unraptured

The time has come and gone, and Mother Nature has not served as God's scourge, but instead regaled us with a beautiful Plinian could out of a pronouncable, and more importantly, benign Icelandic volcano.

It was easy to poke fun at the followers of Harold Camping who, the day after, found themselves still subject to mundane gravity. Today, it would be cruel.

The psycho-sociological implications that the question of how such gullibility can arise in the age when science and technology appear in firm control of reality are fodder for many a PhD theses.

However, some observations can be made with little dissertation. This prophecy, like many of its predecessors, was based on biblical numerology. Mankind has been fascinated with numerical codes recondite within the fabric of reality at least since Pythagoras. Perhaps because of their abstract and seemingly atemporal nature numbers, and more generally mathematical structures, appear to encode the fabric of reality. Plato conferred a hyper-real status to mathematical objects well before hypertext ....

For millennia, arcane numerology coexisted in the same minds that argued in terms of Euclid's Elements. However, with few practical exceptions (e.g., accounting) mathematics remained the topic of philosophical thought just as what we call now science was Natural Philosophy. Eventually, the scientific method sanctioned math as the language to analyze and quantify Nature.
Scientific and technological advances likely reinforced the fundamental equivocation that math is the language of reality, if not reality itself rather than a human tool to investigate reality (as well as itself).

Curiously, some of the most formidable advances in technology (computer science's reduction of information to bits) and math (the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem) can be considered as going in the opposite directions: transforming language to numbers.