Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Turn Backwards, Oh Time

Why does the arrow of time move forwards and not backwards?

For some reason I began rethinking this ever-present conundrum recently and achieved some, for me, new thoughts.

Maybe it doesn't. Maybe we just see it wrong. Backwards. The refusal to see the arrow of time moving backwards is equal to atheism. The failure to accept the mind-boggling notion that time, flowing backwards, violates entropy and displays the universe moving to a more ordered state is a failure to accept Creation right under one's gaze. The bones of the antelope gain flesh, bacteria contribute mass, and the flesh warms, and an arrow is suddenly ripped from the form and flies returning to a bow, and life is created from dust. To reverse the arrow of time is merely to embrace God. All things flow towards God, and will meet in a faraway but explicitly knowable time. The inevitability of our return to the Creator has been made achingly, beautifully, obvious since we began to think. We just see it all backwards. We flee to the unformed Future, and perversely imagine we have the blessing of the Creator, while we flee; while we break the heart, in our backwards flight, of the only organizing Principle of which we have evidence. We invent the future to console ourselves in our sad, dishonest loneliness. We yet imagine in our flight we are not ignoring the wisdom of our parent, and we make promises we know we may not be able to keep. By reversing the arrow, we are runaways, and perhaps pawns, on our wooden ships, prodigal children casting occasional breadcrumbs behind us into the sea, but with no conscious intention, and no other way, to return, and yet reaping from our lonely sea of unformed unknown, and so curiously binding all the things we glean to the far hand of the beginning from which we flee.

3 comments:

Jumper said...

http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=1890

yellojkt said...

Time's Arrow. It's our perception. The way the chemicals react.

Jumper said...

I thought I'd delete this half-formed post, but figured I'd leave it. I really suspect Wheeler's theory works in reverse and we have many pasts, too.