Hurtling Towards Oblivion

I listened to a podcast from Focus on the Family a couple weeks ago. It was an interview with Author/Physician/Futurist who wrote this book: Hurtling towards Oblivion: A Logical Argument For the End of the Age. He is a believer, but his ideas are not based on the Bible. They are based on his study of the past and the present. However, his ideas do certainly line up with Revelation.

Instead of trying to figure out how to explain it myself, I will take the words out of Kendal B. Hunter's most helpful customer review from the book on amazon.com (changed a little by me!). Thanks Kendal B.!

So what is Dr. Swensen's point? His is a voice of warning that several factors or trends are working together to cause serious havoc on the world-system. These trends are:

1) PROFUSION: More and more of everything. Inventions, technologies, people, etc.

2) IRREVERSABILITY: We cannot undo what we have done.

3) EXPONENTIAL GROWTH: This more and more of everything is happening faster and faster, so we are getting more and more of the original "more and more." This is on an exponential J-curve.

4) FALLENESS FACTOR: Things go wrong, or can be misused. Even though a lot of the new inventions and technologies, etc. are good, there is always a possibility that these things can be misused for evil.

5) EXPONENTIAL PROFUSION OF EVIL: With all of these factors working together, we not only have a profusion of good (i.e. More educated people, more TVs and CT-scan machines), but he also have an EXPONENTIAL PROFUSION OF EVIL.

6) At some point this EXPONTIAL PROFUSION OF EVIL can overwhelm the world. For example, it becomes easier for a smaller group of people to do extreme harm to a much larger group of people.

Make sense?

So, I'm gonna be honest here. I don't think about stuff like this often, and I don't know if the world is gonna end in my child's lifetime (Swenson thinks it probably will, but no promises), but when I heard this guy on the 'radio'... I understood what he was saying. He has a pretty good argument. Each point is hardly refutable (in my opinion), and each one builds on the other to reach his conclusion. I kinda see it like this: If in the year 1000, humanity was crawling towards the end of the world, then now (because of points 1-5) we are now, comparitively, flying towards the end of the world at the speed of light. I mean, we could just say "we are closer than ever to the end of the world," but that's kind of obvious and silly statement, isn't it?

But I think that Dr. Swenson could say all of this much better than Kendal B. or myself. So maybe I should shut up and we all should just all read his book. I mean, if you want to.

:)

Anyway... my FAVORITE thing about this topic is that it is just a reminder to me that this world (no matter what side of it I am living or how bad the 'profusion of eveil' gets) is NOT my permanent home. I am just passing through... looking towards my next (more long-term) home...