A time to every purpose under heaven.
Now I'll get that song stuck in my head and won't be able to shake it until the next compelling meme comes along.
Have you read Ecclesiastes? Did you understand it or did you misunderstand it like you seem to misunderstand so many other things?
Kohelet, the preacher, king of Jerusalem, was right wasn't he? As he went out to study the world looking for purpose what did he find? He found none.
Everywhere he looked he saw that all was pointless. All was in vain, useless and meaningless.
Everything is wearisome,
more than one can express;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
the ear not filled up with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new
under the sun.
He looked throughout his kingdom and found toil for naught.
He found growing food to satisfy hunger but hunger never abated. It always returned. His accumulation of knowledge is ultimately left to someone after him. And the only gain from man's efforts is a life filled with pain and the strain of his toils.
He found that man was no better off than the animals. They breathe the same air, eat the same food, make children and, like animals must, men die. From dust man and animal came and to dust each will return to be forgotten in time.
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other. Yea, they have all one breath, so that man hath no preeminence above a beast, for all is vanity.
All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?
That's pretty summary of the some of the thoughts there.
He was almost there. Reality was just beyond his grasp, beyond his knowledge. He knew nothing about evolution.
The purposeless, mindless, goal-less revolutionary process, I am sure he would have also said was
"vanity of vanities."
Then I wonder how he would have fit it into his observation that man cannot on his own find out what God has done from the beginning -
"He made everything beautiful in its own time; also He has put eternity in their heart, yet so that man does not find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." ( Ecc. 3:11)
He did not know that man was, and was descended from, a lineage of apes.
I think probably men of ancient times looked at human like apes and wondered if there was a relationship. Modern hubris assumes no one too much before Darwin ever had the idea cross their mind.
He knew nothing of the universe. He did not know the stars as suns with their own planets. He did not know the vast reaches of our galaxy, the immensity of a universe full of hundreds of billions of galaxies. He had no way to discern the great probability of other life in the magnitude of the cosmos.
In a sense your suggesting that as he looks naive to us today so also should time continue, 1000 years from now people will consider us naive with all our knowledge of microwave, black holes, etc.
But your point is ?
But Kohelet was a religious man. There were no options for him as king. There was nothing to challenge his training that god had made man and god must have had a reason, right? God would have had to make man with a purpose and yet everywhere he looked he found none.
When he says
"Who knows?" about the destiny of animals as opposed to those of humans, I think he is challenging some spiritual ideas of the day.
True to his ignorance and to the only "reality" in which he had been acculturated, Kohelet could only conclude that man's purpose was to fear and obey god.
But today we have the knowledge that Kohelet lacked. We understand the universe in ways he could not have imagined. We understand the self-serving predatory nature of religion and the psychological stranglehold it puts on men.
I think we underestimate the sophistication of ancient minds on one hand somewhat. We have lost some of the wisdom they had. And the rediscovery of forgotten wisdom is often argued.
But aside from this I think that the following teaching of Paul is true
regardless of what millennium we are in.
"Because that which is known of God is manifested within them, for God manifested it to them. For the invisible things of Him, both His eternal power and divine characteristics, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being perceived by the things made, so that they would be without escuse." (Rom. 1:19-21)
Though they knew nothing about the big bang they also knew nothing about the fine tuning and the astounding anthropological like constants that were in place to make life possible in the universe.
Though we have accumulated more knowledge about more things, the wise person will still perceive the
"eternal power and divine characteristics" of the Creator.
The amount of knowledge has not changed this to the realistic mind.
He says that God has made it known to mankind within His creation and that no one has an excuse to not believe in a Creator.
With this knowledge we know the concept of "purpose" in our existence as religions would have us believe falls away.
Absolutely disagree. The fine tuning of the constants permitting life and man to exist since the creation event, argue for purposefulness. We should look in the direction of having somehow lost our way.
If we are lucky, we come into this world adapted to survive. You do know that about half of all human conceptus never get that chance, don't you? A science thing.
Though some survive longer than others, God seems to take into account the quality of what they lived and not just their longevity.
Things are much better now (another science thing) but at the time your bible myths were being developed up to 2/3's of all humans born never made it out of childhood.
You are arguing the only longevity counts in the matter.
As for myths, I think you should turn some of the skepticism towards your own ideas about a mindless, random, goal-less, non-intelligent "selection" bringing about from non living material the beautiful diversity of the living things we see around us today.
I think you are not skeptical enough. I think you should turn some of that suspicion towards what you have been taught about the the process of macro evolution.
We are the lucky ones. We get to experience life. We get to have babies that with any luck will survive to have babies of their own. And in this journey through survival and procreation some of us get to have some fun along the way (think Hagen-Dazs).
My view is that God is way, way, WAY ahead of us. He has timed our arrival in the universe and the place in it so that man, at the high point of his science knowledge, can see the most of His creation.
The window of time in which we find ourselves and our very place in the galaxy maximize the vantage point from which modern science can observe the environoment. We can look back in time with telescopes peering light years away. And we are in the proper location where too many suns do not so brighten our sky that we cannot observe the stars at night.
None of this should be taken for granted. We are in the right place at the right time with the right instruments to see the largest scope of His handiwork. And to many of us the result is the same as two thousand years ago if not more so - we surmise the eternal power of God and His divine characteristic through the things which are made.
I would refer you to Astrophysicist Hugh Ross's book
"Why the Universe is the Way it Is." .
And this scienctist has a creation model which makes predictions. The book
More Than A Theory compares his model to other models to score them as the years go by.
I have to stop writing now.
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