From Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and creator of Closer to Truth:

When I was 12, the summer between seventh and eighth grades, a sudden realization struck such fright that I strove desperately to blot it out.

Why not Nothing? What if everything had forever been Nothing? Not just emptiness. Not just blankness. But not even the existence of emptiness. Not even the meaning of blankness. And no forever.

Lump together everything that exists and might exist—physical, mental, platonic, spiritual, God. Everything. Call it all “Something.” Why is there “Something” rather than “Nothing”? Why does anything at all exist?
I now attack the question directly—finally in my life—by speaking with some really smart people, primarily philosophers (also one physicist) who have thought long and hard about this seemingly impossible question.
I begin with one of my favorite philosophers, John Leslie, who has been much consumed with Nothing and ultimate explanations. I ask him whether my question is a legitimate one.
“It’s legitimate,” Leslie responds, “because it can have answers. Even if one thinks the answer is ‘there just happens to be something,’ that’s an answer.”
Is it the most fundamental of all questions?
“One could argue that all one’s views about the nature of the universe will in the end depend on whether the universe, which one believes exists, could have a reason behind its existence,” Leslie says. “I myself don’t like the theory that the universe just happens to exist and just happens to have the characteristics which it does.“
At the end of all our strivings, after we have a final theory or a series of final theories, and/or multiple universes with perhaps different final theories in each, will we not still have remaining this ultimate question, Why is there Something rather than Nothing?
“I think that’s right,” Leslie says. “I don’t think it would be possible to say, for example, that because quantum physics tells us that it’s likely that a blank would at some point fluctuate into a real world that that’s our final answer. Because the question would then be, ‘Why does this kind of quantum physics apply to reality?’”
I try to progress by trying to discern the nature of Nothing. Nothing seems “simpler” than Something, I proffer, in that Something has extra stuff to be explained, whereas Nothing does not?
Leslie agrees, but amplifies. “Even in a blank, there would be all sorts of facts. Try to imagine out of existence all actual things. Is that Nothing? In a sense, yes. But that overlooks the fact that there’s an infinite richness of truths about possibilities which is bound to exist even though no actual things exist.”
So it’s impossible to have purely Nothing, Leslie says. “Because one always has possibilities. One always has facts about relationships with possibilities. And one also has the fact that certain possibilities are good and other possibilities are bad. These are facts from which one can never escape—even if there were no actualities, no real possibility of any actualities ever occurring, there would still be no contradiction in the assertion that they may possibly or potentially occur. Their occurring would not be like the occurrence of, say, a ‘married bachelor.’”
For a philosopher to assert that anything is “impossible” is an assertion of significance, and Leslie says that it is impossible for there to be a Nothing without possibilities. “One can even go further and say that the condition of Nothing would have to be infinitely rich,” Leslie adds. “There’s an infinite number of possibilities and an infinite number of facts about them [which cohabit Nothing]. And those possibilities and the facts about them will be there even if there were no actual things forever and ever.”
To Peter van Inwagen, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, Nothing is important. “What would count as an answer to the Nothing question?” he asks. “We cannot describe a way that nonexistent things interact with each other to produce existent things—the nonexistent is never going to produce the existent. This question cannot be like questions about why are there living things, answered by the ways that nonliving things may have interacted to produce living things. Explaining why we have Something would have to have a wholly different kind of answer, if it had an answer at all.”
Inwagen argues that “one sort of answer would be that it was impossible for there to be Nothing, that ‘there being Nothing’ is actually an impossible state of affairs. And that of course would explain why there was Something rather than Nothing, since the impossible cannot occur. There have been two attempts at this in the history of philosophy. One is subsumed under the name ‘ontological argument” [a greatest possible Being must exist] and the other under the name ‘cosmological argument’ [everything that exists must have a reason or an explanation for its existence; whatever begins to exist must have a cause]. But I myself don’t find either of them convincing.”
Another way of answering the question of why there is Something rather than Nothing, Inwagen suggests, would be to show that “it’s vastly improbable for there to be Nothing.” Here’s his argument: “Think of all the possible ways that the world might be, down to every detail. [There are infinitely many such possible ways.] All these ways seem to be equally probable—[which means that] the probability of any one of these infinite possibilities actually occurring seems to be zero, and yet one of them happened.
“Now, there’s only one way for there to be Nothing, right?” Inwagen continues. “There are no variants in Nothing; there being Nothing at all is a single state of affairs. And it’s a total state of affairs; that is, it settles everything—every possible proposition has its truth value settled, true or false, usually false, by there being Nothing. So if Nothing is one way for reality to be, and if the total number of ways for reality to be are infinite, and if all such infinite ways are equally probable so that the probability of any one of them is [essentially] zero, then the probability of ‘there being Nothing’ is also [essentially] zero.”
Inwagen argues that because there are an infinite number of potential worlds, each specific world would have a zero probability of existing, and because Nothing is only one of these potential worlds—there can be only one kind of Nothing—the probably of Nothing existing is zero. A clever argument. But doesn’t it assume that the prior probability of Nothing is precisely the same as that of every one of the infinite number of possible ways the world might have been? Inwagen’s argument turns on the assumption that a “Nothing Total World” is equally probable to every kind of an infinite number of “Something Total Worlds.”
But, to me, Nothing seems different. Nothing seems simpler in that all the other kinds of worlds would require Something more, with additional explanations required for whatever constitutes those Somethings.
Some people would answer the question glibly and say “God”—there is Something because God created it.
“Either God is a necessary being or he’s not a necessary being,” Inwagen responds. “If God is a necessary being then there isn’t any possibility of there being Nothing.” (This, in essence, is the ontological argument, which almost every philosopher rejects as deficient and spurious, though determining precisely why has proved to be maddening.)
“If God is a contingent being,” Inwagen continues, “then we still have the question of, ‘Why is there Something rather than Nothing’ because one of the possible ways for there to be is that there is Nothing, not even God. The doctrine of divine creation would then be, well, if God exists and if anything else exists, that anything else must be because God created it. This may explain why there’s a physical world, but not why is there Something rather than Nothing.”
At the end of all disputations, Inwagen himself says, “I know what I think is the right answer: I think God exists and that God is a necessary being, and therefore it’s not possible for there to be Nothing.”
As for God being the answer, I put the question to University of Oxford atheistic philosopher Bede Rundle, whose book Why There is Something Rather than Nothing rejects the God hypothesis.
“The question is fascinating in that it seems impossible at first blush to give any sort of answer at all,” Rundle says. “It’s had a longish history, starting with [Gottfried] Leibniz; many philosophers have tried their hand at giving an answer. St. Thomas Aquinas worked out his answer: There is God and God has to exist—God exists necessarily.
“Now what I’m interested in,” Rundle continues, “is whether or not that makes sense and can be substantiated.” He believes that those who “in effect think that ‘there being Nothing’ is not a genuine alternative because there has to be Something because there has to be God” are on the right track—except for the God part. “I’m trying to agree with the general petition that there has to be Something or other,” Rundle explains, “but the theistic solution seems to me to have its difficulties.
“Well, what are other conditions in which you can speak of Something as beginning to exist?” Rundle asks. “Isn’t it that there has to be a time when it [the Something] doesn’t exist followed by a time when it does exist? But if you don’t have anything at all, then you don’t have ‘enough time’; so it doesn’t make sense to think of a state of affairs of Nothing being followed by a state of affairs of Something.”
Rundle concludes that, “Perhaps we just have to confront it [the fact of Something] as brute fact—that there is Something. One can’t get beyond that, there’s no explaining it, and that’s that.”
To me, to accept “brute fact” as the final explanation of Everything—All-There-Is—is maximally unsatisfying (which doesn’t make brute fact wrong, of course). Is this just a defect of human cognition? Certainly evolution would have no reason to select for capacity to understand this question.
Rundle answers me thus: “If it’s a conceptual truth that there is Something, and if there has to be Something, then that’s an end to your agonizing, surely. And if you could refute all the arguments that say, ‘We can make sense of the state of affairs which is Nothing at all,’ then there is no alternative. … There’s no such thing [or possibility] as there being Nothing.”
So Rundle believes that there must be Something or other. There cannot be Nothing: Nothing is an impossible state of affairs.
Is this progress? Or word games? I can’t decide.
“Nothing” still haunts me.
“God” would close off debate. What are alternatives?
Quentin Smith, an atheistic philosopher who is fixated on the riddle of existence, has his answer.
“The first thing is to recognize that when people have tried to answer this question,” Smith says, “they have defined Nothing as this very thin sort of Something, like empty space, quantum vacuum, the null set, a point, and the like—but few have really talked about Nothing.” A better way to define a real Nothing, he says, “is ’Not Something,’ so the question becomes, ‘Why is it the case that it is false that there is not Something?’”
There is an answer to this, Smith continues, “but it’s rather trite and trivial, whereas we’ve associated this question as having some great, grand, magnificent metaphysical answer—but the answer is just logically trivial and then really quite uninteresting.
“The answer would be this,” Smith explains. “Right now, Something is the state of affairs. The universe is Something. So why does this Something exist? Well, it was caused to exist by the previous state of the universe, which is also Something, and that previous state was also caused by a state previous to that, which again is also Something [and the infinite regress, the endless series of causes backward, can continue without end]. … And so the reason why there is Something is that each Something that exists has been caused by a prior Something, and if you ask why there is Something at all, I say that I just confine myself to one example, this state of the universe.”
After he first realized this, it took him a while to recover from the disappointment, Smith says with some regret: “I thought to myself, ‘I spent all my life wondering why there is Something rather than Nothing … and this is the answer?’”
Smith concludes that to call existence a “brute fact” is a more logically complete explanation than either theism or any other theory because there are no questions left unanswered in the “brute fact” explanation.
So he contends that while “No Thing existing” might have been the case, “Some Thing existing” is the case. And the reason is trivial: Each and every thing was caused by a prior thing.
That can’t be the answer … but might it?
I still want to scream, “Why Not Nothing?”
Every time I return to it, the question drives me crazy.
To conclude, I consider God. And then no God. In each case, I address the question, “Why Not Nothing?” In each case, I ask one of the world’s most profound thinkers.
I put the question to Richard Swinburne, one of the foremost Christian philosophers, thus: “I am astonished that there is Something, anything at all. Nothing would seem to have been the most likely, perhaps most logical, state of affairs.”
“I share that intuition,” Swinburne begins. “It is extremely puzzling.”
Swinburne’s approach is to first discern the essence of “explanation.”
“All explanation,” he says, “consists in trying to find something simple and ultimate on which everything else depends. And I think that by rational inference what we can get to that’s simple and ultimate is God. But it’s not logically necessary that there should be a God. The supposition ‘there is no God’ contains no contradiction.”
I ask the traditional skeptical follow-up question, “So why is there a God?” Swinburne is clear. “There is no explanation of why there is a God. And it would be theologically problematic if there were [such an explanation of any kind]. If one were to say, well, as a matter of fact, it is logically necessary that there is a God, [that would be a theological problem] because that would mean that the existence of God depended on some principle of logic which was somehow superior to God.
“If God is defined as ‘explaining everything else,’” Swinburne continues, “then God wouldn’t be God if there were an explanation of his existence. God to be God is ‘the ultimate truth.’ That’s just how it is. We can’t go further than that.”
To Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in physics, the question, “Why is there Something rather than Nothing” is “just the kind of question that we will be stuck with when we have a final theory [of physics]. … We will be left facing the irreducible mystery because whatever our theory is, no matter how mathematically consistent and logically consistent the theory is, there will always be the alternative that, well, perhaps there could have been nothing at all.”
In modern physics, Weinberg explains, “the idea of empty space without anything at all, without fields, is inconsistent with the principles of quantum mechanics—[because] the [Heisenberg] uncertainty principle doesn’t allow a condition of empty space where fields are zero and unchanging.”
But why, then, do we have quantum mechanics in the first place, with its fields and probabilities and ways of making things happen? “Exactly!” Weinberg says. “[Quantum mechanics] doesn’t answer the question, ‘Why do we live in a world governed by these laws?’… And we will never have an answer to that.”
“Does that bother you?” I ask.
“Yes,” Weinberg says wistfully. “I would like to have an answer to everything, but I’ve gotten used to the fact that I won’t.”
Here’s how I see it: The primary questions people pose—Why the universe? Does God exist?—are important, sure, but they are not bedrock fundamental. “Why anything at all?” is the ultimate question.
I’ve come to only two kinds of answers.
The first is that there is no answer. Existence is a brute fact without explanation. Something or Other has to exist. I don’t like this, but I must accept that it may be so.
The second is that at the primordial beginning—whatever that may mean—Something was self-existing. The essence of this Something was its existence, such that nonexistence to it would be as inherently impossible as physical immortality to us is factually impossible.
Candidates for essential self-existence? These include:

• matter-energy and space-time.
• natural laws of physics or higher-order laws that generate quantum mechanics and perhaps multiple universes.
• forms of consciousness, cosmic or otherwise.
• a creator God or an ultimate cause beyond the physical.
• some overarching principle or value, like Plato’s “the good,” which somehow has causative powers.

There are no doubt other candidates. And the argument that our human brains/minds are incapable of answering this question, or even properly addressing it, cannot be refuted.
Why is there Something rather than Nothing?
If you don’t get dizzy, you really don’t get it.
Nothing is … closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with John Leslie, Peter van Inwagen, Bede Rundle, Quentin Smith, Richard Swinburne, and Steven Weinberg in “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?” the 39th—and final—episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (directed by Peter Getzels). The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Three new series of Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God —13 episodes each, 39 all together—will begin around January 2010.

From V.V. Raman, emeritus professor of physics and humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology:

Eternal life, as a mere persistence of life here on Earth, could be very boring. But then, considering that old age doesn’t have to be boring, if there are things to do and experiences that one enjoys, whether it’s listening to music, eating chocolates, reading romance novels, or tending to gardens, never-ending life could be a welcome permanence.
We may trivialize the concept by saying that it all depends on the phase and health of life at which this imagined eternal existence is going to be. If it is going to be in the sort of physical body we are accustomed to in the prime of salubrious life, with refreshing showers, decent wardrobes, and variation in breakfast cereal and dinner menu, with near and dear ones within reach, it would be ideal.
We may say that our images can be eternal (whether as fading photographs or on YouTube), by which we mean existence of form and sound for others to see and hear as long as technology and terrestrial civilization last. Likewise, there is immortality in the ideas and discoveries left behind. In recent decades, some physicists have argued that eternal life is a distinct possibility for us all in cyberspace. Like alchemists of ancient times, one might concoct any theory to make ourselves live in saecula saeculorum: forever and ever, to use a biblical phrase from Galatians.
The temporal view of eternity was expressed by the poet Bayard Taylor:

Till the sun grows old,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of Judgment Book unfold.

Eternal life is a sophisticated theological concept, which has little to do with physical time. It is related to the doctrine that we are all endowed with a soul. The soul may be envisioned as an intangible supernatural entity that can exist beyond space-time, with an innate connection to an Eternal Being. The general religious belief is that in the postmortem phase, eternal life would be ecstatic for the soul that attains the celestial realm.
The eternity of which religions speak is holistic existence that transcends ticking time. As Robert Neville put it in his book Eternity and Time’s Flow, “eternity is the togetherness of past, present, and future in which they are all equally real and in which each allows the others to be what they are precisely in their temporal difference, … eternity is an eternal togetherness.” In the imagery of poet John Donne, who described time as a short parenthesis in eternity, we may say that our physical life is an even shorter parenthesis within that parenthesis. Thus, eternal life would involve jumping out of two parentheses into an ocean without bounds. Another poet noted that in mystic moments, we are watching the shadows of eternity. In this metaphor, we may say that eternal life would be moving from sheltered shade to dazzling sunshine.
From a mathematical perspective, the only things of whose eternal life we can be rationally certain (not in the temporal sense but in their continued actualization ad infinitum) are the values of pi and other transcendental numbers that go on and on and on without end in their decimal mode, and the integers more generally (1, 2, 3, …). But their eternal life, impressive as it may be, gets to be pretty drab after a while.

V.V. Raman appears with Richard Swinburne, J.P. Moreland, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Neil Gillman, Michael Tooley, and Huston Smith in “Eternal Life Is Like What?” the 38th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

From V.V. Raman, emeritus professor of physics and humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology:

The question by itself is incomplete, for it is important to specify: fundamental to what, and in what sense.
The word “fundamental” pertains to that which is at the basis of something and is essential for its existence. Thus, carbon is fundamental to life, love and relationships are fundamental to sanity, and nuclear fusion is fundamental to stars. So it is important to state for what something is fundamental.
From all that we know about our universe in the framework of current physics, consciousness is not fundamental to the existence of the physical universe. That is to say, the physical universe was there, is there, and will be there whether or not it incorporates consciousness in it. There can be rocks and pure water, sand and nitrogen, and cosmic dust: The universe at large will exist without any consciousness.
On the other hand, in the framework of religion, consciousness (humankind) is what the universe was created for. God made man in his image in the Judeo-Christian framework, and Purusha (consciousness) was primary in Hindu cosmogony. Many venerate and worship a Cosmic Consciousness, variously named and described.
This is an important difference between science and religion: For science, consciousness is an epiphenomenon associated with some brains that happen to have evolved in an insignificant niche in the universe during the past couple of million years—in an indifferent universe whose history stretches back to well over 10 billion years. For most religions, consciousness is supremely central to the universe, the heart of the universe, as it were.
It is important in this context to recognize that, as conscious beings, our experiences are rich and unique: We taste and smell, feel softness, enjoy music, and perceive color. These, as far as we know, are not explicit in the physical universe, but emerge from the interaction of physical processes and entities with the extraordinarily complex human brain (itself, as far as we can tell, a purely physical entity). Furthermore, we also love and hate, engage in ideas and values, speak of truth and commitment, are involved with mathematics and science, and enthralled by beauty. None of this would be possible without consciousness. It is therefore fair to say that consciousness is fundamental to the experience of a good many intangible aspects of the universe.
One may ask: Can there be an inverse square law in mathematical terms without consciousness? Are the numbers e and pi in the universe, or are they merely in the human mind? Can the elliptic orbits of planets ever be recognized as such without consciousness? Whether these are mere creations of the human mind or are aspects of the universe that become manifest only through consciousness is a valid question.
If the latter is the case, then it is fair to say that consciousness is fundamental to the full expression of the physical universe, just as an audience is fundamental to an enacted play. If the world is a sonnet that happened by chance, consciousness is the reader without whom that sonnet would forever remain in a dark abysmal depth. In this sense, the emergence of consciousness was as important an event in cosmic history as its natal big bang.

V.V. Raman appears with David Chalmers, John Searle, Marilyn Schlitz, Paul Davies, and Andrei Linde in “Is Consciousness Fundamental?” the 37th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

From Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and creator of Closer to Truth:

In every generation, in virtually every religion on earth, some believers have imagined their time to be the “End Time,” a pivotal epoch of disruptive change, usually generated supernaturally, that brings about perpetual transformation. These End-Time seekers have expected, or hoped for, the obliteration of society and often the intervention of their God, the return or advent of a messiah or the equivalent. And there were always some who saw signs of apocalypse just over the horizon.
Each generation has thought itself unique—our generation, it seems, particularly so.
In our time, “End Times” abound. What drives such zealotry?
James Tabor is a leading scholar of early Christianity and a careful observer of apocalyptic and messianic thinking. He is the chairman of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and the author of The Jesus Dynasty. There is no one with whom I would rather start. (In the spirit of full disclosure, Jim is a lifelong friend.)
The contemporary End-Time emphasis, Tabor says, “is mainly coming right out of the Bible. Particularly in the Hebrew prophets, the Bible focuses on this ideal time of the future, this ‘eschatology,’ this story of ultimate things.” Then, he adds, “as time goes on, particularly into the time of Jesus when Christianity and other apocalyptic movements (such as the writers of the Dead Sea scrolls) arise, we find them saying not only is the End Time coming, but we will likely live to see it.”
Although “apocalypticism, this idea that the End Time is in our day, is a very interesting idea,” Tabor says, he reminds his students that it has “a 100 percent failure rate.” So, he tells them, “you’re buying into an idea that may be fascinating, but so far it’s always been wrong.”
Tabor believes that “what fueled the kind of apocalyptic fervor that we find among fundamentalist Christians is the establishment of the State of Israel, and then the Six-Day War [1967], where Jews occupied Jerusalem—or re-gained it, depending on your point of view—for the first time in 2,000 years. So now, supposedly, one can open the Book of Revelation or the Book of Daniel, which are two of the Bible’s primary prophetic books, and you can think that you are reading events in a very literal way.”
Granted, the “End Times” is a compelling, even intoxicating idea. It reaches deep into human longing by extending the abstract meaning and often distant impact of religion into, allegedly, real-world relevance. It also has a way of generating group cohesion among believers and bringing, so the believers believe, just desserts to nonbelievers. But with its history of “100 percent failure,” why do some scholarly believers still take it seriously?
Robert Saucy is a professor of theology at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in Los Angeles. He takes the “End Time” seriously—not as sociological substrate, but as prophetic reality.
Key to Saucy’s understanding, which is widespread among many Christian groups, Is the notion of “dispensationalism”—different periods in biblical history, and the anticipation of the literal fulfillment of biblical prophecies in the “End Time” period.
“Dispensationalism is prominent in today’s theological discussions,” Saucy says, “largely because of Israel.” Dispensationalism, as an understanding of the Bible “by those who take the Bible fairly at face value,” Saucy says, “puts more emphasis on prophecy, and that includes restoration of the State of Israel.” He differentiates dispensationalism , which he says “takes biblical prophecies fairly straightforward,” from non-dispensationalism, “which tends to believe that the church has replaced Israel.” This means that non-dispensational interpretations of Old Testament prophecies are made with references to the spiritual church, and not to the nation of Israel. Israel is left out of the non-dispensational picture, Saucy says, and “the re-establishment of the State of Israel would not have biblical significance for the non-dispensationalist.”
I ask Saucy whether he, in a serious cerebral way, looks forward to a literal millennium.
“I do,” he says without equivocation, again stressing the restoration of the State of Israel after 2,000 years as the critical phenomenon.
Saucy is not alone. Many evangelical Christians believe that the existence of Israel heralds the beginning of the End Time, and that its culmination may be imminent.
Bizarre as this may sound, to be fair, if one’s beliefs are based on a word-by-word reading of the Bible, it’s a view that seems consistent with the literal texts. End-Time prophecy is intoxicating because, If true, it would prove the veracity of the Bible and the existence of its God.
But there are other understandings of Christian prophecy.
Nancey Murphy is professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. A committed and devoted Christian, she is not at all concerned with prophecy.
“There’s no way to know when the End Times will happen,” Murphy says. “I grew up in the Catholic tradition and the emphasis there was Jesus saying that even he didn’t know when the end of the world was coming.”
Although a “remarkable number of Christians” seem to adhere to a “millennialist theology,” Murphy explains that “the more sophisticated biblical scholars would deny almost all, and perhaps literally all, of the predictions purportedly drawn from Scripture about when the end of the world is going to come.”
Yet Murphy does believe, in a more fundamental way, that there will be an end to this physical world in some God-directed way. I push to get her to give me some kind of time frame.
“OK,” she says reluctantly, “here’s a not terribly serious order of magnitude. The Earth is about four and a half billion years old. The sun is going to expand and burn us all up in about four and a half billion years from now. So Jesus came right smack dab in the middle of that, give or take 2,000 years.” She then concludes, with a laugh, “So, I think we’re right in the middle.”
But, she continues more seriously, “I think it depends on whether there’s extraterrestrial life. For all we know, there are other planets with life spans that will last far beyond that of the Earth.”
Murphy is clear. She believes in God, the Bible, Jesus, and the ultimate transformation of the heavens and earth. But not in the near-term prophecies that many of her co-religionists propound and preach.
Although prophecy today is largely the province of Christians, there is also a long Jewish prophetic tradition. Arthur Hyman, a professor at Yeshiva University, is a leading authority on Jewish eschatology—what is prophesied to happen in the End Time. In explaining the Jewish view, Hyman calls attention to the biblical requirement that “there are conditions that have to be fulfilled.” He then reiterates “the Jewish claim against Christianity—which is part of many medieval discussions—that Jesus cannot be the Messiah because the conditions of the coming of the Messiah had not been fulfilled.” Primary among these, he says, is “a kind of a big cataclysmic war between Gog and Magog, who were biblical characters sort of projected into the future.” And then after this war, Hyman continues, “the Messiah will come and the dead will be resurrected, which is then followed by ‘the world to come,’ which brings peace on earth, no sickness, no death, and so on.”
Hyman notes that in Jewish history, there have been “Messianic pretenders in almost every generation,” but “the counterclaim always is that the conditions of the Messiah have not been fulfilled.”
The specific events that some Jews claim will lead to the Messiah’s first coming are similar to those that many Christians claim will lead to the Messiah’s second coming. Though they disagree on what “number coming” it will be—the first or the second—fundamental Jews and Christians agree that these kinds of events will signal the advent of the End Times.
But End-Time thinking has minimal importance in mainstream Judaism. What about in mainstream Christianity?
I ask Greg Boyd, founding pastor of the Woodland Hills Church in Minnesota, who has a doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Boyd recognizes that “the present state of the world, this present era, isn’t eternal—it comes to an end.” It’s like a chapter of a book that’s going to conclude, he says: “We don’t know when. We don’t know the details of how.” He then adds, “But there are plenty of people out there who say they know when, and say they know how, but they don’t know what they’re talking about—and they do damage by ranting like that—though they usually make a lot of money.”
Boyd is adamant: “But we don’t know when, and we don’t know how,” he asserts. “However, our present Earth will come to an end—the Bible describes it as the coming of the Kingdom of God, when God’s going to make right all that is wrong.”
Boyd sees the Kingdom of God as a literal kingdom, not just something “spiritual in your heart” as some believe. “As depicted in the New Testament, God brings the Kingdom to earth,” he states.
It will happen, he reiterates, but he is loathe to even hazard a guess as to when. “If there is anything we should know from history,” he says, “it is that we shouldn’t try to guess when. Such speculation only sets up people for disappointment. It sometimes gets them to do crazy things.
“We should leave the things of God to God,” Boyd stresses. “God will know when to wrap it all up. Our job is to live every day like it’s our last. Speculating about the details of these sorts of things is the equivalent of going to a tarot card reader and trying to find out exactly how you’re going to die—it’s morbid.”
In contrast, Boyd asserts, “the thrust of the teaching in the New Testament is that we’re to live with the anticipation that the Lord is going to return and set up his Kingdom. And that could happen at any time. So live every day like it’s your last and don’t sweat the details.”
Does that mean Boyd doesn’t pay attention to world news in the sense that perhaps current events may have something to do with Bible prophecy?
“No, I really don’t,” he says. “It’s so speculative that I don’t see any good fruit coming of that at all. I really don’t think that God so loved the world he gave us a jigsaw puzzle so that we could figure out what’s going to happen in the last seven years of world history.” He adds: “When God wants to be clear, God is clear.”
Still, throughout its history, Christianity has had groups and sects preaching “End Time,” imagining all varieties of prophecies about to be fulfilled. This was true in the early church, and it is true today. And not only in Christianity. The vision of a culmination of human events cuts across cultures—which anthropologists take as shared transmissions or common thinking, but which believers take as common truth.
The eschatological hope is a natural one. If one is a believer, one would certainly wish the advent of a new age and the unambiguous presence of God. Glorious rewards. All wrongs made right. All doubters convicted.
So here’s how the opposing views line up. On one side is psychology and sociology, personal hopes and social movements, all energized by anthropological trophisms that explain why such false beliefs take root and propagate. On the other side is the claim that our generation, as opposed to all other generations, really is special—with nuclear proliferation, global warming, escalating religious conflict, confrontation in the Middle East, “wars and rumors of wars” in the oft-quoted warning.
The former, with 100 percent historical success, must be the default position. The latter, with 100 percent historical failure, must bear the full burden of proof.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with James Tabor, Robert Saucy, Nancey Murphy, William Grassie, Arthur Hyman, and Greg Boyd in “Is This the End Time?” the 36th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.