Afterward:  again no one I showed my work to seemed to know what to make of it, and the question became, what do I do next?  It seemed to me that the point of contact would be the problem of evil rather than the collapse, so I wrote the first version of the theodicy.  This, too, brought no response, so I was faced with the same question.

I knew that if the human condition were a test between two opposed theories of reality, its outcome would verify one or the other, and that an agreement to hold the test would involve predictions about that outcome.  If the test were to be actual, its direction determined by the choices of free creatures, predictions would be like those modern physicists make about probability waves.  A particular choice by a particular individual would not be inevitable, or it would not be a choice, but in a group of individuals interacting in a period of crisis, when choices were hard and unavoidable, the behavior of the best might be predictable, and that of the worst--so that the outcome of the situation might be inevitable.

It struck me that if this were the case, prediction--given a knowledge of the choices involved and an insight into human (creaturely) nature--could be precise and might be on record.  God's part in agreeing to the test might be the assertion that if He set up these conditions and let the test run its course, the process would turn out thus.  God would be the Author and Producer of the drama of history, without acting in it.  If His script were in fact played out, the outcome would vindicate the good.

I decided there was a chance that the outline of the plot and its timing might be in the apocalypses, fragmented and shuffled so that it could not be decoded until the appropriate time (and that that time might have come), so I sat down one night with a time line of western history and the numbers from Daniel and Revelation, to see if they could be made to jibe.  It took all night, but they fit, and the entire framework is there.  This does not seem possible, but the objections to taking the apocalypses seriously as descriptions of events that had not happened when they were written are on grounds that do not touch this method of interpreting them.  As Jacob Bronowski said of Newton discovering universal gravitation, "When the numbers come out right like that, you know as Pythagoras did that a secret of nature is open in the palm of your hand."