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| How These Persons are to Be Answered, Who Find Fault with the Creation of Man on the Score of Its Recent Date.
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Chapter 12.—How These Persons are
to Be Answered, Who Find Fault with the Creation of Man on the
Score of Its Recent Date.
As to those who are always asking
why man was not created during these countless ages of the
infinitely extended past, and came into being so lately that,
according to Scripture, less than 6000 years have elapsed since He
began to be, I would reply to them regarding the creation of man,
just as I replied regarding the origin of the world to those who
will not believe that it is not eternal, but had a beginning, which
even Plato himself most plainly declares, though some think his
statement was not consistent with his real opinion.542
| 542 The Alexandrian Neo-Platonists
endeavored in this way to escape from the obvious meaning of the
Timæus. | If it
offends them that the time that has elapsed since the creation of
man is so short, and his years so few according to our authorities,
let them take this into consideration, that nothing that has a
limit is long, and that all the ages of time being finite, are very
little, or indeed nothing at all, when compared to the interminable
eternity. Consequently, if there had elapsed since the creation
of man, I do not say five or six, but even sixty or six hundred
thousand years, or sixty times as many, or six hundred or six
hundred thousand times as many, or this sum multiplied until it
could no longer be expressed in numbers, the same question could
still be put, Why was he not made before? For the past and
boundless eternity during which God abstained from creating man is
so great, that, compare it with what vast and untold number of ages
you please, so long as there is a definite conclusion of this term
of time, it is not even as if you compared the minutest drop of
water with the ocean that everywhere flows around the globe. For
of these two, one indeed is very small, the other incomparably
vast, yet both are finite; but that space of time which starts from
some beginning, and is limited by some termination, be it of what
extent it may, if you compare it with that which has no beginning,
I know not whether to say we should count it the very minutest
thing, or nothing at all. For, take this limited time, and deduct
from the end of it, one by one, the briefest moments (as you might
take day by day from a man’s life, beginning at the day in which
he now lives, back to that of his birth), and though the number of
moments you must subtract in this backward movement be so great
that no word can express it, yet this subtraction will sometime
carry you to the beginning. But if you take away from a time
which has no beginning, I do not say brief moments one by one, nor
yet hours, or days, or months, or years even in quantities, but
terms of years so vast that they cannot be named by the most
skillful arithmeticians,—take away terms of years as vast as that
which we have supposed to be gradually consumed by the deduction of
moments,—and take them away not once and again repeatedly, but
always, and what do you effect, what do you make by your deduction,
since you never reach the beginning, which has no existence?
Wherefore, that which we now demand after five thousand odd years,
our descendants might with like curiosity demand after six hundred
thousand years, supposing these dying generations of men continue
so long to decay and be renewed, and supposing posterity continues
as weak and ignorant as ourselves. The same
question
might have been asked by those who have lived before us and while
man was even newer upon earth. The first man himself in short
might the day after or the very day of his creation have asked why
he was created no sooner. And no matter at what earlier or later
period he had been created, this controversy about the commencement
of this world’s history would have had precisely the same
difficulties as it has now.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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