3 ————————————————
6997183637540819440035239271702
But he does not come very near, as the young arithmetician will find.
MATHEMATICAL THEOLOGY.
Theologiæ Christianæ Principia Mathematica. Auctore Johanne Craig.[[268]] London, 1699, 4to.
This is a celebrated speculation, and has been reprinted abroad, and seriously answered. Craig is known in the early history of fluxions, and was a good mathematician.
He professed to calculate, on the hypothesis that the suspicions against historical evidence increase with the square of the time, how long it will take the evidence of Christianity to die out. He finds, by formulæ, that had it been oral only, it would have gone out A.D. 800; but, by aid of the written evidence, it will last till A.D. 3150. At this period he places the second coming, which is deferred until the extinction of evidence, on the authority of the question "When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" It is a pity that Craig's theory was not adopted: it would have spared a hundred treatises on the end of the world, founded on no better knowledge than his, and many of them falsified by the event. The most recent (October, 1863) is a tract in proof of Louis Napoleon being Antichrist, the Beast, the eighth Head, etc.; and the present dispensation is to close soon after 1864.
In order rightly to judge Craig, who added speculations on the variations of pleasure and pain treated as functions of time, it is necessary to remember that in Newton's day the idea of force, as a quantity to be measured, and as following a law of variation, was very new: so likewise was that of probability, or belief, as an object of measurement.[[269]] The success of the Principia of Newton put it into many heads to speculate about applying notions of quantity to other things not then brought under measurement. Craig imitated Newton's title, and evidently thought he was making a step in advance: but it is not every one who can plough with Samson's heifer.
It is likely enough that Craig took a hint, directly or indirectly, from Mohammedan writers, who make a reply to the argument that the Koran has not the evidence derived
from miracles. They say that, as evidence of Christian miracles is daily becoming weaker, a time must at last arrive when it will fail of affording assurance that they were miracles at all: whence would arise the necessity of another prophet and other miracles. Lee,[[270]] the Cambridge Orientalist, from whom the above words are taken, almost certainly never heard of Craig or his theory.