How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
What was the precise date of the creation?
Were each of the days of creation exactly 24 hours long?
Do any of those calculations have anything at all to do with faith?
I don't think so.
I have My Own Personal Pet Exceptional Theory (M.O.P.P.E.T.) about the nature of faith and science.
Science explains things that are hard to believe.
Faith is believing things that can't be explained.
There is no proof of the existence of God. If there was, He would cease to be amazing and would be just one more aspect of the natural world. God is supernatural. Proved, He would be no more splendid than a car.
To try to quantify God is not an act of faith.
That's what Harold Camping has been doing for the last (I don't know how many) years. He pretends to be the most faithful of the faithful, but his time and intellect have been consumed by trying to see behind the curtain and understand the mechanics of God. He wants to drown doubt in a sea of calculations that prove exactly, precisely, unquestionably what is really going on in the universe.
We can laugh at Camping's folly, but he's really a very sad man. What he presents as unwaivering faith is riddled with doubt.
I guess it's not really right for me to pass judgment on Mr. Camping's faith. I have very little myself. I'm agnostic.
I don't know whether God is real. I'm not even sure that question means anything. What is real? I know what's real in my own perception, but I don't know whether my perception is correct in any absolute frame of reference.
At the end of the day, my answer to the great question of philosophers is that it just doesn't matter.
A being created by God is functionally the same as a being created by the process of evolution. The only reason I come down on the side of Darwin is that his explanation for the origin of species gives us the science of genetics, which has proved useful for medical purposes. Without genetics, there are a myriad of treatments and understandings of life that we would be without.
A universe where the sun revolves around a flat Earth is exactly like the one where a spherical Earth revolves around the sun -- if you're not going to try to leave the planet. However, if you're going to try to send a probe to Mars, it helps to know where Mars is. So, I tend to come down on the side of the 3-D universe.
In my agnostic world, I'm going to try to understand the mechanics of the physical structure of my surroundings. The metaphysical aspects of my surroundings are fun to imagine, but aren't important to getting my next meal and keeping a roof over my head.
The rapture didn't come today -- as far as I know. Maybe what Mr. Camping calculated did happen -- it just wasn't like what he was expecting, and involved changes to the universe that we couldn't detect with our mortal senses. If that's the case, it probably doesn't matter ...
... at least to me.