"Life is Short but Eternity is Forever"

 “Know Thyself” is a maxim inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. They are also words found in Lamentations from the Old Testament. 

 

The quest for self-knowledge is a journey requiring honesty and is key to understanding our purpose in the world. Many of my personal essays, like this one, are short trips along that path of self-discovery. I have found that it is not the destination – which is always elusive – that is the goal, but the journey. 

 

Thank you for allowing me to share them with you.

 

Sydney

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Life is Short but Eternity is Forever”[1]

January 20, 2024

 

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the 

profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive

forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute

true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”

                                                                                                              Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

                                                                                                             “The World as I See It,” An Essay by Einstein

                                                                                                              1931

 

At a recent family dinner, the discussion turned to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its ramifications. A grandson remarked that AI machines have limits. For example, they have been unable to create a living organism, except possibly Xenobots, supposedly self-replicating living robots. Scientists can modify genes to make wheat more durable and blueberries bluer. They can clone sheep and women can freeze eggs. But man reproduces through copulation, a biological function common to most animal species.

 

Life, as we know, is short. In the two thousand years since Jesus’ birth (a small fraction of the time that Homo sapiens have roamed the earth), six thousand generations of people have been born and died. Now, as I age, I think of mysteries of life, for instance that causality requires a first cause – from whence came the first spark of life? Evolution is understandable, how species evolve over millions of years, how they are still evolving, and even why, looking back from a perspective of a million years or more (assuming the planet and our galaxy survive), what we now know as man may seem like an early, primitive creation.

 

But what did create that first form of life? We think of infinity, but it is beyond comprehension. If the universe is finite, what lies behind it? What does eternity really mean? Was the world as we know it, the creation of some power far greater than anything we can imagine? Or is any of this worth worrying about? Should we turn the page of the book we are reading, switch channels, or view another posting on Instagram? 

 

I am not a student of religion. In fact, we rarely go to church. When our children were young we did take them regularly to St. Barnabas in Greenwich where I served on the vestry and they attended Sunday school and became acolytes. When in boarding school, I was required to read the Bible. But I retained little, with my then non-retentive speed-reading skills. Nevertheless, I have found that I am thinking more about such questions. And I keep a copy of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer within easy reach. In the same book mentioned in the footnote, Tyrrell wrote of reading the 17^th Century French philosopher Blaise Pascal and his wager: If one lives by God’s rules as laid out in the Bible, and believes in God’s existence, God will be satisfied. If God does not exist, one has lost nothing, while living with love and compassion. 

 

Accepting Pascal’s wager appears sensible. And with Einstein admission that there are limits to human knowledge, God’s existence seems a reasonable possibility. I’m getting there.