It was the opinion of Aristotle and others that the world was eternal. But that the present system of things had a beginning, seems evident, if we consider the following things. <\/p>\n
1. We may not only conceive of many possible alterations which might be made in the form of it, but we see it incessantly changing; whereas an eternal being, forasmuch as it is self-existent, is always the same.<\/p>\n
2. We have no credible history of transactions more remote than six thousand years from the present time; for as to the pretence that some nations have made to histories of greater antiquity, as the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Phaenicians, Chinese, &c. they are evidently convicted of falsehood in the works referred to at the bottom of this article.<\/p>\n
3. We can trace the invention of the most useful arts and sciences; which had probably been carried farther, and invented sooner, had the world been eternal.<\/p>\n
4. The origin of the most considerable nations of the earth may be traced, 1: e. the time when they first inhabited the countries where they now dwell; and it appears that most of the western nations came from the east.<\/p>\n
5. If the world be eternal, it is hard to account for the tradition of its beginning, which has almost everywhere prevailed, though under different forms, among both polite and barbarous nations.<\/p>\n
6. We have a most ancient and credible history of the beginning of the world: I mean the history of Moses, with which no book in the world, in point of antiquity, can contend. Stillingfleet’s Orig. Sacrae. P 15, 106; Winder’s Hist. of Knowledge, vol. 2: passim; Pearson on the Creed. p. 58; Doddridge’s Lectures, 50: 24; Tillotson’s Sermons, ser. 1; Clarke at Boyle’s Lectures, p. 22, 23; Dr. Collyer’s Scripture Facts, ser. 2.<\/p>\n
SEE COSMOGONY.<\/p>\n
ETERNITY OF THE WORLD It was the opinion of Aristotle and others that the world was eternal. But that the present system of things had a beginning, seems evident, if we consider the following things. 1. We may not only conceive of many possible alterations which might be made in the form of it, but … Continue reading “Eternity of the World”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-encyclopedic-dictionary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}