I always took eternal to mean without beginning and end.
How can that be?
In the simple human scientific world there is supposed to be a logical explanation for everything
But eternity defies logic
A circle has no beginning or end. Time is just a construct. The best we can say about time is that it is a convenient way of marking the expansion of the universe. So outside of a three dimensional space there is no time. So it seems to me that eternal only has meaning if one is inside space.
Fair enough
Christians believe in eternity also because God told them so
God told them so
Here's another way of looking at it... for any given thing there will be a final state of fact. We call this objective truth or reality. Once discovered it will be known that it was always that way and will always be that way even when it wasn't know that it was that way. Thus objective truth or reality is eternal and unchanging.
So humans with out tiny brains are going to find out where eternity came from without any help from the Creator?
Dont hold your breadth waiting for that
I believe we can discover that through the light of human reason, yes. Are divine revelations involved in that? Maybe, but I doubt they come in the form that was embellished in the OT.
There's a lot that "the light of human reason" can illuminate, and the creation is a great place to examine the limits of observation.
For example, at the very first moments of the beginning of the universe we had EVERYTHING traveling at the speed of light, in fact some say that space itself was moving faster than lightspeed. The dodgy part of our examination of reality now is whether we want to say we're
in common space/time or not. If we're in, then how can we observe anything w/ time standing still, and if we're out of space time what are our rules?
iow, we're stuck at the "observer problem" that Shrodeger & Einstien wrestled w/. Who's observing?