The Garden of Eden

On my last visit to the charity shop near St. Luke's, I picked up a copy of 'The Potter's Hand' by A. N. Wilson, a 500 pager which BH has now read and liked.

Then on my recent visit to Westminster Reference Library, I picked up a copy of 'West End Extra' which contained an article about this same Wilson, about his book about how to read the Bible, headed up by the picture illustrated left. There was even a suggestion that he might be a lapsing atheist. Leaving that aside, I rather liked the picture, being rather fond of Cranach generally. Sadly this particular one is in Dresden, which I am unlikely to visit any time soon.

Next I start to ponder on the original sin of the Bible, of trying out the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. From where I associate to the bit in Lawrence's  'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' where Auda abu Tayi complains about the western habit of wanting it all, of wanting to know everything. This in the context of examining the stars of the clear night sky of Arabia (during the first world war) with Lawrence's binoculars. 'Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your millions' (19. vi. 17, page 282 in my copy).

Since then, we have got even worse. Physicists want to build a theory of everything. They want to know how the universe began and how it will end. Physiologists want to build bugs to compete with those already provided by the Lord. Psychologists want to build machines which are conscious in the same way that we (and to some extent, some other animals) are. Futurologists look forward to the day of immortality, when they can download themselves onto their telephones and live for ever after in someone else's pocket. More mundanely, we are not content just to watch the film from the stalls, as it were, we want to go behind the scenes and to see exactly how it was made. To know all the tricks of the trade, all the grubby details and all the secrets. To share in the omnipotence of the director. In which departments, I am as guilty as anyone in that I want to know it all too. But I also think, along with the chap who wrote the Garden of Eden bit of the Bible, that this is all rather unhealthy, and quite probably rather dangerous. I don't think I trust humans to make good or sensible use of all this knowledge and I am not even sure that simple possession makes for health & happiness. Blissful ignorance might be a better bet, at least in moderate doses.

However, there is hope. This morning, TFL told me all about a wonderful new app which I could load onto my telephone and which would tell me (presumably not while on the move) everything I needed to know about the Santander (aka Bullingdon) cycle system. Much faffing about on phone and PC and I finally got something loaded, which turned out to be intended for users of some comparable system somewhere in Spain, not the intended app at all. Mature consideration suggests that the problem my be that the app in question has been released for iPoid and Android but not for Windows 8.

Apart from this timely demonstration of fallibility, there is more good news. Unloading the app proved to be very easy. Hopefully I did not pay for it.

With thank to wikipedia for the illustration, all four and a half megabytes of it.