After what I said yesterday, I can’t resist passing on a link to this blog, Speculation on what Rapture believers will say this week. It presents quite a different kind of prediction from the one that Harold Camping made that the world would end yesterday. It’s a prediction not about how God will act but how people will act; it’s held with a much lighter degree of psychological conviction in calling itself “speculation”; and it is grounded in quite a different kind of justification. When I ended yesterday’s posting, I was wondering what explanations the doom believers will give for the End of the World NOT happening. Author Don Browne gives a few possibilities: “here is what Camping and others might explain as to just why the world end didn’t realize exactly as promised.”
Doomsday prophecies do catch people’s attention — and could activate student minds to look critically at the nature of justifications. After all, we make predictions all the time and live our daily lives with expectations of the future. Examining the kinds of predictions we make about the future provides some great comparisons between our areas of knowledge in the kinds of predictions they make and the kinds of justifications they provide. It also provides a way into thinking about the influence of our own cultural and personal backgrounds on our inclinations to accept some kinds of knowledge claims. And yes — I’d also say it brings in our own temperaments. Me, I’m inclined to be an optimist. And you?
Eileen Dombrowski
