Has everything under the sun already been done?

My friend Kieran posed this question on Facebook. Only 50 words are allowed in response. Obviously I need more verbiage space.This is my attempted answer.

Well ‘the Bible says so’ as the refrain of the grim verses in Ecclesiastes say; ’there is nothing new under the Sun.’ with its pessimistic take on the world and humankind. But I don’t think that is anything to do with human activity or our perception of relentless progress or terminal moral decline. Rather it is about the relentless cyclical nature of death and rebirth in the created world, the seasons, in nature and the ‘three score and ten’ of man. Nothing is actually new, its been before and is renewed, dies, is born again. When we discover a new species, its not actually new, its always been, but was just outwith our detection.

If it were, about humankind, history and progress, then I suppose the question you may be also posing is– what new things are there still to do? On this score there is a lot. Ecclesiastes was in a pre-technological age. It was about toil. No-one then could have ever thought we could change the temperature of the earth, or even fly out from the world into orbit in space. We are living in the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial to the information age and then the biogenetic age. Just edging into another technological orbit under the sun.

Maybe, to take a ridiculous example, in the next 100 years, in the same way as we see piercing in places you didn’t before; (noses, bellybuttons, lips eyebrows) we’ll see biogenetic cosmetic enhancement; natural hair extensions any colour your like (or think!) Maybe for the macho male, some cranial horns, skin colours and tints of all hues (already available for eyes) webbed feet for swimmers or sea dwellers (due to global warmed sea level rises.) In this sense there is plenty of invention and change ahead beyond our wildest imagining.

So there will still be plenty of technological advances, new things to be done, our sons and daughters taking up careers serving and served by technologies not yet invented. There will be the merging of electronic with neural, of machine and body. But is that ‘nothing new under the Sun’ in the sense of the scripture? I don’t think so.

These words I think point towards the limits of evil and the impossibility of renewal on earth. There is no shocking crime or evil that has not been committed before. In this sense the verses are very encouraging. The world is not getting worse and worse. Its just the same. It seems worse to us because of the scale, speed and awareness of events. There are many billions on the earth now (6.5Bn) More living now than have ever lived in all history (itself a mind boggling proposition.) So it seems there is a proliferation of evil. But paedophilia existed in ancient Greece and Rome. These are not modern phenomena. Same for conflicts and wars, only the technology and scale has changed.

So, in this world, under this sun, nothing really changes. So everything has been done. The world and we are fixed, limited and natural and therefore fallen and unrenewable. The only possibility of change and of meaning (as opposed to meaninglessness as complained of in Ecclesiastes) is change that comes beyond our selves and the world. It is limitless, spiritual, supernatural and it is of course a new creation – and all of those have not yet been done.