And Another Thing

30 August 2008

What we really want to know is not on the menu

Time, and our appalling ignorance of it, leads one directly to death, a subject on which we are, if possible, even less informed. Yet this is the topic on which each and every one of us is passionately anxious to know more. We all have to face it — that is one point on which Judeao-Christians, atheists, Darwinists, agnostics and even pantheists all agree — but none of us has the faintest concept of what it entails, or precedes, if anything. It raises more important questions for human beings than any other topic, and yet science cannot answer any of them. Imhotep, the architect of the first tomb complex built in stone, about 2,500 bc, already knew as much about death as anyone today. Indeed, it seems to be a subject most scientists try to avoid. It underlines their impotence about things which really matter.

Death is inextricably linked to time, because if time continues after death, and the disembodied spirit lives in time, then insoluble problems arise. Heaven (or Hell for that matter) becomes a bedlam, in which husbands are confronted with wives married at different times, each with claims, and many with multiple husbands too, hovering moodily in the background. And the children! At what stage in their lives are they fixed, as it was, for all eternity? And what is eternity if it is time-governed? How could anyone conceivably bear it, however blissful? On the other hand, if when we die time loses its grip and we step into an existence where time and change, permanence and impermanence, past, present and future all cease to have any meaning, and we exist in an infinite instant without location or material dimension of any kind, leaving all to the imagination, then there is comfort in the prospect of leaving this world.

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A mortal admirer

August 31st, 2008 6:13pm Report this comment

"Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."