The natural forces Thales considered were part of the world. They were orderly and behaved in consistent and coherent ways that could be understood with careful observation and mindful effort. In this way many, if not all, the events we experience could be predicted – they could be anticipated as exactly as our understanding of the laws allowed.... Harold Camping thought he had access to the same capacities. The 89-year-old retired civil engineer who built a multi-million-dollar Christian media empire to publicize his apocalyptic predictions was wrong. The spectacular failure of his predictions highlights what is right with science and what is wrong with using religion as a gateway to understanding the natural world.
Read the whole thing. I confess to some sympathy with the commenters who argue that its unfair to pin the faults of this individual nut job on all religious people. Pin It
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