40. Deep Time and the Sublime

What happens to our understanding of our world and who we are within it when we start to realise that there is a mystery surrounding the physical origins of humanity and the world?

Charles Taylor highlights three themes that can emerge with this line of questioning:

i) ruins and deep time (time), the sense that there is an unrecoverable past that we have emerged from

ii) the sublime (space), the sense of the infinite expanse of nature at both the universe and microscopic levels

iii) the dark genesis of humanity (existence), the sense that our origins are mixed up mysteriously with that of the natural world around us, and we are perhaps less different than we might first imagine

As these directions spurt more and more avenues, so too does the no man's land between belief and atheism seem to widen. How are we to respond? We turn to a popular biblical narrative and return to the marketplace to find out.

References:

-Pages of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor: (335-351)