It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

our own mortality as individuals. One important function served by religion is to provide structure and consolation in the face of our individual mortality; and so it also offers a way we can make sense of the end of everything.

Let’s start with the conventional understanding of this story. In the Jewish and Christian tradition, God made the universe in six days and rested on the seventh. Since then, our story has been unfolding in all its glorious complexity. However, a story without an ending is an unsatisfying prospect and if God can create the world, he might also be tempted to unmake it, to tear it down and destroy it, with the virtuous going to heaven and the wicked to perdition. Something similar is true of the Islamic tradition, according to which there will be signs of the coming end times, but finally the sun will rise from the west and there will be three catastrophic ‘sinkings of the earth’ in the east, the west and in Arabia. Then the dead will return to life and a fire will flare in Yemen that will gather all to ‘Mahshar Al Qiy’amah’, the gathering for judgement, after which the faithful will go to heaven.

So when will this happen? According to believers, soon:

A recent poll showed that 41 per cent of Americans overall and 58 per cent of white evangelical Christians believe that Jesus will either ‘probably’ or ‘definitely’ return by 2050. Within the Muslim world, a 2012 poll found a similar prevalence of beliefs, with 83 per cent of Muslims in Afghanistan, 72 per cent in Iraq, and 68 per cent in Turkey anticipating the return of the Mahdi (the end-times messiah) in their lifetime.*

The end, it seems, is indeed nigh.

Why do these predictions so often take place in the here and now? The critic Frank Kermode argued that we are uncomfortable with the idea that our lives occupy a short period in the vastly longer history of the world. Stories of the end exist, he says, to give us the chance to consider our own lives and mortality, to make sense of our place in time and our relationship to the beginning and the end. ‘It seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future,’ Kermode says, ‘that one should assume one’s own time to stand in extraordinary relation to it.’* And so ‘men in the middest’, as Kermode styles them, are fond of making predictions as to specific near-at-hand dates as to when the world will end. We fear being left out of the crucial climax of the story. Better nigh than never.

Still, our religious myths are about much more than providing ways to grapple with our mortality. While religion is often used to predict that the end is nigh, many of our religious stories about apocalypse are based in the past, and since we are still around, these prior ends of the world have clearly proved unsuccessful. If you believe that a god is capable of making a universe, you will also believe that he is capable of unmaking it, but if that is the case, why would there be so many unsuccessful attempts? It doesn’t reflect well on the powerfulness of our various gods.

Is it always the case that someone who makes something can unmake it? The modern myth of Frankenstein speaks to our sense that making can entail not only horrible but irrevocable unintended consequences. We build nuclear reactors without knowing how to decommission them, and we produce trillions of tons of plastic and don’t know how to get rid of it. Our creations assume a malign life of their own and start wrecking the joint. It may be that, as our attempts to wrest our world from the catastrophic climate change have suggested, this baleful truth will be revealed as the core certainty – that we can create but cannot uncreate. If that’s true for us, why should it be any different for a god?

Of course our gods are more powerful than we are – omnipotence, surely, includes the power to undo what they have done – and yet from Greek myth to the Bible, religious stories are rife with divine creators deciding to unmake their creations and finding themselves unable to follow through on their divine resolution.

Greek myths in particular are filled with previous failed attempts by the gods. Take for example the legend of Prometheus.* Zeus, the story goes, repented of having created humankind after seeing the wickedness to which we are prone and decided to let us die out in the cold and hostile world before creating a better kind of creature. But Prometheus, a Titan (an entity not quite as elevated as an Olympian god, although still a powerful immortal), took pity on us and smuggled fire from the sun down to earth in a fennel stalk. We humans were thus able to prosper, and Zeus’s plan to see us all dead was thwarted. He was so angry with Prometheus that he chained him to a rock high in the Caucasus Mountains, where, according to some versions of the myth, he remains. Every day an eagle flies down, rips open his belly with his beak and devours his liver; every night the liver miraculously regrows, so the punishment can begin again the next day.*

That Zeus takes his anger out on Prometheus in this savage manner is certainly in character, but we might wonder why, if he wanted humanity extirpated, he didn’t focus on the task in hand – flocks of eagles and a rain of thunderbolts would surely go some way towards actively finishing us off. Or what about a flood?

In some versions of the myth, a flood is exactly what Zeus sends next; having failed to destroy humanity once, he resolves to drown us all. But Prometheus’s mortal son Deucalion, warned by his father, has the foresight to build a giant chest big enough to fit himself, his wife and his family. In this manner