Time & Perspective Quote by Dean Inge

A clock that runs down is a slyly modern metaphor for an old theological move: smuggle a Creator back into the room under cover of physics. Inge borrows the Victorian-era “heat death” intuition (the universe spending its usable energy) and turns it into a rhetorical trap. If the cosmos behaves like a wound mechanism, then someone - or something - did the winding. The image works because it feels commonsensical: you don’t argue with entropy; you look for the key.

The intent isn’t primarily to do cosmology. It’s to reframe a metaphysical dispute as a simple inference. By insisting that an ending “in time” demands a beginning “in time,” Inge tightens the noose around any worldview that wants history to be both finite and self-originating. The subtext is a jab at philosophical evasions: if you grant an arrow of time, you’ve already conceded the conditions for a First Cause argument.

Context matters. Inge wrote as a Christian intellectual in an early 20th-century Britain where science was increasingly authoritative and theology was scrambling for updated footing. His move is adaptive rather than reactionary: take the prestige of scientific imagery and turn it into apologetics. What makes the passage compelling is its confident tone - the conditional “if” quickly hardens into “must” - and its quiet challenge to the reader’s imagination. You may not know the “date,” he says, but the very fact that you can picture it is meant to make the beginning feel inevitable.