So the question is this: is the end of the world millions of years away, or will it arrive momentarily?
According to the discipline of statistical probability, there is a scientific way of weighing up whether the world will end tomorrow or in trillions of years in the future, and the news is not good. I’m talking about the so-called ‘Doomsday argument’, which uses Bayesian probability to assess the odds of whether the world will end sooner or later.*
Probability, of course, is to do not with certainty but likelihood. Roll a die once and you have a one-in-six chance of guessing the number correctly; but roll a die a million times and the probability that each number will appear with one-sixth of throws increases. If you rolled the die a billion times and plotted how often each number appeared on a bar chart, you would have a chart in which all six bars were the same height. Probability is what happens when random instances accumulate to the point where randomness cancels itself out and the underlying pattern is revealed.
Bayes’ theorem is a branch of probability theory named after its inventor, the eighteenth-century English clergyman Thomas Bayes. Here’s how it works. If I asked you the likelihood that it was raining outside, you could go to the window and look; then you could tell me directly. However, let’s say that you’re too far from the window to see whether it’s raining, but you can see that lots of people outside have opened their umbrellas. Though this doesn’t absolutely confirm that it is raining, the alternatives are less likely than the most probable explanation.
That’s a trivial example, but there are plenty of nontrivial ways in which Bayesian reasoning is applied in the real world. For example, our likelihood of getting certain cancers increases under the influence of factors such as age, gender and lifestyle. Knowing this, doctors can use Bayes’ theorem to assess the probability of such cancers and so improve prevention and increase survival rates. In other words, feeding certain kinds of observation into Bayes’ theorem, in a medical context, can literally save lives.
What does this have to do with the end of the world? Well, a group of statistically minded philosophers recently used Bayes’ theorem to calculate the probability that the world is about to end. This was an exercise in probability theory rather than a specific prophecy. The idea was not to point the finger directly at environmental collapse, nuclear war or alien invasion but to establish the larger likelihoods of extinction. They did not feed data concerning the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the number of nuclear weapons in the world into Bayes’ theorem; they fed into it only the fact that we are alive now. When they did that, the equation generated an intriguing result: the probability that human beings will become extinct in the relatively near future increased.
It is, of course, rational to be concerned that environmental stability is collapsing, or that nuclear weapons could, whether by accident or design, wreak terrible harm upon our world. But this hypothesis increases the likelihood of human extinction irrespective of other data. To be clear: the end of the world to which this analysis relates (because, of course, there are several different kinds of end of the world) is one in which there are no more humans alive, not in which the planet itself is necessarily destroyed. As humans, this really ought to concern us. Sensible people are right to have specific concerns – for instance, that the thawing of frozen methane in Siberia and the release of that greenhouse gas into the atmosphere makes the imminent end of a human-habitable world more likely. OK. The point of this analysis is: if we factor in Bayes’ theory, we should revise our estimate of that probability, whatever it is, upwards. It’s a strange, even a counter-intuitive, argument, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong.
Consider two hypotheses: ‘Doom Soon’, the belief that human history will end in the near future and ‘Doom Delayed’, the belief that Homo sapiens will survive long into the future. In the latter scenario, the population of all humans who will ever live will be very large, maybe trillions of people in total. In the case of ‘Doom Soon’, that number will be much lower, because the ending of the world will prevent more humans being born. Using Bayes’ theorem, statisticians estimate the respective probabilities of the two scenarios and conclude that the probability that you are living right now is greater if ‘Doom Soon’ is true and less probable if ‘Doom Delayed’ is true.
Think of it like this: you being born exactly when you were born is a matter of chance, like picking a lottery ball from a giant tub of such balls. If half the balls in our notional tub are black and half are white, there’s a 50 per cent chance of picking either colour. Equal probabilities. That’s simple enough.
But imagine that you have to pick a random ball from a tub that contains either ten or one hundred balls, with each ball numbered sequentially from one to one hundred. In goes your hand and out comes ball number three. Now, is it more likely that the tub contains ten or one hundred balls? Bayes’ theorem tells us that you picking ball number three makes it more likely the tub contains ten balls, because the probability of picking ball number three is higher if the tub contains ten balls than if it contains one hundred – ten times higher, in fact. It doesn’t prove that the tub contains ten balls, of course – maybe it contains a hundred and you just happened to pick ball number three – but it does make the ten-ball hypothesis more likely.
Now apply this thought experiment to the end of the world. Let’s say that I am the 50 billionth human being born on Planet Earth. ‘Doom Soon’ might say that the number of humans who will ever live will be 100 billion, while ‘Doom Delayed’ says that number will be much larger – 1,000 billion, perhaps. But the fact that I’ve picked a ball with the number 50 billion written on it means that ‘Doom Soon’ is more likely than ‘Doom Delayed’, just as picking out ball number three in the example above makes it more likely that there are ten rather than one hundred balls in the tub.
There’s another statistical principle to take into account here: the we-are-not-special doctrine. People used to believe that the Earth was at the centre of the universe and that the Sun and the stars revolved around us, until Copernicus changed that view. It turns out that we are not the centre around which the entire cosmos revolves, but are rather a planet orbiting a small star that itself is in the outer reaches of the spiral arm of one of many billions of galaxies. Across a wide range of sciences, the beliefs that used to mark Homo sapiens out as unique and special have shifted.
The end of the world has its own equivalent argument. Consider ‘Doom Delayed’: perhaps humanity will colonise the universe, live for billions of years and produce trillions of human beings. If that is true, you and I have popped up extremely early in the human story – what are the odds of that? We would expect, by probabilistic distribution, to be somewhere in the middle. That leads our analysis towards the idea of ‘Doom Soon’ – not that the world is going to end by this coming midnight (that would also be unlikely) but that it is going to end over the next couple of centuries. Probabilistically speaking, the end of the world is nigh.
* I hope, therefore, my next book will be about why we should give balding, middle-aged writers in Berkshire millions of pounds and our collective adulation.
* G. K. Chesterton, Dickens (1906), Chapter 10.
† Similarly, the Edinburgh football club Heart of Midlothian FC (or simply ‘Hearts’) is named after one of Scott’s best novels, The Heart of Midlothian (1818).
* ‘According to Angelo Robles, founder and CEO of the Family Office Association, “taking steps to deal with the apocalypse is becoming a bigger concern among many family offices. We’re seeing more members and executives talking about the possibility and trying to work out the likelihood of different scenarios so they can decide how intensely to address the matter.”’ Russ Alan Prince, ‘Many of the Super-Rich and Family Offices are buying “Apocalypse Insurance”’, Forbes, 26 September 2017.
* I think it becomes clear in what follows that I do not believe my individual consciousness will survive my death. Indeed, the real worry for me is not that I
won’t survive death, but precisely that I might – because the prospect of living forever fills me with a far greater sense of existential dread than the prospect of stopping. I daresay it is bad theology, but I’m rather drawn to the idea that God became Christ in order to put an end to his own endlessness. ‘God is growing bitter,’ Jacques Rigaut said in 1920. ‘He envies man his mortality.’
* Thinking in the wrong direction is like looking in the wrong direction, but for thinking.
* A good recent explanation of this position is John Leslie’s The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (Routledge, 1996). I have taken the ‘lottery ball’ analogy from Leslie.
ESCAPING THE WRATH OF THE GODS: RELIGIOUS DOOMSDAYS
Of all the types of stories that humanity has told itself about the end of the world, religious apocalypse is the oldest and most enduring. From the four horsemen of the Christian apocalypse, the seven suns of Buddhist eschatology and the chilly Ragnarök cosmocide in Norse mythology, the religions that posit a cosmos-creator also posit a cosmos-destroyer. For most of them, these two figures are one and the same.
As we’ve already discussed, imagining the end of the world is one of the ways in which we imagine 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 he survives the flood, floating about for nine days and nights until the waters recede. Whatever else this myth is saying, I think we can all agree that it shows a lamentable sloppiness on Zeus’s behalf. The father of the gods can summon floods to drown the whole world, but can’t aim a single thunderbolt at a wooden box bobbing along on the waves? Perhaps the problem is that Zeus lacks not the capacity to finish off Deucalion but the inclination; although he knows he really ought to purge humanity from the world, he just can’t bring himself to do it.
The Deucalion story has an obvious parallel with the story of Noah, in which God has had enough of human wickedness. In the Torah and the Old Testament, God decides that Noah will survive because he is the world’s only righteous man, giving him advance warning of the coming flood. That is offered as an explanation for why God doesn’t tie off the unfinished business that Noah represents.
The common feature in these narratives is that the gods decide to destroy us because they have grown increasingly disgusted with our human sinfulness. The point, in other words, is punishment, and if there aren’t any people around afterwards to learn the lesson, what is the point of the punishment? So this is not as much about mortality as it is morality. We carry within ourselves, to varying degrees, a sense of personal discontent linked to shame and guilt. Only the sociopath is free of those two qualities; for most normal people they loom pretty large. We are afraid that our nature is inherently sinful and that, accordingly, we deserve what we get. These stories are a judgement on how a society has lost its way
; cautionary tales to scare us into being good. If a person punishes us, then perhaps there has been some kind of miscarriage of justice. But that can’t be true if God punishes us because God is justice.
There are versions of this particular end-of-the-world story – God’s wrath – all over the globe: the flood that moves across the world like the bar of an Etch A Sketch, resetting it to blankness. The world is styled as emerging from the waters, just as we are each born when our mother’s waters break, so there is a symmetry in the idea that the world will end with a flood. That such narratives speak to a general collective experience makes more sense than the idea that it relates to any historical event. There have, of course, been floods in the world’s history, including some on a prodigious scale. It has been hypothesised that the Black Sea was created around 5600 BCE when a rise in global sea levels caused the Mediterranean to burst over a land barrier, turning a previous freshwater lake into a much larger saltwater sea. The marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman have speculated that memories of this gigantic flood fed into the many flood narratives in Mesopotamia and the Near East, including the Biblical flood of Noah.* But there are reasons for avoiding such parochialism: flood narratives occur in mythologies from all around the world, and not just from the area around the Black Sea. Ours is a watery world, and most early human societies lived by or near seas and oceans. Floods happen in the real world; tides and tidal bores and tsunamis affect all coastlines. In a world before globalisation, with communities living in isolation, local events such as these would have seemed practically world-ending at the time. With no explanation other than an angry god, the stories and myths that emerged from these incidents are often replete with ideas of punishment and a world reborn into innocence.
It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) Page 2
