It is the imagination which links man to God

We are imprisoned in space and time and there appears to be no obvious way of escaping from them. Indeed if, like Richard Dawkins and other neanderthals, you do not believe in a non-material world, there is no escape at all. You, as an individual, have no more significance, no more meaningful past, present or future than a piece of rock or a puff of dust. Nobody else is significant either, and nothing matters. When we die, darkness closes in and we go out like the light on a switched-off television set, dwindling and then vanishing utterly, for ever.

But what does it mean ‘When we die’? What is death? How do you define it? It can be defined medically and legally. But not philosophically. I’m not even sure it can be defined theologically and it certainly cannot be defined scientifically. Personally, I do not believe in death. A better term would be ‘clocking off’, because at that point we leave time. For everyone, as Shakespeare put it, ‘time must have a stop’. Unfortunately we are so conditioned by time-consciousness, so imprisoned in it mentally as well as physically, that we cannot think except in time terms, and this leads us to absurdities such as ‘eternity’, ‘for ever and ever’ and ‘perpetual’.

The possible explanations of life-time-space-and-everything-else can be grouped under four heads, and only one in the end makes sense. First, there is simple materialism. This, as I say, provides a bleak and totally unattractive picture of what it is all about; notably by eliminating the moral content of life altogether. If it came to be generally accepted, which is highly unlikely, then the future of the human race would indeed be nasty, brutish and short. However, it cannot be accepted by intelligent people who trouble to work out its implications, not least because it doesn’t solve the time problem.