After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity, and Joy

Modern science rests on the assumption that the gap between what we know about the world and what we long to know cannot be closed in any number of lifetimes.

Our finite powers limit us to observing the “outward” relations among events. Their real “inner” cause remains forever inaccessible.

For a scientist, it is never enough merely to know that something is the case. She wants to know why it is the case. Her answers only lead to further questions. The process is endless.

Anything that is eternal in the sense that it exists outside of time must, just for that reason, exist at every moment in time as well.

Eternity therefore has two meanings. One (endless time) is defined in temporal terms. The other (timelessness) is characterized by the irrelevance of all terms of this kind.

Deep disappointment is our fate.

Goals of this sort are abstractions. We can conceive but never “see” them. Their meaning becomes clearer as we go, but the goals themselves cannot be captured in an imaginative portrait even of the blurriest kind,

The idea of eternity in this sense gives us the “running room” we need to set goals that are by definition unattainable because they cannot be reached in any period of time, whatever its duration. It makes these goals conceivable. At the same time, it guarantees our disappointment.

My imaginative access to it does not make me any less mortal. But it transforms my experience of mortality in a basic way. It allows me to take an interest in what happened before I was born and will happen after I die.