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Eternity
In his prints, drawings, and paintings, Tucson artist Daniel Martin Diaz often explores the marriage of science and religion or Fides et Ratio, Latin for faith and reason, realms that are usually found in opposition. Here in Eternity a serpent and dragon encircle a World comprised of the four elements of alchemy—Terra (earth), Aqua (water), Aura (air), and Ignis (fire)—with the Sacred Heart of Jesus at its center, symbolizing the eternity of God, the resurrection of Jesus, and the eternal life he promised. For both science and religion, eternity is an infinite amount of time. The mathematician Georg Cantor (1845–1918), starting in 1874 and summarized in his Contributions to the Founding of Transfinite Numbers (1895–1896), utilized reason to demonstrate there is a hierarchy of infinities, a paradox with which current mathematics is still coming to grips. Previously Isaac Newton (1642–1726) described a mechanistic World that ran just as well backwards as forwards. Subsequently 20th century physicists have proposed that all chemical, magnetic, electronic, nuclear, and gravitational reactions in theory work in either direction along the continuum of time. It seems as if our World is time-symmetrical and our sense of time running irreversibly from the present into the future an illusion. In a time-symmetrical World, the present is no more determined by the past than by the future, and everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen is happening all at once. When, however, entropy the tendency of ordered states to become disordered enters the picture, time assumes its more traditional uni-directional arrow. While the mathematics of an ordered stick of dynamite exploding into a million disordered fragments are time-symmetrical, it’s hard to imagine even in infinite time the fragments imploding back into a stick of dynamite. The question of time’s arrow, like the question of whether the World is finite or infinite, has been argued endlessly and probably has no definitive answer. One thing we know for sure is that we, humans, like all life forms on Earth, are neither time-symmetrical nor infinite. We are born, we live, and we die. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) tried to prove the existence of God via Aristotelian logic. Cantor used mathematics to demonstrate an ultimate infinity which he called God. Reason cannot resolve the fundamental questions of existence. Even the Sacred Heart of Jesus cannot answer these questions. Whether God exists, whether we live for eternity in heaven or hell, are matters of faith or no faith. The serpent swallows the dragon swallows the serpent in an endless cycle of birth and rebirth with the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the center urging the viewer to leap.
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