A. Because I believe reality is subjective and determined by embodied experiences. When we abstract things so far away from our embodied experiences that constructs of reality take precedence over human experiences of reality, I think we lose the plot.
Embodied humans experience time in certain ways and have metaphors for understanding that embodied experience, most foundationally, that time is space. Others flow out of this conceptualization that time is a domain in which or along which we move toward destinations or that time itself moves in space; time is a path, time is a current, time is a line, time is a circle, time is a moving object
No matter what physics postulates or formalizes about time, humans will continue to experience it as embodied creatures and process those experiences with embodied cognition, and the result will be the reality that matters.
That is a good articulation of why I said “kinda” above. There is still the matter of how God orchestrates providence though, and it is not something we can get our heads around.
To say that God exists outside of time already falls into the trap of the antiquated notion of absolute time. Time is not a singular thing. The correct way to say it is to say that God exists outside the space-time structure of the physical universe.
But neither do I believe that God exists within some alternate space-time structure or alternate time. God is not just a being who exists in an alternate universe. But this still doesn’t justify saying that God exists outside of time. Just because God’s existence is not bound within some external space-time structure doesn’t mean God exists outside of time.
Would you, for example, say that God exists outside of intelligence? To be sure God isn’t confined to intelligence any more than God is confined to some space-time structure. Surely God uses intelligence, right? Likewise God uses time… as… He… chooses.
Therefore it is foolish to think God cannot do the same sort of things what we can do which logically require a measure of time. But it does negate the sensibility of asking what God was doing for an infinite time before creation? Such a question falls into trap of the antiquated notion of absolute time which is something science has already discarded.
But that is theology of course… back to science…
I was expecting someone to ask… well then what is the universe like if it is not like a sequence of instances??? There is the standard answer of Minkowski space-time which draws this picture of a cone separating past and future.
But I doubt that does the job of replacing the idea of the universe as a sequence of instances (like a movie film).
Well… the film is a good approximation at a particular place in space-time like a tangent approximates a curve at a point of the curve. So what you do is carry out the usual sort of succession of approximation where you put together all the tangent lines at every point of a curve. In this case you put a movie film in every inertial frame at every point of space time and you refine the patchwork by adding more and more such films at more such points and inertial frames.
That would be like saying there is no changes as you move westward in the United States. And to say the mechanisms for change in evolution don’t work is like saying there cannot be any reasons for the changes as you move west in the United States.
In the B theory you just see time as being like a dimension of space. It is not an eradication of time but just doesn’t see how it is different from a spatial dimension. It is like a drawing of an evolution tree – all drawn out on the same piece of paper. And the reasoning for why those changes still work just fine. If the B-theory ignores anything it is not the changes in time but the many other possible ways that evolution could have played out – those don’t fit on such a evolution tree paper.
God’s omnitemporality has nothing to do with absolute time.
No, because like his omnitemporallity, his omniscience is an attribute, something he possesses.
Yes. The ellipses are unnecessary.
Yes, within the universe, because it is talking about space. God is not confined to space – he is omnipresent, in this cosmos… and in any other, if they exist.
I would still recommend watching the applicable part of the NOVA (unless you are a special relativity denier) if it is accessible to you and you haven’t seen it:
@Kendel would probably have something worthwhile to say about how this relates to Heidegger (perhaps “Being and Time”), and how important the human experience is to our understanding of the world. I agree in all these cases, that perhaps a 4D block universe/tenseless time makes sense for certain mathematical calculations, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that is how the world “is” given our experience with time. Consciousness is another thing that doesn’t seem easily reducible to the natural.
I’m curious what you mean by this. Do you mean truth is relative, or that our experience with reality is subjective?
You may be amused to know that there are an infinite number of Light Cones in the Cosmos. At the vertex of each Light Cone is a hypothetical “observer” and there are an an infinite number of them in the universe, to be exact.
Yes, they are exactly like the conceptually infinite number of virtual points in a line segment. They are not real things that can be counted, however.
@Paulm12
Thank you for pulling me in here. I assumed this thread would be unapproachable for me. So, I haven’t even looked at this conversation.
I’m weeks behind on the reading I’ve wanted to do in the Forum. I’m hoping to catch up a bit soon. A lot of Real Life (RL) going on around here.
Re: MH — I have read a brief summary of an abstract of a quote of Heidegger, which contained 5 or 6 words translated from German, AND I can properly pronounce the title of Sein und Zeit.1 Other than that, Paul, I got nothing for you.
Unless you want to turn it into a reference question. I’d be happy to look for good resources.
1Alternately, I recommend the gorgeous album Time and Tide by the Split Enz; the title is a happy play on words.
I see what you’re saying about moving westward, but what I do not understand is how causality is compatible under B-theory. Yes, changes can occur but I am having trouble seeing how these changes can be sequentially or causally related. In other words there is no actual “progression” of species, in the sense the some species come “after” another; rather they all exist simultaneously and tenselessly. They can “change” by looking for movement across the temporal axis but this temporal axis does not move in an arrow and exerts no causal force on objects the same way being left or right of an object does not imply any causality either.
If the past/present/future distinction is illusory, then future species are not causally related to past species any more than past events/species are causally related to future events/species. Natural selection would be in an ontological crisis because nothing truly “dies” under b-theory. At least this is my initial impression; I’m curious what the answer would be from people who see a compatibility between natural selection and B-theory. I know at least one biologist who denies B-theory because if it’s implications for natural selection, but I can’t say whether these are good reasons since I haven’t studied this in any depth
You still have causality in a spatial dimension… as the conditions in one area affect the condition in adjacent areas. To be sure we are generally accustomed to thinking of causality in time. But physicists don’t have that difficulty… especially when the equations governing events are time-reversible. They are trained to look at things in higher dimensions and the whole history of the universe can be looked at as a static 4 dimension object. You can object that this doesn’t make sense of our experience of time, but the physicist doesn’t necessarily have to concern himself with such philosophical questions.
Obviously I am not arguing the case for B theory. I definitely think A theory is correct – no question about it for me. But you cannot make a good case for A theory when you don’t completely understand B theory and your arguments against it miss the mark.
Perhaps another analogy might help. The universe according to B theory is like a novel in a book. The whole book is right there in front of you and reading it you create the subjective experience of time in going from one page to another. But you could also read it backwards or jump around to pages randomly – or what if you read all the pages simultaneously… so everything happens at once. The point is that as much as you/we need the experience of time personally, it is all in you/us and what you/us do with the book and not in the book itself.
Saying that God “transcends” such things might be a clearer term than “is outside of” to imply that he interacts with them, but is not confined to them.
Surely the unobservable nature of an uncaused cause relates to the theory of time. Or that an immediate effect or its acting does actually occur at some times and places.
I mean our descriptions of truth are relative and are constructs of reality. I don’t think we have access to truth that is not filtered through our limited abilities to conceive of reality, so in that respect I just don’t think “absolute truth” is something we are equipped to access. I don’t think that means, as some people claim, that everything can be deconstructed down to nothing or to meaninglessness or that truth really doesn’t exist or that we can’t decribe reality accurately or that all people’s experience of reality are equally true. Truth is more than just what we individually perceive or subjectively experience (people can be wrong or biased or deluded and consensus about reality matters), but our ability to comprehend and communicate truth is limited by our subjectivity. And sure maybe there is some reality experienced/known by God that is absolute reality in some sense.
[quote=“glipsnort, post:23, topic:51503”] Why single out evolution? In this version of B theory, there is no causality in any aspect of physical reality.
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While this is true you can still have logical causality based on the relationship between objects and propositions. But yes, I was simply singling out natural selection as an example; a whole new metaphysic would be needed under this version of B theory (which I think is not necessarily the view people have under relativity).
I think I understand what you’re saying now (I typed an entire reply and realized you disagreed with what I thought I was replying to haha). It sounds like what you’re saying is that there is still events that happen “before” others in that they affect what we consider current and future events, but the experience with passing through the events can happen in any order. In other words, people who claim there is no distinction between past/present/future are wrong.
Paul, I’ve just finished reading through the thread, and I listened to the Stanford Plato entry on A and B theories of time in the “Time” article (Time (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)). It’s interesting, but there’s a lot I don’t understand. I’ll look back over things soon, and particularly Mitchell’s explanations.
I have a few questions at this point that really have nothing to do with one theory of time or another.
Why is one or the other of importance to WLC?
Does he need one or the other to be true in order to build a particular apologetic argument?
What if his argument is built on a faulty concept of time, or he has misunderstood/misconstrued/otherwise-missed on the concept of time he “needs” for his argument?
Would this argument be understandable to a) the average layperson, or b) even a graduate-level person, who is working in a field of math study most people can’t even describe? c) only Physicists? d)Anybody else?
If the argument is not understandable to anyone but physicists (and maybe also non-physicists who read heavily in the area and understand what they read), and given that WLC is not a physicist himself, what use is it?
What does it have to do with the price of tea in China?
