now. >> Yes. That was ultimately the theory that was come up with to explain this. So, that's the big bang. And it leads to another, it leads to more thinking about, if we had a big bang, what's going to happen at the end of that? We've already talked about does it keep going forever, does it crush back down again? There were some people who thought that the idea of the big bang was really to redolent of a religious creation story, and they wanted to maintain the idea that even though things are moving apart, they really have always been moving apart, and if we just hypothesize that out of some magical formula we get, what is it, three new hydrogen atoms per cubic meter every million years, that would be sufficient to maintain the density of stars that we see. But nobody ever really took that seriously. 

Especially after the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, which is a measurement that is predicted... >> Resident. >> Exactly. Predicted but not noticed for a while. And when that was finally found, that sort of sealed it for the idea of the big bang. And now, we believe that there's something called dark energy because when we look at these very distant things, they're really moving away too fast. They're moving away as if something is pushing them. So, what now do we believe will eventually happen? We believe, at least if you're reading cosmology, all the galaxies will eventually be all alone. They will no longer be receiving light from anything else. The stars will eventually burn out because we know stars do. 

Or they'll collapse into black holes, and the black holes will eventually evaporate by Hawking radiation, and you'll pretty much have nothing except photons flying around. Pretty grim. >> A little boring, yes. >> Yes, and that too. And really much less fun because it's sort of a whimper, isn't it? It's not the bang. But this isn't happening all by itself. In fact, probably the number of people who are reading about this and are interested in this are dwarfed by the number of people who learned about the supposed Mayan prediction of the end of the world. >> Ah, the Mayan prediction again. >> Yeah, well, this was very big leading up to 2012 because in the calculation of somebody, I'm not even sure who this was, it's hard to track down where this originally came from. It's also hard to track down what people thought was going to happen. 

What's going to happen when this calendar supposedly runs out? Is there going to be a flip of the Earth's magnetic axis or of it's rotational axis? Is there going to be an alignment between the center of the galaxy and the sun and the Earth, which would have disastrous consequences >> Oh, my gosh, another flood. >> It's not clear. Yeah, who knows. Or will we be struck by the rogue planet Nibiru at that time, which no one's ever seen except maybe the Mayans knew about it. Well, if you look at the slide, you can see that there's the -- that the largest cycle, 144,000 days, that's the one that is supposedly when that is expired the world will come to an end. But this would be as silly as saying that when you flip your calendar over in your kitchen in December and see the wall that that means the world is coming to an end. There are extant Mayan carvings that make predictions for what would be our year 4,772. So, clearly, the Mayans didn't think this was going to happen, so why it got out of hand this way, and people who do astronomy outreach leading up to this were getting phone calls from people who would say should I kill my children now or can I wait because I don't want them to suffer. >> You can wait until 4,700 at least. >> Yeah, I suppose that would have been a safe thing to say. 

Don't kill your children until the year 4,772. But people, I've been told by people I work with that they're junior high and high school aged children would come home and be somewhat upset about this and in sort of an embarrassed way say, mom, dad, what about this thing with this 2012, what do you think about that? So, it frightened a lot of people. >> And why do you suppose people want to think seriously about something like the Mayan calendar? >> Well, there again, it's like why would a well placed clergyman enjoy the idea that the world was coming to an end? And, again, I may descend into psycho babble here, but, on the one hand, I think we've got what these astronomy outreach people call cosmophobia. That the more we have learned about the world we live in with its asteroids and comets, it's not impossible that one of these things will hit. We know that one hit and killed the dinosaurs. >> Right. >> 96 million years ago. There's a big cater out in, what is it? >> Yucatan. >> Yeah. And then there's that other big crater in Nebraska someplace. 

You can go down to the bottom, there's a snack shop. >> There's a meteor crater in Arizona. >> Yeah. So, these things happen. And I think now people look up into the sky and are frightened by what might be up there that might want to harm us. >> They maybe would like to know when to expect it? >> Well, I think that they're not getting that, or at least they seem not to trust that, from astronomers. So, now I'm going to out on a limb here because other historians have made the case that these destruction stories are told by the disenfranchised. And I wonder whether there may not be many ways to be disenfranchised. And I sometimes think that the whole way of thinking about nature that we call science, where you collect evidence and you have a theory and the theory doesn't every really get proven. A theory just works until it doesn't work. 

Someone might come along with a better one, without even any new evidence, which is what Copernicus did. No new evidence for him, but he thought of a better way to think about the cosmos. That seems to be difficult for some people to do. They want the truth. They don't want a theory. In fact, you'll hear people who don't like evolution put it down by saying, well, it's only a theory. Well, gravity is only a theory. So, I think there's that. If people don't like a thing and it's getting very popular and very powerful, scientists pull a lot of weight in our culture, you would like to see it taken down a notch, especially if you perceive that it is challenging what you were taught when you were a child. If you were perceived that science is the enemy of your religion, that may be another reason to want to see it shown up. 

And of course in this late 20th century, early 21st century, new age stuff is still very big. It's fun to think that ancient cultures knew way more about the world we live in than science. >> And some secrets that we have not discovered. >> Yes. They knew all the stuff that we don't know. It made perfect sense to them that the Mayans would know that there's a rogue planet out there that's going to hit us at this particular time. So, again, it shows up science, and, if you're a Christian and you're there when the end occurs or when the conflagration begins or maybe you think you'll be raptured, that would be great fun, and you could sort of do this to all your scientist friends. There's a guy and there's his picture. His name is Harold Camping. He was an engineer by training. 

He owned a construction company and then became a preacher. I think he's 90 something now. He owns a radio network. And he started playing with predicting the end. He predicted an end in 1994. It didn't happen. He very prominently predicted an end in May of 2011, and his followers spent their own money to proselytize this end of the world all over the world. In June of that year my son was on the road driving to Texas from California and passed a big billboard that still had the warning about May 21st, 2011 up there. When that didn't happen, Camping said, no, I made a mistake, it's going to be in October. And at that point the graves of the un-Christian people will be emptied out and they'll be like manure on the ground. 

And that didn't happen either. And in March of 2012, Camping put an apology up on his website saying I never should have done this, after all, scripture says you should never do this. But he made a lot of money by doing it. >> So, no Millerite he. >> No. I think he is one of the charlatans, one of the many charlatans that has followed in the footsteps of the modern predictor. But there's so much more to this story that we haven't got time to go into. The 20th century was full of people roping in Russia and calling Russia Gog and Magog. >> Oh, yes. Yes. 

>> And nuclear weapons. The creation of the state of Israel looked like the beginning of the end because that's also there. The Jews will go back to their homeland. That's one of the things that's supposed to happen leading up to the end times. So, we're never going to be free of this of course. We will always have people telling us what the end is going to be. Although, today at lunch I tried to think of a recent scripturally based end of the world. And I guess maybe we won't see that anymore. Maybe Harold Camping was the last straw among the people who pick a date, with the nerve to actually pick a date, but we'll see. Until then we have asteroids to worry about. 

>> So, in the long run, what's the value of any of these erroneous predictions do you think? >> Value? >> Yeah. Is there anything to learned from them at least? >> Well, about human nature, certainly, I think there is. There is some sort of attraction to something which is just terrible. Again, like I said, I can go on about how it is a religious person's reaction to science. I don't really know. But that said, and that's why I think it's never going to go away because it has lasted this long. >> It's something about it in human nature. >> Yeah, it's just fun to think about at some level. Fun to think that you will be among the elect. I don't know that anybody thinks it will be fun to be on Earth when it's hit by the very large asteroid by Apophis which will come back in 2036. 

Whoever thinks that's fun, I'd want to sit down with them and find out why. >> But you sort of want to know what's going to happen, what the end of the story is going to be like in any event. >> Yeah. And, of course, a bang is more fun than a whimper. >> It's more exciting. >> Yeah. >> Well, it's not the end of the world, but it's the end for us, Peter, and this conversation about it. >> Okay. >> We touched on many bases, but many bases, of course, untouched. >> Yes indeed. 

>> Thanks for joining. >> Thank you, Norman. Always a pleasure. >> I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can be with me next time for University Place Presents.