It’s well known that Christians, through the centuries, have embarrassed themselves and their Savior by false predictions of the world’s end. I remember gathering a file of such prognostications a few years back that ran to over twenty pages of text.
But Christians have not cornered the market on false prophecies. This week I ran across a blog entry entitled, “Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocolyptic Predictions” which warned ominously about the destruction of our planet in various ways.
You can read the article for yourself here, https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/, but these are some highlights:
* A Stanford professor warned of a world-wide famine before 1975.
* A scientist, in 1970, predicted that pollution would bring on another Ice Age beginning with the turn of the millennium.
* There were several predictions that world-wide cooling, not warming, would be our fate within three or four decades.
* Rising sea water all over the world would obliterate coastal cities by the year 2,000.
You get the idea. Even during the past decade we were told that by now the polar ice caps would be gone. Glacier National Park just last year removed signs that the glaciers after which the park is named would be gone by 2020. Oops.
The problem with such arrogant, wrong predictions is that they create the risk of people not listening to scientists at all, as in the “little boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ story.” We begin to get cynical and suspicious and eventually don’t take it all very seriously.
It’s a good reminder to all of us to speak and write within our limitations, and not play to the grandstand of public opinion, even if we think we need to frighten people into “doing the right thing.” Ephesians 4:25
Our most recent experiences with this phenomenon, of course, is the past year of predictions about COVID-19. We’ve recounted these miscalculations and dire, erroneous apocalyptic prophcies several times in this blog, and won’t revisit them here.
Except to point out that we are now nearing the first anniversary of “two weeks of shutdowns to flatten the curve.”
“What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9