The End of all times

When you talk to people from other worldviews its quite often quite hard to realize how poorly they understand your position. When it comes to the End Times there is a strong and undeniable dividing line between those who stand on an atheist standpoint and those on a religious one.
He is right in analyzing that the world even in an atheist view has an end. To the biosphere as we know it with the next big meteor impact, to the solar system with the inevitable end of the sun and the slow death of the universe that will expand forever and in this course have ever and ever lower energy densities.
When it comes in this universe to the fate of mankind I'm optimist. I believe that mankind will solve the current social and environmental problems on this planet, will survive the meteor impacts to come and finally even escape from this solar system the time the sun will die. Undeniably mankind in such a distant future will be a biologically different species from what it is today. By natural selection our genes will change and our bodies adapt to ever and ever changing environment. But whatever happens, as long as the descendants of homo sapiens will survive - and might it be in some form of artificial intelligences that are beyond our current technological imagination - our culture, our memes as Dawkins called them will persist. They will be newly perceived, newly interpreted but even if our modern thoughts will be just the very lowest basis of a future human culture - they will survive. The ones after us will find new suns who will warm them and spend them energy for a further couple of billion years until also those sources of energy run dry. Afterwards they might be able to find energy close to neutron stars, but eventually one day even those sources will dry up. At this time I believe the ones after us will merely be highly intelligent machines with artificial intelligences beyond the capacity of our modern day brain. As such they will be able to save energy by simply running slower.
For the last of a long line of descendants of homo sapiens time will begin to run, as they begin to slow down more and more. In a universe in which there isn't really anything to see anymore they will see the millennia and millions of years flying buy until one day they will also run out of energy with a final thought into eternity.

Now that I laid out my escatology in a nutshell, lets see how it is different from the Christian escatology. Dr. Mohler said to be fulfilling life, all of life, needs to have a beginning and needs to have an ending just as a good story needs to have. From an atheist position we tell our lives like stories, but this universe isn't a story. It is. It's without a narrator - without a narrative. If there is ever anyone to make it into a narrative than it's by some future technology, some future power mankind or another extraterrestrial civilization.

Yes, the atheist way to view the world means that all the wrongs of the past won't be made right. The only wrongs we can make right are the wrongs of the future by avoiding them. To be able to do that, we need to understand this world in an unbiased way. We need to respect the human being

and we need to realize that ideas do have consequences.
Just like the idea that the end of all times is a thing to long for.

That is what makes atheists afraid of Christian escatology. In the centuries before us it was a mindset of constant waiting, that itself was already quite depressing. But at the moment this old believe that the end of times is something to long for gets into a toxic mixture with a very typical American way of impatience. When especially Christians talk about bring about the end of times by nuclear war - than this in plain scary.
I wish Dr. Mohler would have taken as much time to scold those Christians who feel entitled to accelerate the coming of the apocalypse as he took to scold atheists for their beliefs.

When it comes to the apocalypse the difference between religious people and atheists is that atheists (at least all of who I know) would do anything to avoid it, the religious seem to long for it.
If you believe that this world and what we can make out of this world is the best we will ever have, the idea that the end of this world is something good is genuinely scary.

As Dr. Mohler knows and agrees to: Ideas do have consequences.