According to Harold Camping, Saturday at 6pm the Rapture will occur and sometime in October the world will come to an end. This is testable and so at 7pm, we will know that Harold Camping was wrong. Camping however isn’t the first to make end time predictions and he won’t be the last. In fact, I have a prediction of my own.
As an atheist, I of course lack the belief in a deity and as such the concept of the Rapture makes no sense to me logically. While not all atheists embrace science and reason, most atheists in the greater atheist community that I represent do embrace science and value reason. With that in mind, “we can know” when the end times will be.
First, we have to realize that almost at any time human life could be annihilated from the Earth. This could happen from a large comet or asteroid collision, a massive nuclear war, a biological plague, or perhaps even an alien attack. But even without the people, the world will survive and it would not be the End Times for the Earth.
Aside from the Empire’s Death Star, the only thing that could destroy the Earth and bring about the End Times would be the Sun. Currently, the Sun is roughly 4.5 billion years old, give or take (we are still waiting for Donald Trump to demand the Sun’s birth certificate). Our sun is about halfway through its main sequence life cycle. In another 5 billion years or so, it will evolve into a red giant star and likely envelop the Earth.
Don’t panic! There is a slim chance that the Earth might be push by stellar winds out of the path of the Sun. Another thing to consider is that if humans are still around in 5 billion years, we might find a way by then to leave this planet and so the End Times for the Earth may not be the End Times for humanity.
I am going to call it right now. The End Times will occur in the year 5,000,002,011 and I believe the day will be a hot December 2nd at about 3:32pm Eastern Standard Time. That is the date that this atheist predicts the end of the world will occur. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
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