From the explainer of gravity: No Apocalypse before 2060

A British news Web site published a story today about a collection of personal letters written by Sir Isaac Newton predicting the end of the world would come no sooner than 2060. It's an interesting read, but it has flaws that have become the standard when the media writes about faith and science. His calculation was based "on religion rather than reasoning," the story says. I love that. He used mathematical calculations drawn from timelines in the book of Daniel to estimate the soonest the end of days could arrive, and it's not reasoning. Not even from one of the greatest, most reasonable scientists ever. If he had been guessing at the Apocalypse based on the rate of global warming, divided by the number of years since the big bang, then the media would hallow his calculation as "reasoned." Draw anything from the Bible, which must be badly twisted to even begin to seem inaccurate, and it's tagged as religion and dismissed. But if it agrees with the trendiest pop-science, the newspapers will decide that it's infallible, newspapers that mostly don't know the first thing about science.

As one of my teachers used to say, I'm off my soapbox now.

I also really like what Newton said in his letter about trying to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse, exercises which he called "rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail." Sound familiar?

I recently heard Chuck Smith speak on the end times, and he said God wants us to live as if tomorrow will bring the end of the world. It's no mistake, he said, that every generation since Jesus' time thought theirs was the last. That resonated with me. If you have two minutes, check out the story. It even has images of the original pages of Newton's letter.