http://www.khouse.org/enews_article/2015/2464/

from the December 28, 2015 eNews issue

A nation that forgets its past has no future.

— Winston Churchill

This is the time of year where we take a look into the coming years and try to see “through a glass, darkly” and try to predict what the future holds when we confront it “face to face.”

The Historian versus The Scientist

There are two classical ways to do this. One can look into the past and assume the future will, to some extent, be repeated. The other way to predict an eventual outcome is to look at the general course of development in the past and extend that trend into the near future. The first method is that of the historian; the second is that of the scientist. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages.

Black Swans

To try to predict the future as a historian is to ignore the “black swan” phenomenon. Black swan events describe an occurrence that comes as a surprise and has a major effect on a prediction.

The phrase “black swan” derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is

the poet Juvenal’s characterization of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” (“a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan”) When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. In this case, the occurrence of a black swan event would undo the entire train of the prediction.

Some examples of Black Swan events include:

• The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria which precipitated the First World War.
• The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon which changed the entire focus of asymmetric warfare and institutionalized the War on Terror.
• The rise of the Internet which led to major changes in science, commerce and warfare.
• Any one of many natural disasters: the storm that destroyed the Spanish Armada and insured England’s survival.
• The Black Death which ravaged Europe made surviving tradesmen work more valuable and led to the break up of feudalism.
• The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was a little known Black Swan event that also changed history. Herbert Hoover, President Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce was in charge of relief operations. His reputation was so enhanced through his work he easily won the 1928 Republican nomination for President of the United States. The course of the Great Depressionand the Second World War could have been markedly different had Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith won rather than Hoover.

Driving Using the Rear View Mirror

Trying to predict the future by extrapolating the past has its hazards as well. This method has been likened to driving down the road using the rear view mirror. It does not take into account the eventual curve in the road. This method though does have its advantages.

One person who had good success with the “scientific method” was Winston Churchill. Strandmagazine published one of his articles in 1931 of titled “Fifty Years Hence.” This was a time in Churchill’s career he called his “wilderness years.” He had lost the election of 1929 for parliament and described himself as “former British Chancellor of the Exchequer.” He had yet to go into history as leading England during the desperate years of World War II, being elected prime minister in 1940.

Fifty Years Hence

In this essay, Churchill predicted many things that have come to be: the nuclear age, advances in microbiology and telecommunications. These are all fact, and greater things still are coming to be. Churchill imagined a world in which people were manufactured to specific tasks; their “mental development” interfered with to confine them to those tasks. He also imagined people had so much power they could live as long as they wanted, go where they pleased in interplanetary space, and enjoy pleasures “incomparably wider” than we enjoy.

He started the article by describing how far mankind had already come and how rapidly things had changed in recent years:

A priest from Thebes would probably have felt more at home at the council of Trent, two thousand years after Thebes had vanished, than Sir Isaac Newton at a modern undergraduate physical society, or George Stephenson in the Institute of Electrical Engineers. The changes have been so sudden and so gigantic that no period in history can be compared with the last century. The past no longer enables us even dimly to measure the future.

Churchill’s predictions for the future proved prescient given the time in which he wrote the article.

Nuclear Energy

Before the atom was harnessed in a chain reaction, Winston Churchill wrote this:

High authorities tell us that new sources of power, vastly more important than any we yet know, will surely be discovered. Nuclear energy is incomparably greater than the molecular energy which we use today. The coal a man can get in a day can easily do five hundred times as much work as the man himself. Nuclear energy is at least one million times more powerful still. If the hydrogen atoms in a pound of water could be prevailed upon to combine and form helium, they would suffice to drive a thousand horse-power engine for a whole year. If the electrons— those tiny planets of the atomic systems— were induced to combine with the nuclei in the hydrogen the horse-power liberated would be 120 times greater still. There is no question among scientists that this gigantic source of energy exists. What is lacking is the match to set the bonfire alight, or it may be the detonator to cause the dynamite to explode. The Scientists are looking for this. (This was finally accomplished 11 years later under the University of Chicago football field as part of the Manhattan Project.)

Communications

At a time when the only type of radio was an AM radio that looked like a piece of furniture and telephones were large and not very clear, Churchill predicted this:

Wireless telephones and television, following naturally upon their present path of development, would enable their owner to connect up to any room similarly equipped and hear and take part in the conversation as well as if he put his head in the window.

GMO

He also had some thoughts about the future of food production:

New strains of microbes will be developed and made to do a great deal of our chemistry for us. With a greater knowledge of what are called hormones, i.e., the chemical messengers in our blood, it will be possible to control growth. We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Synthetic food will, of course, also be used in the future.… Vast cellars, in which artificial radiation is generated, may replace the cornfields and potato patches of the world.

Genetic Engineering

Also Churchill thought when the conquest of nature becomes the signal object, the result will be the conquest of man. He wrote we may soon be able to make people to order, to breed them in laboratories. He opined if we can do that, we can make them better and worse, depending upon the jobs we want them to do:

There seems little doubt that it will be possible to carry out the entire cycle which now leads to the birth of a child, in artificial surroundings. Interference with the mental development of such beings, expert suggestion and treatment in the earlier years, would produce beings specialized to thought or toil.

Once we begin this — and it is possible now — we will be making people to suit our convenience. Some will be not just ruling but creating others as tools. This could be just such a world once the Restrainer is removed from the world. Though he was speaking of an alien connection, Chuck Missler could be right when he wrote, “The Restrainer of II Thessalonians 2 may be restraining far more than we have any suspicion of!”

Later in the piece Churchill describes a future state in which people can live as long as they want, enjoy pleasures and sympathies “incomparably wider than our own,” and travel anywhere among the planets. But then he asks:

But what was the good of all that to them? How can those things answer the “simple question which man has asked since the earliest dawn of reason—. ‘ Why are we here? What is the purpose of life?’ ” Because of the power of these questions, no “material progress” can “bring comfort” to the human soul. And this fact “gives the best hope that all will be well.” No matter what happens, our “hearts will ache … if [we] have not a vision above material things.

Human advances left to continue unabated will continue to a very ugly end: pride, enslavement, corruption of that which is good. This is unavoidable given man’s sin nature.

How does one keep from this dark future? One man may have hit upon the answer.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) (often Romanized to Alexander) was a Russian novelist, historian, and outspoken critic of the Soviet Union, who was born into the Soviet system and saw what materialism carried to its end result looked like. In 1945 he was arrested for writing disparaging comments about Stalin in his letters and was sentenced to a “mild” eight years in the Soviet Gulags (labor camps). Upon his release, he was exiled to the desert in Kazakhstan and then was exiled to the West in 1974.

During this period, Solzhenitsyn became an Orthodox Christian. He came to recognize only Christianity provides both a realistic understanding of the human condition of sin and the one solution to the human condition that makes any sense.

In his letter to Titus, Paul wrote:

“After all, we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient and misled. We were slaves to many kinds of lusts and pleasures, spending our days in malice and jealousy. We were despised, and we hated one another. In grace our Savior God appeared, to make his love for mankind clear. … And so, made heirs by his own grace, eternal life we now embrace.”

— Titus 3:3–7, ISV

Identifying himself and all Christians with sinful and degenerate humanity, Paul emphatically asserted, “once foolish, disobedient and misled. We were slaves to many kinds of lusts and pleasures.” Christians, though at one time degenerate and lost, were objects of God’s kindness and love, which resulted in their salvation.

Whatever predictions for the future come through, it is all vanity unless we each have Christ in our life and show His love to lost individuals and society, making Christianity attractive and resulting in the salvation of others.

Related Articles

• How to Predict the Future
  — Science of Us
• Predicting the Future: Why We’re Always Wrong
  — Sydney Morning Herald
• The Best Way to Predict the Future
  — BBC
• Thessalonians Commentary
  — Koinonia House

Categories: Articole de interes general