Jimmy Akin ponders entropy and immortality as they relate to dinosaurs, Genesis,
and St Thomas Aquinas:
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/
Heaven knows there’s never been a theory shortage on this subject, never been a
dearth of opinion about death and (im)mortality. Everybody and his brother has had
some notion about it.
The longer I putter about with words, however, the more I perceive their
limitations, the more I recognize that the thoughts that really mattered to me
personally never came in malleable words but in another, firmer, form, which, for
want of a better term, I guess I could call “vision,” not in the sense of “having” a
vision, more in the sense of “perceiving” something that is, after all, simply non-
verbal.
If any of the theories had ever been really correct, people wouldn’t have kept
coming up with them. I think it’s a temptation, actually. It’s an attempt to contain,
restrict, confine, something too big for us to get outside of. That is, after all, what
language does: delineate via definition, exclude via exposition. The whole process
is illusory—just as we imagine that we exclude nature from ourselves—literally—
by calling it the “environment.” The word is absurd; its meaning signifies that which
is around us. But nature doesn’t surround us; it’s part of us, and we are part of it. It
is therefore NOT our environment. But the (rather stupid) word gives a clue about
the way in which science self-supercedes, by its own compulsion to objectify, into
perpetual obsolescence, gaining not ever-increasing knowledge, but ever-increasing
irrelevance to knowledge.
Once. And once only, I perceived “something” that is as close as I will ever come
to comprehending (im)mortality. And science—whether it uses such terms
as “entropy” or “environment”—would not, I don’t think, be capable of verbal
explication, or any sort of objective articulation. Just to set the scene: I was standing
outside at night. The weather had been stormy all day, heavy clouds and high winds.
I had lost my job, and short of a miracle, I would soon lose my home and everything
I’d worked for. The creature dearest in the world to me was inside, dying. Without
him, I would have no heart left in me to break. I was overcome by a great weariness,
too weary to think, to pray. Nothing.
I perceived that everything—literally everything—not just organic life, but
buildings, towns, countries, ideas, thoughts—is mortal. Everything is dying.
Nothing—literally nothing—is immortal. Death owns ALL of reality, both material
and immaterial, including that which, in our human frailty, we call “love.”
In a flash quicker than lightening, into this darkness, from its height to its depth,
there pierced a great sword. The whole of all things, all reality—including, even, all
our ideas about reality—was pierced by this sword. The sword had a “name,” which
is to say that there was a word by which it is identified: Incarnation. But it spoke not
a word, of course; its existence suggested no verbal thing; instead it was itself Word.
It was not history or prophecy or explanation. It simply existed. Into the chaos of
darkness, there came Being. Eternity pierced time. Once and forever. That is all I
“know” about (im)mortality. It’s not a theory, but an experience.
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