4 ms·

Science is also apocalyptic. The universe will end. Religions just intuited this earlier.

• wpietri 13y ago
  Not in the same sense, I think. Apocalyptic religions want an apocalypse, and followers arrange their views to fit. Note how often the date just gets revised when it misses. If I understand rightly, early Christians expected Jesus to return while they were still alive, and quite a lot of modern Christians expect the same thing, dozens of generations later. The apocalypses that science predicts [1], though, are narratively unsatisfying. A bunch of bad things will happen, but most are so far in the future that it's hard to imagine that humans will be around for them. It's just not about us. In contrast, the science-y things that people seize upon in an apocalyptic way are generally un-scary to people who can do math. E.g., planetary alignments, the LHC. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth
• Mithaldu 13y ago
  Not necessarily. There are theories that the universe will collapse back to cause another big bang. However there are also theories that entropy will simply end up distributing all usable energy equally over all space, resulting in a universe that still exists where however nothing can happen anymore. The latter is a very drawn out kind of end, but in no way apocalyptic, as nothing is destroyed. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe