Here is my sermon, "The End of the World?", for the summer service of 15 July 2012.
The world as we know it did not end on May 21, 2011. There was, perhaps, no very good reason to think that it would, but one strange man named Harold Camping made a public prediction that "the Rapture" of fundamentalist Christian theology would occur on that date. The righteous, some 200 million of them according to some of his followers, would ascend to meet Jesus in the air, as prophesied in the Bible, and the rest of us would be left to wait for the destruction of the world five months later. Strange people say strange things all the time, of course, but Mr. Camping happened to own 150 radio stations and bought billboards all over the country. That was enough, apparently, to get his prediction talked about. On May 23, he revised his prediction to say that both the Rapture and the end of the world will occur on October 21 of that year. As far as we can tell, it didn't. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Camping now shares the consensus of most fundamentalist Christians that the exact date cannot be predicted.
The world also did not end on October 22, 1844, in spite of the predictions of William Miller, a Baptist minister from western New York. Thousands of his followers, some of whom had abandoned all their possessions, suffered the "Great Disappointment". As Camping initially did later, Miller claimed that some sort of heavenly event, with no observable consequences, had in fact happened on the predicted date.
It is not very likely, I think, that the world will end on December 21, 2012, though some people claim that it will. The Mayan calendar, they say, ends its thirteenth cycle since the creation of the world in 3114 B.C., each cycle including exactly 144,000 days or about 400 years. I have great respect for the Mayans. Their interest in cycles led them to invent the concept of "zero" independently of the Hindus and Arabs, and they made amazingly accurate stellar observations without the use of glass or metal. Their mathematics allowed them to reason about very long periods of time, and they were very fond of the number 13. However, there appears to be no evidence whatsoever that they believed anything about the world ending in 2012 -- it was merely an important but arbitrary point on the calendar like our "Y2K". The "Mayan prediction" appears to be a 20th century "New Age" phenomenon like pyramid power or alien abductions.
It's tempting to make fun of such predictions, especially when they lack a clear rational basis. We have the story of Chicken Little, or the Timid Rabbit, or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. The first two of these characters are silly, and the third is actually dangerous because he distracts us from real dangers. I suppose many Republicans think that Bill McKibben and Al Gore are Timid Rabbits or Boys Crying Wolf, with their warnings of catastrophic climate change. Others think that those warnings are a deliberate hoax, a conspiracy to frighten the people into accepting socialism, or something like that. The world scientific community, of course, disagrees.
Along with the mythical archetype of Chicken Little we have another archetype, Cassandra, who gives completely correct prophecies of disaster but is never believed because of a curse. There are many stories of such unconvincing messengers -- Shakespeare's Soothsayer in Julius Caesar, Superman's father, Heinlein's strange little man with his statistics, or Kamin of the planet Kataan. Our stories, it seems, do not teach us whether to believe and act on such warnings -- we are left with our reason.
Should we worry about the end of the world? When I was growing up, it was generally accepted that there was a significant chance that a nuclear war would wipe out all human life, or at least human civilization. As we have become more aware of human effects on the biosphere, we see that those effects are large and could have drastic consequences. Our normal worries about the weather are colored by scientist's predictions of more and bigger storms as the planet warms. My first attempt to preach a sermon on this topic, you may remember, was prevented by a surprising but not entirely unprecedented hurricane (well, tropical storm by the time it reached us). An August hurricane, mind you, preceded by a June tornado and followed by an October snowstorm. I am worried about that particular potential end of the world. It's not my principal topic today, but I don't want to go on without mentioning this Society's chapter of 350.org, Bill McKibben's political action group -- I believe they have a poster in the parlor.
As I prepared last summer's sermon there was constant talk of the "fiscal Armageddon" that the United States faced if there was no agreement in Congress to raise the debt ceiling. That agreement was reached, but this summer the financial markets are worried about a collapse of the Eurozone, and our most famous economist says that the European nations are pursuing an insane policy of austerity that guarantees they will have a depression. Here at home, we face a "fiscal cliff" after the election, where with no new agreement we get tax increases and spending cuts that could cripple the economy.
We are constantly told that the existing economic downturn is the worst since the Great Depression -- it is bad, and the question is whether we are slowly recovering from it or whether it is the start of something worse. The original Great Depression has been much on my mind this summer, particularly after I saw a performance of Arthur Miller's play The American Clock in Ashfield. The play follows a variety of people through the Crash and the Depression, including a family similar to Miller's own in New York City. Many of them are based on the oral histories in Studs Terkel's book Hard Times, from which I quoted before the offertory. These people were facing the end of their world. There was no work. They sold off assets, begged, left home to wander the country. Some commited suicide. But they also fell in love, laughed, and made music. They lived.
The Great Depression was a long period during which things were worse than they had been, and seemed to keep getting even worse. Al, Yip Harburg's unemployed veteran of war and industry, is actually nostalgic for his service in World War I, difficult though it must have been. He knew who he was then, the kid with the drum, and now he doesn't. Not only does he not know, but the people on the street have forgotten his name. His world as he knew it has ended, but he goes on. He lives.
Some people didn't go on, of course. One effect of a Depression is an increase in the medical condition we now call depression, and a common symptom of that condition is suicide. Someone finds themself asking "why does the sun go on shining, why does the sea rush to shore", and they can't go on. They jump off a bridge, or start a gunfight with the police, or crash their car, or empty the bottle of pills. Rationally, there is a chance for almost all of them that it will get better, but they don't see that.
The orthodox Christian tradition says that it will get better after you die, if you are one of the saved. There will be a judgement, and the righteous will live forever in heaven. Heaven is the Big Rock Candy Mountain or the land over the rainbow. The reason to go on is the hope of salvation and the certainty of judgement -- to give up hope is the sin of despair. Thus Hamlet, finding his life intolerable, refrains from suicide in obedience to divine law.
But what if there is no afterlife? If the world is what it is, and the world is all that there is, then our life ends with our death. I believe that. I believe in reason and the scientific method, and I believe that what I call "me" is a pattern of electrical impulses in my brain, together with its interaction with the rest of my body. When I die, those impulses will stop, and I will not exist. I can't see any reason to believe that my soul will go to a heaven or hell any more than that I will be resurrected to fight in Valhalla, or led across the River Styx, or reborn in the body of another creature.
If I am right about that, and though I fully respect your right to disagree, I think that I am, what is the point of going on? Whether the world as a whole ends this December or in ten years or a hundred or a thousand or two, my personal world will certainly end, very probably before the current century does. What am I going to leave behind, and why should I care?
One legacy that we may leave behind us is genetic. As Richard Dawkins would tell us, we exist today with the genetic makeup we have because our ancestors survived to pass those genes onto us. My daughter carries some of my genes, and she may have children who carry them further into the future. It's a tautology to say that the purpose of existence is to survive, but it's not completely wrong. So I may live after death in that way, if there is a world for my descendants to live in.
The Law of Karma says that every action has consequences, and those consequences have consequences, and so on and so on. When I die, the world will be different from what it might have been had I never lived, in ways I can't possibly imagine. There may be a law of nature that good actions have good consequences, and that evil actions cause evil. It may be that small actions lead to bigger consequences later, or it may be that consequences damp out and the world goes on much as it would have done without the actions. Without a second universe with which to perform a controlled experiment, science can't tell us the answer. But the consequences of our actions are some sort of legacy.
The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter argues that if our "self" consists of the interaction of impulses in our brain, which he calls "symbols", then my brain contains a symbol for you -- an interaction of impulses that sums up what I know about you, how I think that you are thinking, and so forth. This symbol is a sort of copy of the self-symbol in your own brain that in some sense is "you", so that "you" persist in the brain of anyone who ever knew you, even after you are dead. It's a seriously posed scientific theory, and it also helped him make sense of his wife's death after only eight years of marriage.
There are official legacies of the dead -- monuments. Christopher Wren's tomb in the middle of the cathedral he designed has a Latin inscription meaning "if you seek a monument, look around you". I think humans will play Bach's music as long as they have ears to hear it. I study and teach mathematical ideas that originally sprang from the minds of ancient Greeks or Chinese, from the heroes of my field like Alan Turing, and from my own friends and colleagues. My own small contributions to mathematics may or may not be studied in the future, if this world has a future. (But I find it impossible to talk about this kind of legacy without quoting Woody Allen: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.")
Whether or not a deity judges our life at the moment of our death, we can and probably will judge our own life. I once heard a sermon from a Christian-oriented UU minister who said that if you are on your deathbed thinking that your life has been wasted, is that not as bad a prospect as eternal damnation? Of course, what it means for a life to have been worthwhile is a whole different question. Most of us don't design cathedrals or write the Brandenburg concertos, but our lives may well have been successful and worthwhile from our own perspective. A good obituary, and I've read some very good ones for otherwise unremarkable people in the Gazette, will manage to sum up the person's life, telling you what they thought was important and what their friends and relations thought was important about them. We perhaps shouldn't guide our life by thinking of what the Gazette will print about us when we're gone, but I can think of worse things to think of.
History, even if it is only a local newspaper and we still have local newspapers, makes a record of our lives. If the deceased is a great artist, scholars might expend great effort to capture every possible recorded detail of their life, to understand the context of their work. Two of my favorite works of literature deal with this kind of obsession: the novel Possession by A. S. Byatt, and the play Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. In each work, late twentieth-century literary scholars are tracking down mysteries about nineteenth-century literary figures. We, the audience, see the nineteenth-century story both directly and through the documentary evidence the scholars uncover. At the end of each work, the scholars think they have solved the mystery, but we know that they have missed the point completely.
I've cried every time I've read the book or seen the play. The nineteenth-century people are so real, at least if you set aside the fact that they are fictional. Their lives and their passions were real, whether the evidence of those lives and passions came down to the twentieth-century scholars or not. Just as all those people in the Depression lived and suffered and loved and made music and survived, whether someone eventually told Studs Terkel about it or not. Just as Jessica and I were married in 1987, though there are no pictures of the ceremony itself -- I was there, and it happened. Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound, if there is no one to hear it? I think it does. My belief that the world is what it is can be taken negatively, to say that there is nothing beyond the world, but also positively -- things are, people live their lives, I live my life. Live performances of music or theatre exist whether they are recorded or not. Games of ultimate frisbee exist whether the scores are recorded, or whether anyone keeps score at all. The life of Kamin of the planet Kataan was recorded by some method far beyond our technology, so that Captain Picard was able to experience what was apparently all of it. But again setting aside the fact that he was fictional, Kamin would have lived the same life whether or not that recording was made, and whether or not any spacecraft ever found it. The present moment exists in context, but it doesn't only exist in context. Take the context away, and something is still there. Your next moment of life is there. Yes, there is a future, and we have to live for the future as well, but we can also live that moment. Maybe we can live it like there is no other.
Last modified 21 August 2012