Life in the pandemic XXI: Back to the future......

Back in September last year I asserted that no-one could predict the future, at least with any certainty or precision. This was at the time when there was lot’s of debate about scientific modelling that was showing new waves of COVID19 cases, with their attendant increases in hospitalisations and deaths. As we come towards the end of another UK lockdown, the models and the predictions flowing from them seem to be a lot less controversial than they were. The prediction that kicked off much of the controversy (500 000 UK deaths if nothing was done) doesn’t seem quite so unbelievable now, given that, even with the heroic efforts of so many, about 126 000 lives have been lost in the UK to the virus. The modelling did its job, informing (although some would still claim misinforming) decisions. But I also alluded to another source of information, providing an important perspective on our future. It’s this I want to return to.

I do so with a degree of trepidation. Despite the occasional claim to the contrary, prediction about really complicated things like society (and much else besides) is a mugs game, and always has been. History is littered with bold and completely unfulfilled predictions. Never mind duff predictions from remote history. Remember Francis Fukuyama’s declarations about the end of history and the triumph of Western liberal democracy in the early 1990s? Trouble is nobody told the new autocrats like Putin, Xi and Erdogan, or for that matter Trump supporters (who can still be found in depressingly large numbers all over the US). On a lighter note, you won’t be surprised to learn that the Star Trek franchise is an even worse guide to the future. Given that the “Eugenics Wars” should have happened in the 1990s (about thirty years after the making of the original series), I’m afraid we can have no confidence that first contact with the Vulcans and the first warp flight will take place only 42 years hence.

Christians also have a bad (and probably deserved) reputation for the same kind of thing, although we arguably have fewer excuses. As to our individual and collective future we should be comfortable entrusting ourselves to the God who knows the future, regardless of whether He provides us with the details or not. And my suspicion is that often He has not, and does not, because it would distort both our perspective and our priorities. There is perhaps a hint of this at the end of John’s Gospel. Jesus has just restored Peter (after Peter’s denial of Him before the crucifixion), and in conversation He then alludes to what will happen to Peter in the future. Peter then asks about John who is nearby, to be told (essentially) to mind his own beeswax – although that’s not a literal translation of the original (see John 21:21,22). Although Jesus could have gone into great detail about both Peter and John’s futures, He’s fairly cryptic about Peter’s, and doesn’t give away anything about John’s.

There is one particular event the precise timing of which Jesus is famously tight-lipped about – the time of His own second advent. Indeed, He goes much further than simply not saying when it will take place. While it might be possible to detect a trajectory towards His return in the shape of events, He says clearly “..concerning the day and hour no one knows” (Matt24:36). The problem was even the Apostles (as well as later Christian “leaders”) had a habit of not hearing what was being said to them. So just before His ascension they enquired about the timing of events, only to be told, as Peter had been told individually, that it was none of their beeswax (again, not a literal translation; Acts 1:7). They had other business to be about. So, of all the things that Christians might be expected to discuss, write about, seek to discern and fall out about, one thing we should not be exercised about is the precise time of His return. However, some of us still aren’t listening.

Perhaps the best known example of Jesus’ own words being ignored in this matter is that of the Millerites, the predecessors of the Seventh Day Adventists (although some would dispute this characterisation). From about 1818 onwards, William Miller prophesied that the world would end and Christ would return “around” 1843. By the 1840’s there were those within the movement prepared to get more precise. As the world staggered into 1844, and then through the early months of 1844, some in the movement, rather than draw the obvious conclusion, sharpened the prediction to 22^nd October 22^nd, 1844. Eventually Miller himself endorsed this date, and the rest, as they say is history. Miller, it turns out, was not an aberration.

Herbert Armstrong was a 1930’s equivalent of the modern TV Evangelist (ie a radio evangelist), who managed to accumulate many of the trappings of his modern successors with whom he overlapped (he died in 1986). Various sources report him predicting Christ’s return in 1936, 1943, the “end of the world war”, 1972 and 1975.  Harold Camping was another serial offender and radio evangelist, who is best known for his prediction that the rapture would occur on 21^st May 2011. To be fair, in 2012 he wrote: "We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing." He died at the age of 92 in 2013. More recently still we had David Mead’s prediction of the end of the world on September 3^rd, 2017.  You could easily add to this list from those who manage to keep just on the right side of Christian orthodoxy otherwise, to others who are either way over the line, or aren’t interested in any line at all.

History has demonstrated that none of these predictions were made by prophets, because the main qualification of a prophet is that they get it right (Deut 18:22)! And of course all of this is a dangerous distraction from two things that should occupy us. Jesus first advent was long prophesied, and probably just as long doubted, until it was largely forgotten about. When he came, it came as a shock. And His arrival was just the beginning. His exit (that we are about to remember again over Easter) was, and is, also a shocker. Here are truths worth focussing on and thinking about. We have plenty to go on. But the truth is that having delivered on the promises of His first advent, at some point He will deliver on the promise of His second advent. I should not neglect the reality of His promised return; it should have a bearing on both my thinking and my behaviour, it should both encourage and motivate. However, rather than stare at the sky (metaphorically for us, literally for the Apostles), there’s important business to be about here and now. He’ll take care of the rest.

Ignoring my own advice though, I do have one final prediction to make: somewhere, someone is factoring the pandemic into their calculations. Look out for an announcement sometime soon. See what I did there?

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.