The year 2000 has arrived, and the world is still intact.

This may mean some changes for those people who were predicting the world’s end on Jan. 1.

Robert Baum, assistant professor of religious studies, said the world’s not ending may not change some people’s apocalyptic prophesies.

“It’s around the time of the new millennium that the prediction is,” he said. “I’m not sure the people who predicted it are going to change that. … It hasn’t been proven wrong yet.”

Baum said some may now be expecting the world’s end in 2001, which many people consider the real beginning of the third millennium. Many scholars now believe Jesus Christ was really born around 6 B.C., he said, which may also change predictions.

“There are all sorts of different numerical calculations you can do,” Baum said. “People have been predicting the end of the world for 150 years.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses once thought the apocalypse was coming in 1914, he said, and Seventh Day Adventists predicted it in the 1840s. Members of those groups later decided the second coming had occurred, but without the end of the world.

Baum said a passage in the biblical book of Genesis says God will never destroy the earth again, but most people base their predictions on the Book of Revelations.

Baum said he wasn’t very concerned about a millennial apocalypse.

“I didn’t worry too much about the end of the world; I worried more about my computer,” he said.

Elaine McDuff, assistant professor of religious studies, also said many groups in the past have been faced with handling predictions that didn’t come true.

“What I think will happen is probably they’ll just regroup, and if you look at the history … back to the 1800s, when they make specific predictions and then nothing happens, they do some explaining and look forward to some other future kind of event,” McDuff said. “Some became disillusioned, while others move forward … waiting, still expecting something to happen.”

Eric Abbott, professor of journalism, is teaching Honors 306 this semester, which will be a seminar on predicting the technological future. One topic the class will discuss is religious and apocalyptic predictions.

He said most of these prophesies deal more with signs than exact dates.

“Most apocalyptic predictions don’t have a particular date that goes with it,” Abbott said. “[But] there are always group[s] that look to certain points in time, and in many cases, what happens with those groups when the day passes and nothing happens — they interpret it as being saved, as the will of God stepping in. Others are disappointed, and sometimes the leadership of the groups falls apart.”

Those people who expected an apocalypse in 2000 aren’t the first end-of-the-world forecasters and may not be the last, Abbott said.

“To put this into perspective, there have been many people over many millennia who have predicted the end of the world, so this isn’t anything new,” he said.