Time with No Beginning

Helmut Schober’s acrylic Time with No Beginning, 2 is displayed at Bury Art Gallery. Its information board states that it is ‘unsigned, undated’, which seems apt. It is not unlike how we might imagine the opening stages of creation, the very commencement of time, the beginning of beginnings. Whereas the poor, benighted atheist must attribute this fact to blind random forces acting without reason or purpose, the Christian knows that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That which was dark and without form began to be shaped, crafted and named. Order was imposed, beauty bestowed and majesty made known.

Since the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’, orthodox Christianity has been lampooned as being intellectually incredible. Yet they who reckon that worlds make themselves, that galaxies spring from nowhere, that the cosmos was a blind, random accident, are surely the most foolish people imaginable.