Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [100]
What this otherwise diverse group of people had in common was faith in the teachings of one William Miller, a do-it-yourself preacher who had analyzed the Bible and determined the date of the Second Coming. Miller was born in Massachusetts in 1782, the eldest of sixteen children and the grandson of a Baptist minister. When he was four, his family moved to up-state New York, where the nationwide religious revival that would become known as the Second Great Awakening was just beginning to stir. In later years, the part of the state near Miller’s home would be called the Burned-Over District, because it was so ablaze with religious conviction that there was scarcely anyone left to convert.
The time, the place, and the lineage suggest an auspicious beginning for a future religious leader—but as a young man, Miller renounced his faith in Christianity. He was troubled, he later wrote, by “inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible,” and at the suggestion of some friends in Vermont, where he had recently moved with his new wife, he began reading Voltaire, Hume, and Thomas Paine. All three thinkers rejected the authority of religious doctrine in favor of independent rational thought, and Miller grew to share their convictions.
Then came the War of 1812. Many a man has reunited with God on the battlefield, and Miller was one of them. As captain of the Thirtieth Infantry, Miller fought in the Battle of Plattsburgh, where outnumbered American troops defeated the British and helped turn the course of the war. To Miller, the improbable victory was evidence of the hand of God: “so surprising a result against such odds, did seem to me like the work of a mightier power than man.” Or so he wrote later. But it’s hard not to wonder if what really got to Miller was the close encounter with mortality. He had long worried that rationalism, for all its virtues, was “inseparably connected with, and did tend to, the denial of a future existence [i.e., life after death]”—a shortcoming that must have seemed more acute after witnessing the ravages of battle. (And, too, after losing his father and sister, both of whom died around the time of the war.) Rather than accept the possibility of annihilation, Miller wrote, “I should prefer the heaven and hell of the Scriptures, and take my chance respecting them.” Thus did the wayward Baptist return to the Bible.
Yet the contradictions in Christianity that had vexed Miller in the past vexed him still. In 1816, a friend from his Voltaire days challenged him to reconcile those contradictions or abandon the Bible altogether, and Miller took up the gauntlet. For the next several years, he dedicated himself to creating a system, consisting of fourteen rules, intended to render all of scripture internally consistent. He would forever after advertise this system as simple and infallible, but an outsider could be forgiven for struggling to discern these qualities. (Rule #8: “Figures always have a figurative meaning…such as mountains, meaning governments; beasts, meaning kingdoms, waters, meaning people.” Rule #10: “Figures sometimes have two or more different significations, as day is used in a figurative sense to represent three different periods of time. 1. Indefinite. 2. Definite, a day for a year. 3. Day for a thousand years.” Rule #11: “How to know when a word is used figuratively. If it makes good sense as it stands, and does no violence to the simple laws of nature, then it must be understood