The solution is to do what I have long promised the reader I would do; namely to look at things through God's eyes. The solution to the apparently irreconcilability of the temporal and the eternal is to look at things through the eyes of a creator.

If you sat down to manufacture creation, I suppose you would begin by inventing the sciences of physics and chemistry; the stars, the sun, the planets, nuclear fission, iron, rock, and oxygen. Then you would have to turn to crystallography and physical chemistry, and select the medium round which life was to be formed. You would invent water, and make sure that it had melting and boiling points in a close temperature range, and that the density of the solid was less than the liquid. This would require some tinkering with the crystallographic structure, and the association of the molecules when liquid. This is necessary to ensure that the seas freeze from the top downwards, and not from the bottom upwards. The other substance whose density as a solid is less than as a liquid is iron, and this is not a suitable substance round which to form life. Next you would turn to biology and all the sciences associated with…