The Reign of the Doomsday Clock

Heat isn’t heat: it’s apocalyptic heat. War isn’t war: it’s the apocalyptic beginnings of World War 3. Political fighting isn’t just democracy: it’s an ‘existential threat’ to our very way of life. Population growth isn’t some interesting challenge: it’s a threat to our entire civilization.

The Doomsday Clock began in 1947 as a way of highlighting the new destructive reality of the atomic bomb. Although no nukes have been used in combat since the United States bombed Japan in World War II some 76 years ago, the Doomsday Clock is pushed ever nearer midnight.

The movie Oppenheimer (see Bishop Barron’s review here) takes us back to the complicated origins of the atomic bomb, which was an epochal achievement of scientific progress but also the deadliest weapon ever created. For the Christian imagination, it isn’t so problematic philosophically or conceptually. Since the Tower of Babel, we know that human ingenuity is tied into human pride and destruction. It’s a complicated tension between our original vocation as custodians of the Garden (which still continues) and the rebellious streak by which we seek to establish ourselves as god, according to the original temptation of the serpent.

For the materialist scientific optimist, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was supposed to prove that the human mind unfettered by religion would finally liberate the world, and the unlocking of nature’s secrets would make a society totally geared toward the human person. World War I was a shock to this system, but it was the war to end all wars, secularity’s one mistake that it would never make again. But 20 years later it happened again (and was even worse). As technology advanced, so did our ability to kill ourselves and our neighbors more effectively, culminating in the massive bomb.

For the Christian, the apocalypse is the revelation of God and his judgment, something to be feared but looked forward to. It is the final establishment of justice and our occasion to receive our eternal reward if we have remained faithful to his promise.

For secularism, an apocalyptic mentality assists in focusing the mind and distracting from the latent nihilism that lurks when we have gotten rid of notions of ultimate meaning and God. It is the final blow of destruction which finalizes the randomness and chaos of our existence. Thus it is to be feared and avoided at all costs, and every emergence of human tension and frailty is a portent of the end.

Peter Singer and St. John Paul II have been two of the most influential philosophers of the last century. Their differing views on the human person – and human dignity in particular – offer profound insight into the debates of our day.

Meet Saint Charbel Makhlouf, the Lebanese saint who brings Christians and Muslims together in the Middle East, with individuals from both religions reporting miracles arising from his intercession.

Finally, two articles in The Wall Street Journal (behind a subscription wall) may be worth a careful look:

Resources are limited, yes. However, human ingenuity in using them is far less limited. Read “We Will Never Run Out of Resources” here.

The DEI officer has fallen out of favor in the corporate world. Read “The Rise and Fall of the Chief Diversity Officer” here.