On Blake's Poem "The Fly." Part 3/3

On Blake's Poem "The Fly." Part 3/3 | Ecency

Title page of The Book of Urizen (1818), copy

He who created the hen and the chicken

To begin with, let us remember these lines from the Book of Genesis:

"1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. /2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. /3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. /4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."

God created light and then “divided the light from the darkness.” As soon as there was light, there was darkness, too. Fine. Dialectics is just fine. We understand. But who has created light/darkness? Who has created the Creator?

Whose blind hand brushes away God’s wing?

Blakes poem “The Fly” presupposes the existence of God, so whatever reasoning we hold, it should be within the boundaries of such truth. The fly is to man as there man is to God as God is to...?

In the beginning there was God already. Whoever—he, she, or they—wrote that part of the Bible assumed that it was logical for human beings to have a Creator, but it was not as logical for this Creator having been created as well. He was there, and that was it. No questions, nor logic, asked.

It is petitio principii, the premise is proved in the conclusion: a circular argument. The man affects the fly, so there must be some entity affecting the man in the same proportion; that should be God: God, then, affects the man. It was what Aristotle would have called a material fallacy. But a fallacy it is, anyway.

The Fallacy

Proposition: All that has come to be needs a creator who has brought it to existence.

Reasoning:

All things that exist have been created.

Man/God exists.

Therefore, man/God has been created.

And there you have it, premise and conclusion say the same. We assume the premise is true, by the way.
Now, what if "all things" have not been created? What if either man or God was just there, “in the beginning”?

And what if there is not such a thing as a beginning? If eternity exists, it means there is no end at least in such instance. And how come there is a beginning without its fellow contrary: the end? Eternity is the end in the beginning and vice versa, which means that all is nothing and vice versa.

Beginnings and ends, human fabrications.

As to the meaning of our poem, no doubt eternity's blind hand is there to brush away God's wing at any moment.