Preparing for the Miraculous

2012 and 1956: Doomsday? 103his argumentation questionable, not to say naive: that animmense change in the consciousness of humanity willstart on a given day; and that the collective mind of humanitymight be capable of undergoing such a sea-changein five years or less.Our final century?Another voice in the debate is that of a distinguishedscientist, Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal since 1995 andMaster of Trinity College, Cambridge, since 2004. He haspublished a book with the ominous title Our Final Century:Will Civilization Survive the Twenty-First Century? “Thetheme of this book is that humanity is more at risk thanat any other phase in its history,” writes Rees. “The widercosmos has a potential future that could even be infinite.But will these vast expanses of time be filled with life, orbe as empty of the Earth’s first sterile seas? The choice maydepend on us, this century.”It is a fact that scientific materialism revels in the denigrationand degradation of all humanistic, religious andspiritual values (although it will readily use them whendeemed handy to promote its cause). It finds pleasure inrepeating that being born is beginning to die, as it does inreminding us of the Copernican Principle, which reducesthe status of the Earth to nothing but one planet amongothers and the status of the human beings to nothing butone kind of animals among others. Bertrand Russell, atone time the mouthpiece of scientific rationalism, wrotealready many years ago: “If you accept the ordinary lawsof science, you have to suppose that human life in generalwill die out in due course. You see in the moon the sort ofthing towards which the earth is tending, something dead,cold and lifeless.” And: “Brief and powerless is Man’s life;on him and all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless