Good to know. I promise to use this knowledge appropriately and not like a 90’s teenager with a new GeoCities page (even if I do feel a certain nostalgia for blink and marquee).
I think the verse is telling us that God has uniquely enabled man to have just enough of a grasp of the eternal for us to recognize how limited our knowledge is. I don’t know exactly what level of abstract thought all the various kinds of animals can attain, but to paraphrase Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, the wild horse was not an Aquinian and the race-horse a Cartesian. Among earthly creatures, we’re the only ones who give any thought to eternity at all, and I can’t think of any good explanation for it that doesn’t involve God. It certainly wouldn’t seem to confer much evolutionary advantage for us to gain the ability to think about something we’ll never experience and that tends to make us feel awe and reverence for someone who doesn’t exist. Yet here I am, contemplating the infinite and enjoying every minute.
I won’t be offended if you figure out how to make text blink
Marquees are underrated
Oh, interesting thoughts.
For me this verse echoes of Augustine’s “ You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”or Pascal’s “ There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ” or CS Lewis’ “inconsolable longing”
This eternity in our souls is haunting us all, believers and unbelievers. Some towards greater joy, some towards more misery.
One of my favorite Bible verses is Ecclesiastes 3:11. Here it is in the NASB:
He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.
I should note this is one where translations vary significantly. Much of the debate centers on the Hebrew word olam, translated ‘eternity’ here. At its root it carries the idea of something vanishing off in the distance and some versions handle it quite differently, but ‘eternity’ makes the most sense to me in context. One of the greatest mysteries regarding the infinite is how and why we even have a concept of it. The idea that an actual infinity exists seems to present some insurmountable difficulties, but so does the idea that it doesn’t. An infinite creator and a finite creation is the only view that has ever made any sense to me.
Bible Hub’s entry for olam can be found here: https://biblehub.com/hebrew/5769.htm (Incidentally, I’m not *sure* how links are handled in the comments here or whether adding any kind of markup would do anything.)
HTML markup is totally permitted. Just use <em></em>. If you use <blockquote></blockquote> when quoting, you’ll see the result nicely indented. I might have Claude make an HTML-markup utility for users, like the admin area has.
What do you reckon the Preacher did mean by “He has also set eternity in their heart”?
Aristotle will definitely give you ideas about how we have a concept of infinity.
Reply to “Physics III.4: Why is natural philosophy concerned with infinity at all?”