I’ve been asked to write about the relationship between God and Time.\u00a0 I believe that God is not a part of Time, that he is eternal and unchanging, and that therefore he knows (what we consider to be) past, the present, and the future equally.\u00a0 I believe that there are good reasons to believe this coming from 3 different fields of study: 1) metaphysics, 2) physics, and 3) biblical theology.<\/p>\n
(Of course, it is also true<\/a> that <\/em>the Son of God<\/p>\n came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.\u00a0 He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered [\u03c0\u03b1\u03b8\u03cc\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1, which can also mean “was passively acted upon”]<\/em> and was buried.\u00a0 On the third day…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, he united himself<\/a> to a human being who was, like us, part of the flow of time.\u00a0 In this sense<\/em>, God is in Time, but to allow this to be truly and properly a life-giving paradox, we need to assert that it was the Eternal and Immortal who suffered and died for us.\u00a0 The more we anthropomorphize the divine nature, the less significant is the Incarnation.)<\/p>\n In order to address this question, we need to know two things: what is Time and who is God?\u00a0 To some extent we can begin to explore the metaphysics of Time without discussing who God is, although eventually we must place every created thing in the context of the One who created it.<\/p>\n So let’s start with Time.\u00a0 There are two main views on this, which are rather boringly called the A-theory and the B-theory (although there are variants I won’t consider).\u00a0 This is, as far as I can tell, due to a 1908 article by the philosopher John McTaggart arguing for the Unreality of Time<\/a>.\u00a0 McTaggart was basically a Hegelian mystic and yet, despite the later backlash against Hegel in the subsequent era of Logical Positivism, this paper has became one of the foundational articles for contemporary Analytic Philosophy!<\/p>\n (Recently I’ve been reading the records of the Oxford Socratic Club, a club for debate between Christians and Atheists\/Agnostics, of which St. Lewis was President, whose Digest has recently become available<\/a> from Lulu thanks to St. Joel Heck.\u00a0 The talks were given around the time of WWII, which was a particularly interesting time for Philosophy since it was during the overlap period when both Idealism and Logical Positivism were taken seriously.)<\/p>\n Anyway, the A-theory (a.k.a presentism<\/em>) claims that time flows from the past to the future, in such a way that neither the past and future really exist, but only the present moment is real.\u00a0 However, the past was <\/em>real and the future will <\/em>be real, since time is really flowing from past to future.<\/p>\n The B-theory (a.k.a. eternalism<\/em>) claims that all times (past, present, and future) exist equally, and that the word “present” is like the word “here”, an index to refer to the location of the speaker within the timestream.\u00a0 Thus, there is no objective fact about which time is really “present”, any more than there is an objective fact about whether “here” is located in the USA or Australia.<\/p>\n One of my commenters explained the difference in this way:<\/p>\n The first is called the A-theory, or tensed time. Only the present is real; the past and future do not exist. The second is called the B-theory, tenseless time, the block view of timespace, or Minkowski or Minkowskian spacetime. All of time\u2014past, present, and future\u2014is complete and actual in this view. In some unperceived way, all of time is occurring now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I mostly agree with this statement (although I’m not sure what “complete” means) but take issue with the last sentence.\u00a0 The B-theorist would not say that all of time is literally now <\/em>anymore than we would say that all places are here<\/em>.\u00a0 The past indeed exists, but does not exist “in the present” because for an A-theorist that means “at the same time as the speaker is located.”<\/p>\n Really what that last sentence does is explain the B-theory view in terms of the A-theory view<\/em>.\u00a0 According to the A-theory view, only the Present moment is real.\u00a0 Saying “all times exist now” is really shorthand for “The B-theorist ascribes to the Past and Future the same type of reality which the A-theorist only ascribes to the Present.”<\/p>\n Can we return the compliment and describe the A-theory in terms of the B-theory?\u00a0 Actually we cannot.\u00a0 If all you have are B-theory ideas, there is no way to make the A-theory clear.\u00a0 If an A theorist says that the past does not yet exist<\/em>, the B-theorist will translate “does not yet exist” to “exists at a moment \\(t_1\\) previous to the current moment \\(t_2\\)”, and if he says that the future is going to exist<\/em>, she translates this to mean just that the future is in the future!<\/p>\n In this sense the A-theory contains a vicious circle in it, as pointed out by McTaggart (although I don’t agree with his conclusion that time is therefore “unreal”).\u00a0 When we say that a physical object is changing or flowing, this means that it changes with respect to time, that if we plotted it out on a graph, there would be a physical parameter \\(x\\) such that the time derivative is nonzero: \\(dx \/ dt \\ne 0\\).\u00a0 When we say that time itself<\/em> is flowing, either we mean \\(dt \/ dt = 1\\) (time goes at one second per second) which is a trivial calculus tautology which says nothing, or we mean that it is flowing with respect to some other <\/em>meta-time coordinate.\u00a0 But that’s absurd, if we can only explain time with respect to a deeper time.\u00a0 (And if that deeper time “really flows” we will need a 3rd timestream to parametrize that, and so on.)<\/p>\n It’s like those time travel stories where somebody goes back and changes the past<\/em>.\u00a0 But if you think about it, that’s a crazy contradiction.\u00a0 Time just is<\/em> the way we parametrize change.\u00a0 The moments of time cannot themselves change or flow in the same way that things change or flow, since there is no other timestream to parametrize their<\/em> change.\u00a0 (Well, maybe in science fiction there is, but in the real world there’s no reason to postulate this.)<\/p>\n We can put it another way.\u00a0 The A-theorist maintains that the past and future do not exist.\u00a0 But if this is true, it is impossible to distinguish it from a radical presentism<\/em> in which one maintains that only the present moment will ever <\/em>exist.\u00a0 Suppose that right now (e.g. 9:18 pm March 2, 2015) is the only instant that will ever exist.\u00a0 The past is just a delusion of our memory, and the future is a just delusion of anticipation.\u00a0 None of it is real.\u00a0 Clearly an absurd form of skepticism.\u00a0 But really, the A-theory implies this.\u00a0 For it says that the future exists only in the future <\/em>and that the past exists only in the past<\/em> and that both of these are forms of nonexistence.\u00a0 So the future does not really exist, and neither does the past.\u00a0 No amount of protesting about the fact that the future is going to exist<\/em> or the past having existed <\/em>implies anything about it actually ever existing<\/em>, unless you secretly smuggle in the B-theory view that these modalities refer to ways of existing.<\/p>\n One might worry, though, that the B-theory is radically foreign to our own experiences.\u00a0 Whatever we say philosophically, isn’t it obvious if we inspect our own conscious experiences that it feels <\/em>as if time is ever flowing and changing?\u00a0 Each moment is so slight that we hardly grasp it before the next is upon us.<\/p>\n I admit that this worry has some psychological tug on me, but in the end I don’t think it implies the A-theory.\u00a0 After all, it also <\/em>feels <\/em>as if my own experiences are more real than the experiences of others, and that here <\/em>(wherever I am) is more real than there <\/em>(wherever I am not) but these things I am happy to discount as illusions, without incorporating them into my metaphysics.<\/em>\u00a0 Furthermore, my brain cannot really detect a single instant: it takes a second or two for me to consciously process my sensory data.\u00a0 Thus what I experience as now<\/em> is always really a moment that has a finite amount of thickness in time.\u00a0 If only the a single instant <\/em>existed at once, that sliver would actually be too small for any conscious experiences to fit inside of it.\u00a0 But if more than one instant can exist, it is simplest to say that they all exist, but that my self simply does not experience them all together in one lump.<\/p>\n Thus I conclude that only the B view makes logical sense.\u00a0 Some might say that this means Time is an illusion; but I would instead say I am asserting that all of Time is real.<\/p>\n Now if God is omniscient<\/a>, then he experiences everything as it actually is.\u00a0 But we have seen that the idea that time itself “flows” and “changes” (as opposed to saying that things<\/em> change with respect to time), makes no sense.\u00a0 If the B-theory is correct, then God must experience it as being correct, that is he must himself be eternal and unchanging.<\/p>\n But this is also what we would conclude if we instead started with the nature of God as understood by classical theism<\/a>.\u00a0 Here, you will recall, God is conceived of as the fundamental being<\/a> whose existence is explains everything else.\u00a0 As I argued before<\/a>, the fundamental reality, however we conceive of it, must be eternal:<\/p>\n If the fundamental entities are necessary, then it stands to reason that they are also eternal<\/em>, since something that exists necessarily cannot come into being, or cease to be, or indeed change in any way.\u00a0 They must just exist timelessly.\u00a0 Besides which, if they explain what happens at all moments of time, it doesn’t seem plausible that they should only exist for certain moments of time.\u00a0 For similar reasons, one can argue that the fundamental entities can’t be limited to just one region of space.\u00a0 Their influence must be present everywhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For God to be in Time, would mean that there is a part of God which changes and develops and changes, even if it is only the part that observes “what time is it right now”.\u00a0 But that would mean that God is actually divided into pieces, some of which (the past versions of God) help to explain others (the future versions of God).\u00a0 This is inconsistent with the unity and eternity which befits the divine nature, which is fully real and cannot pass away like shifting shadows.<\/p>\n This is why proponents of Classical Theism have generally maintained that Time, rather than being some Metaphysical Ultimate, is actually part of created reality.\u00a0 It exists contingently as part of the physical world, because God created it.\u00a0 This view was developed by Philo, St. Augustine and others, but in the next post<\/del> two<\/a> posts<\/a> we shall see that it is also supported by modern physics: especially Einstein’s theories of Relativity.\u00a0 Then in the third<\/del> last post<\/del> posts I will argue that the view that God is eternal and unchanging is also to be found in the Bible.<\/p>\n