Yesterday in class we had several interesting discussions
regarding both God and eternity. As a
result, I began thinking about the limits of logic and reason in general, and
wondering as to whether something should be automatically discarded simply
because it does not make logical sense.
For instance, the concept of eternity proved difficult to describe
yesterday (as it should), and as a result made Aquinas’ argument hard to
analyze. However I think that attempting
to make rational sense of the concept of eternity is, in a sense, to miss the
point. Eternity is a concept that is
essentially designed to defy reason. In
fact, it goes against everything that we know and experience about the
world. Eternity is not a long time; it
is the absence of time. And since time
is an absolutely essential aspect of how we experience and interpret reality,
the idea of “no time” quite literally makes no sense to us. However, does this mean that it is
essentially worthless as a concept? Or
could it still be an important concept that logic is simply incapable of
explaining?
I feel as though logic is simply incapable of explaining something so complex because of us as humans. As Professor Silliman pointed out one day in class, humans are constantly looking for an answer, for an explanation as to how something exists. To attempt to explain eternity would be like trying to explain how the universe was created; there's no possible way to know because there is nothing that far back that could have told us how or why it came into existence. I don't see it as a useless term, it's simply something that logically can't be made sense of, at least, not yet.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure even master Logicians would admit to limits of logic. We use it as a tool, and it can help us see weaknesses in our reasoning. It seems like a great way to evaluate many of the claims we hear regarding matters a wee bit simpler than Time, Eternity, God, and even Truth.
ReplyDeleteWe don't discard ideas because they don't fit into a logic's paradigm, we find other ways of looking at them.
Well, at least, I don't.
Fair enough, and of course logic has limits, as does any tool. But it's not clear to me that we can mean anything at all by 'eternity' by describing it as an absence of time. It seems rather to be ALL of time, looked at from a perspective that abstracts from any particular experience of time (time passing, etc.). Now the proof will be in the pudding as to whether this view of all of time taken together is a useful notion or just gum-flapping obfuscation. Some abstractions are important and useful, after all, and some are just noise.
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