Eternity Week #1: The Options
This week, I'm going to be talking about eternity, because it is a huge key to understanding much of anything going on in Christian thought. You can perfectly well assert Christian statements and values without the doctrine, but to make any ordered sense of it, you need eternity. This is a pity, as it is a ridiculously hard nut to crack, and had me gnawing its shell for years.
It has likely escaped few of you that we have a bit of difficulty seeing just what caused our universe. It would very much appear that all events in our world are caused by prior things, which in turn are caused by prior things, etc. This gives us several basic sets of possibilities for just why earth really is full of things:
1) Materialism: The universe, while made up of causally linked events, does not itself have a cause.
2) Pantheism: The universe is somehow its own cause (1) (2).
3) Theism: The universe has an external cause (1).
4) Mysticism: Any number of other possibilities which completely defy both logic and language, and thus, while not negligible, are pretty useless to discuss here.
5) Mythology: The universe is the dead body of a frost giant or somesuch.
Now, I am happy to admit that option 4 is entirely plausible. Indeed, parts of Christian revelation really do baffle reason: we can talk about them a bit, but it's almost no good trying to diagram them out. The universe has no obvious, certain responsibility to have a means of existence that we can understand. But this doesn't mean that we can't beat one of the other options into a form that works. And if we can, then we have every reason to run with that over option 4. We have the gift of logic, we might as well use it wherever it consents to be used, and there is no sense giving up simply because the problem is very difficult.
Option 5 is kind of a pushover. The question of "well, what caused the frost giant" is too obvious to bear much mention. But the fact is, I have no desire to beat up mythology. It is a great and useful human tool, but it excuses itself from rationality, and so is not really part of this discussion. This kind of purely mythological explanation is a variant of option 4, set to the music of language, but without logical underpinnings. The most potent example I know of this is the tradition of the Australian natives that the world once existed in a 'Dreamtime,' a misty dawn of the world from which time emerged. It's a beautiful image, in many ways quite true (as we'll see,) and completely antithetical to any rational discussion, including this one. We move on.
The first three options are serious logical possibilities: materialism (the world doesn't need a cause), pantheism (the world is its cause), and theism (the world has an external cause.) Naturally, there are many flavors of each of these, and some traditions (like Hinduism) rather cleverly find a way to blend several together. Nonetheless, it seems that if the world does not follow at least one of these patterns, we can't really talk about it at all. They are logically exhaustive.
Now, it is important here to address the issue of the age of the world, as it so often comes up in these situations. Some may say that the universe stretches back forever, and thus needs no further cause. This is the basic model proposed by Aristotle some time back, and still a popular one. Now, I could get into a discussion of the Big Bang and such here, indeed, I did. Then I removed it, because it's just not germaine to this post. Modern science has refuted Aristotle's worldview as such, but there's nothing saying that our world wasn't spawned from another world, with time and causality and everything. So there is nothing inherently wrong with imagining a world that just keeps going back, forever and ever.
However, this is only delaying the issue of causes. To let the matter rest there one must account for the whole infinite jumble-of-world, and to do that, you must declare it its own cause (pantheism), deny that it needs a cause (materialism), or imagine a cause outside of it (theism). You can easily construct a materialist world that was born yesterday, by the same process as you construct one that started forever ago. All you need to do is stop asking pesky questions about 'why'. And if you pick up the concept of eternity, you can just as easily have a theistic worldview that stretches back into infinity. If God is not at the beginning of the timestream of our universe, but rather fully outside of it, then it is no more threatening to theism to have a universe that goes back forever than one that goes forward forever (this is jumping the gun, but still true.) The question of how old the world is may be a fascinating scientific question, and it has been conflated with the issue of "first cause" for a long time. This is an error. In this discussion, the age of the world is mostly a red herring.
The answer Christianity gives, and which I'll be exploring, is that the world (3) is caused by something that causes itself, but is not part of our world. It might (somehow) not be in a world at all, or it might exist in a "world" which itself is somehow its own cause. Naturally, a thing that causes itself without prior impulse, something that simply Is, is quite foreign to us. We are accustomed to things that are, but might as easily not be. Even our laws of nature we might imagine being different: we do not see any reason that they must be just as they are. True, a change to them might result in our end, and the end of our world, but it is still conceivable. Our lives are, in a sense, inessential, shifting sand. But if we take the theistic explanation, they are built on solid, self-sustaining rock. This brings us at last very near eternity, and the gates of the great I AM.
I'll be hanging around here all week, if y'all want to stop by. Depending on where discussion goes, and how I'm feeling, I might touch on the compatibility of God and free will, what this whole Trinity thing is about, that sort of thing. Should be a good time, if that's what you're into. It's clearly what I'm into, so for me, it's a good time.
By the way, on the issue of "jargon" (cited by ornithoptercat, perhaps rightly,) I don't mean to be overly obscure. I attempt to throw in Christian language when I think its meaning is obvious, and when it is a better description than anything else, but if this is too confusing, let me know.
(1) For the moment, we will allow that this causal source may be composed of one or many members (or, oddly, both), and may exert its influence at the beginning of the universe or in a manner distributed throughout time (or both).
(2) I did not note the possibility that there could be a self-causing thing, within the universe, which causes everything else. This is because if it manages to create everything - laws of nature, time, space, matter, the whole picture - then it is the god of Pantheism. Otherwise, it leaves elements unexplained, and cannot solve our problem. A god trapped within a pre-existent universe answers only a very little, indeed, only as much as we do.
(3) Or worlds; some translations of the Nicene Creed read that Christ was "begotten of the Father before all worlds," and while this is a translation issue (from the Greek aeon,) it is not at all heretical to imagine that God might have made others. I rather like to think he did, and indeed, there are the dimmest hints in several Christian texts that he has done so, though these aren't even vaguely conclusive.