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Is
The Apocalypse Coming? No, It Isn't!
September 13, 20171:49 PM ET
By
Screen shot from The Sign, a documentary in which biblical literalists
claim the end is coming on Sept. 23 with a specific planetary alignment.
YouTube
The Sign, a
documentary directed, shot and produced by Josh Turnbow and Robert Dvoran and
set to air Thursday, addresses whether the end of days is coming this month, as
some biblical literalists predict.
The "sign" in the title refers to an
alignment in the sky peaking on Sept. 23, whereby Mercury, Venus, Mars, and
Jupiter will be around the constellations of Virgo and Leo, together with the
sun and moon. Sept. 23 is when Jupiter leaves Virgo after being there for a
while.
According to Revelation
12, some say, this is when the end comes, after much turmoil and
destruction:
"A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the
sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She
was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another
sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns
and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the
sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was
about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.
She gave birth to a son, a male child, who "will rule all the nations with
an iron scepter." And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.
According to the biblical
literalists interviewed in The Sign, airing
Sept. 14 at 8 p.m. ET/PT, the "son" leaving the birth canal is
Jupiter leaving Virgo. The red dragon is associated by some literalists with
Planet X, a planet (wrongly) conjectured to orbit the sun about 90 times more
distant than Earth, which, the literalists say, comes every so often to create
havoc.
To make a long story short,
many biblical literalists affirm with utmost conviction in the documentary that
Sept. 23 is it — the day the end comes as prophesied in Revelation. (A preview
of the film can be watched here.)
Fortunately, the
documentary doesn't only present this version of the story. Michael Shermer,
author and editor of Skeptic magazine
is there, too, to make sense of the nonsense. And so are Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith
Observatory, and Konstantin
Batygin, an assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech. Together, they
explain the scientific arguments against such fears, including the fact that
there is no Planet X. Any such planet, given its elongated orbit and large
mass, would have caused major instabilities in the solar system, including
ejecting the Earth from its place around the sun. Given that Earth has been
orbiting the sun for 4.5 billion years, its orbit is pretty stable so far.
There is no such planet.
Watching the documentary, what I find most
striking is the strength of the literalists' conviction. What will they say on
Sept. 23 when the world remains where it is? Surely, as Shermer mentions, Trump
may do something, or North Korea. But isn't it always the case that there will
be turmoil somewhere in the world — and this turmoil may be interpreted as a
sign from a biblical prophesy? Hasn't this happened over and over, prophecy of
the end after prophecy being debunked by the boring continuity of life as we
know it?
Believers disagree. They argue that it all
revolves around Israel and the mounting tensions in the region — and that this
is it. Israel's existence, a chronology of dates from its foundation to wars,
everything, they say, points to the veracity of the old prophecies. One of them
in particular, Michael Rood, has returned to Israel to watch the end unfold.
Rood looks like a benevolent rabbi, a biblical patriarch. He is convinced that
come Sept. 23 something will happen to the sun, signifying the dragon of the
prophecy, although not necessarily Planet X. He is convinced that God will send
the sign, and it need not be consistent with science. In his world, there are
two coexisting parallel realities, a natural and a supernatural one. Come the
end, they will clash in decisive ways.
I watched the documentary in a state of awe.
The key question here is what makes people believe in such literal readings in
2017?
In my book The
Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and the End of the World, I
explored why apocalyptic ideas often depend on some celestial event and how
such ideas have percolated from religion to science. The skies do display
unusual alignments and phenomena that have been observed for millennia. Since
for believers the skies are often the realm of the gods, the jump from seeing
something strange up there to attributing it to some sort of divine message is
not a huge one. Indeed, in cultures across the globe we find eclipses, comets,
and meteor showers being associated with evil portents. If the skies act crazy,
the gods can't be happy. If the gods aren't happy, we will pay for it
especially — if you are a Christian — the sinners.
The fear from the skies comes from the
awareness of our essential fragility as we face nature's awesome powers. The
current hurricane season is an obvious example of this, as is the recent solar
eclipse. St. John makes good use of the blackened sun in his Revelation,
knowing well that the image conjured terror in his readers. If God controls the
heavens and He makes the sun disappear for a few minutes, couldn't He just as
easily make it go dark forever?
Shermer, Krupp, and Batygin do their best to
dispel any potential danger. Krupp goes as far as chiding the literalists for
scaring otherwise nice, good people with such fantastic tales. The documentary
explores the potential for an all-out nuclear war starting with Iran bombing
Israel or North Korea doing something equally outrageous. Of course, no one can
predict what rogue states with nuclear weapons will do. It is meaningful that I
am writing these lines on 9-11, a date forever tinged with blood in the U.S.
However, even if something awful does happen on Sept. 23, an act of war or of
terror, it will be hard to know what came first, the act or the belief that an
act on this date would conjure terror on large sectors of the population.
The strength of The Sign is to expose so openly the extent to
which literalists will go to justify their beliefs, some using very complex
numerology and coincidences as clues. The film ends with someone (I suspect
Rood) asking: "Could this be the year? This could be the year."
Unfortunately, any year could be the year. If
anything, it's really up to us to collectively make a difference in what we see
around us, from social injustice to disease and famine. To instill fear as an
agent of change hasn't worked for millennia — and it won't work now.
Marcelo Gleiser is a
theoretical physicist and writer — and a professor of natural philosophy,
physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at
Dartmouth, co-founder of 13.7 and an active promoter of science to the general
public. His latest book is The
Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and
the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo
on Facebook and
Twitter: @mgleiser