It’s time to ignore the doom merchants and set ourselves free

By Ron Ferguson

Published:

WE LIVE in apocalyptic times. By that I mean an age in which there are dangerous things happening in the world, and there are dangerous weapons around. It’s a time when some preachers turn to the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible; a few of them will start juggling around with numbers, after which they will predict a date when the world will come to an end.

This sort of thing has been going on for centuries. In times of stress, groups have gone off to caves and awaited the end. None of them has got it right.

Some shameless prophets, far from being embarrassed, have said there must have been a mistake and they’ve calculated a new date – and got it wrong again. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have got it spectacularly wrong on a number of occasions. That doesn’t stop the production of yet another spurious date.

The sight of a man – usually a man – walking down the street with a placard saying “The end of the world is nigh” has become familiar. Nowadays, though, some of the prophesiers are educated scientists. For instance, the European Space Agency’s chief scientist and executive director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group, Dr Bernard Foing, advocates the establishment of a DNA library on the moon.

Dr Foing is concerned that if the Earth was destroyed, there would be little or nothing left of the rich diversity of life on the planet. Hence his suggestion that there should be a repository on the moon for the DNA of every single species of animal and plant on the Earth.

“If there were a catastrophic collision on Earth or a nuclear war, you could place some samples of Earth’s biosphere, including humans, on the moon,” he said, adding that the Earth could be repopulated afterwards – although precisely what “afterwards” might be like is a good question.

Search through the memory traces and you might recall a similar plan. Yes, you’ve got it. Noah’s Ark. When Noah was frantically nailing together cubits and cubits of cedar wood in his back garden while the sun split the skies, he must have been the neighbourhood joke.

Then, when the rain started to come down like a Scottish summer, with the animals safely packed inside, doubt must have spread around the bungalows. By the time the torrents had reached their peak, Noah was waving while the neighbours were drowning, and the floating repository of DNA samples of every creature on Earth enjoyed the 40-day cruise.

Many ancient civilisations have a flood myth. It’s as if there were a corporate memory of an Earth-shaking catastrophe which was both an endtime and a beginning time.

It’s an archetypal story about a God who is fed up with the way his human experiment is going, and determines to make a new start.

Is Dr Bernard Foing the new 21st-century Noah? Does he know something that we don’t know? Does he have a secret word from the Lord? That’s not how he puts it. He is a scientist who is reading the runes – or maybe even looking for funding.

Dr Foing believes that current research will lead to a whole fleet of robotic spacecraft. This makes possible the building of a lunar colony, complete with its own DNA library.

It’s not surprising that biblical imagery should make a comeback in apocalyptic times. The sight of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre pouring down like molten lava into the living rooms of the world recalled the fate of the pretentious tower of Babel.

There is a difference, though. In Noah’s day, only the deity could destroy the Earth. Today, that awesome power is in human hands. After the 20th-century slaughter of nearly 100million people, the new century’s chilling technology of mass death is accompanied by the impatient pawing of four horses in the apocalyptic stables.

We live in strange times. This country of ours has vast wealth. Advances in health services have extended our expectation of life dramatically. We are no longer prey to pestilence. We travel abroad like mediaeval princes. And yet we are inwardly bracing ourselves against an unnamed catastrophe, like Mark McGhee at Pittodrie. Survey after survey reveals an underlying pessimism, which runs into fatalism.

When barbarism is combined with hi-tech skills and a willingness to die for a cause – and the devastating consequences are transmitted live across the globe – a fearful insecurity is let loose in the world. The dangers are real, but the biggest one is that of our own crippling sense of impotence. If we feel we are merely bit players in a deterministic cosmic drama, we surrender responsibility for the fate of the Earth. Then the human die truly is cast.

Fearful cowering and fatalism diminish us. The task before us now, if we would not perish, said the Jesuit thinker and scientist Teilhard de Chardin, is to shake off our ancient prejudices and rebuild the Earth. In the best of theology, God and humans are co-creators. If the sins of the fathers are not to be visited on future generations, justice – and human connectedness – have to be at the heart of our world.

Rather than more technological “fixes”, we need a less-fearful and more-generous posture.

Technology without values is a fearful prospect. Mankind’s value system hasn’t caught up with our ability to produce more and more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction.

We have the technology to put humans on the moon, but we can’t resolve political disputes, like the dangerous conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The image of a DNA library on the moon is one to haunt our dreams. The ancient endtime story narrates that when Noah and the ark returned after the floods subsided, the deity put a rainbow in the sky as a sign that he wouldn’t run that particular horror movie again.

For many people in the west, that God has died. My own, minority, take on it is that He has been taken hostage by fundamentalists. Isn’t it time to set Him – and ourselves – free?