Life in the Pandemic XII: What lies ahead?

No human being can tell the future. Lot’s of us try to guess the future, and claim that we’re making a prediction. If enough of us do that enough times, someone is  going to guess well and apparently predict the future correctly. But this will be apparent rather than real. There are those who make a living out of (apparently) predicting the future. This is not because they are good guessers, and it’s certainly not because they know something not knowable by the rest of us.  Often it’s because their “predictions” are so vague as to be interpretable as being fulfilled by something at some time. Of course this means that there are also so vague as to be of no practical use. Perhaps the best evidence of this is that they make their living making “apparently” reliable predictions, not by actually predicting winning lottery numbers or placing big bets on unlikely events. And of course because of selection and confirmation biases, we tend not to notice the predictions that aren’t, and take to twitter about their successful guesses.

Deep down in the pandemic we’ve all become familiar with another kind of prediction. From early on the media has been awash with dire warnings based on the reporting of predictive scientific models used to project the future course of the pandemic. Some of these have been extremely influential. The Imperial College model developed by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team is credited with persuading the UK Government to enforce a UK-wide “lockdown” back in March. Their model suggested that without appropriate suppression of the virus the UK might be facing up to 500 000 deaths, breaking the healthcare system and devastating the economy. However, this model, and models in general, have been fiercely criticized in some quarters as being scarcely an improvement on Mystic Meg. It’s claimed that they are not only failing now, but have performed poorly in the past.

But it’s important to understand what scientific models do and don’t do. Firstly they are inevitably based on what is known when they are constructed and on assumptions. Even what is known is usually not known with certainty or great precision, so choices always have to be made leading to uncertainty being baked in to any model. Where important information is missing, then assumptions have to be made. Bad assumptions lead to a poor model. Secondly, no model captures everything; any model is a simplification. It is, after all, a model and not reality. Uncertainties around inputs, plus simplifications in construction, mean that the outputs of any model tend to provide a range of possible outcomes, along with estimates of precision. Even in a model that perfectly captured all that was going on in a given situation, small changes of input assumptions and parameters, would have a big effect on outputs. There are no certainties to be found here, just sets of likelihoods. This is better than guessing, and may offer a way of avoiding complete disaster, but it is not a means of predicting the future with precision and certainty. And models are not proscriptive they are ultimately descriptive. They don’t tell how things must be; they describe how they might be.

However, as with other situations in life, it’s important not to confuse our inability to know everything, with the inevitability of knowing nothing. It’s not that we know nothing about the future course of the pandemic. If we take certain actions then the course of the pandemic will be altered in certain ways.  Not being able to know everything about the future, is not the same as being totally ignorant of the future. So what are we to make of where we are and what’s going on? The pandemic is a perspective-shaping event. It should have reminded us all of how fragile our lives, both individually and collectively, are. It has forced a re-evaluation of what really matters. And that re-evaluation should include considerations about where things are headed.

It seems to me that we are at an intersection of events that are significant. In addition to the pandemic, there are other events that are worth pondering. Earlier in the year Australia was ablaze. According to ABC News, over the 2019/20 Australian summer over 30 million acres went up in smoke, killing animals in their hundreds of millions, and affecting the health of a large proportion of the human population. This would be bad enough. But in the western US over the last few weeks, forest fires in unprecedented numbers and of unprecedented size have already destroyed of the order of 4 million acres and are still burning fiercely. Add to that fires in the Amazon and Siberia, and you have impacts on a planetary scale. This is likely to exacerbate the climate impact of human activity, about which we have heard much in recent years. To public health and climate events, add the political instability now been seen in what has historically been a politically stable country, the US. It’s hard to underestimate just how troubling Donald Trump’s recent pronouncements about the peaceful transition of power have been. This is playing with fire of a very different kind. In the worlds largest economy and most powerful military power this matters to us all. It might just be the craziness of one strange individual. But, taken together all of these goings on seem to be very unlike business as usual.

Given what I’ve already said about prediction, I am not now going to claim any special knowledge on my part that can illuminate where we are and what’s going on. But it is perhaps worth pointing out that there is a source of knowledge available to all of us that is always worth taking note of. My conviction is that neither history nor the future just happen; they have a shape and a trajectory, and we needn’t be completely ignorant of either. Underpinning and driving all that has and will happen is the God who reveals His purposes in His word, the Bible. If you’re looking for key explanations this is where to turn. And you’ll find a prediction or two. Because while none of us knows what’s ahead, this isn’t such a big deal for a God who is eternal.

One final aside. One of the odd by-products of the pandemic, is that it's easier than even to lurk unseen in church services. If taking God and the Bible strike you as strange but you're intrigued, there are lots of places you can find out more. We'll be "at church" shortly; feel free to join us online.