The Job Might Have Seemed to Have Taken Forever.

Imagine that you are flying around in a spaceship. You see a big pyramid far away, so you fly towards it. When you arrive, you see that it is much bigger than you had imagined. Some workers are putting the final stone on the top of the great space pyramid, finally finishing their massive construction. You stop and ask them how long this task has taken, and they say that it has taken an eternity, that the base of the pyramid is infinitely far away and that their task is done at long last. Can you imagine that?

In this imaginary scenario we have a problem: there is a project that has been from eternity past drawing nearer to its completion finally coming to an end. This is inconceivable. It is reasonable to say that there are two lines that start from one point and go eternally in two different directions, but it is not reasonable to say that you have been from eternity drawing two lines towards each other and will soon bring them to their meeting point. If the starting points are infinitely distant in space from one another, then the lines being drawn can never in finite time meet each other. However, in the sentence above the words “starting points” are nonsense because, of course, there is no starting point. Imagine falling into a bottomless well, and when you reach the bottom, you start to climb out. The preceding sentence contradicts itself.

This is the problem that a worldview falls into that says that all living things are inhabited by spirits which are repeatedly reincarnated from eternity past until they finally reach their goal. If the spirits have been nearing their goal from eternity past, they are like those builders who are getting ready to put the final stone on that great space pyramid.

I think this is accurate. If anybody sees a problem in my reasoning above, I would love to be corrected. If this is right, then I wouldn’t mind if somebody let me know I’m not off my rocker.