The two views of time can be described and compared in this way…
Time as the subjective experience according to MarkD’s suggestion is like the universe represents a book on the shelf of a library. Anyone who comes along and reads the book will experience a passage of time consisting of the events told of in the book as he reads it from cover to cover. But in reality there is no time and you could read the book in any order you like.
For time as a reality according to JoelHinrichs we can go back to the same book as it was being written by the author. Instead of something always existing the events come into being as the author creates them. Though as many authors even experience, the characters can participate in the writing of the book also with their own way of thinking and the choices they make. In this way there is a relationship between the author and the characters and they write the events of the story together. But in this case, time is not just a subjective experience because the book being written makes it an objective reality.
…so which makes more sense do you think? The book with no author which simply exists for no reason as it is in a cosmic library with books which simply exist without any origin? Or the book which is written possibly by cooperation of author and its characters? With the Minkowski (space-time) structure of the universe the book could not be the story of the whole universe but only of a small portion like the earth, and the stories of the rest of the universe would have to be told in their own books of this library. Still these other books would have been written in the same way as the one of the earth.
I don’t say time doesn’t exist but isn’t a thing and it is very hard adequately convey what it is. I don’t see how time is anything like a book in either of your scenarios. The idea of representing time as sequential slices is popular but far from perfect.
Was that selection your doing? I clicked on the link and this text was highlighted:
Proudly, you’d think you are the center of the expansion. But your pride is an illusion. Every observer in every coin would see the exact same thing, its neighbors moving away. No coin (or point in the geometry) is more important than any other point.
I recall some kings who proudly declared themselves to be at the center of the universe. It does become concerning when time is factored and you start to appear at the center of events occurring around you and even seem connected to your thoughts.
It’s what’s called anthropomorphising, or possibly using the human verb that is closest to God’s action. The point is, as the apostle tells us much later, that God gave commands to things that didn’t exist, and they came into existence.
No, He’s One Who can issue commands to things that don’t yet exist, and they obey. The Hebrew there is simple and blunt and rules out His being a “wizard”, etc. The ancient near east had concepts of how those things worked and there isn’t a trace of such things in the Hebrew text.
There’s at least one other ancient near eastern creation account where deity commands things into existence, but IIRC those commands were issued to primordial ‘stuff’; the point of the Genesis writer in contrast is that God doesn’t need any pre-existing stuff to work with; all the ‘stuff’ He needs, He orders into existence. To get a bit Aristotelian on this, the other mythologies include a material cause for the world – that exists, along with light, on its own – but the Genesis writer excludes any such thing by relating that God is the source of all the ‘stuff’ there is. Of course he also excludes all the magical silliness of gods and goddesses using the dead bodies of their siblings or colleagues as raw material.
Very much so in one way: the Genesis Creation account pretty much follows the order of events of the Egyptian creation story, which is a good match to those across the fertile crescent.
Treating the Creation account from the perspective of it being a ‘royal chronicle’, one way to look at the Genesis account is as it being the abstract of a scientific paper, summarizing the main findings, the difference being that Genesis doesn’t bother to go on with the body of the paper. One benefit of viewing it that way is that an abstract is often organized thematically, not chronologically, the same being true of a ancient near eastern royal chronicle (ANE-RC)
This is a point where genre comes into play in a serious way: since the point of an ANE-RC is to set forth a mighty accomplishment of a great king, the primary attention goes to statements of what that king – in this case, YHWH-Elohim – did, so that just as an ordinary ANE-RC might say, “And the king commanded” repeatedly, the Genesis writer uses “God said”.
I think the use of “God said” rather than “God commanded” is actually significant here, making a subtle distinction: to command carries the connotation of exerting energy where as to simply speak is much more casual, and so perhaps the writer is indicating that creating the cosmos isn’t some huge feat but something that to YHWH-Elohim can manage almost casually.
If we want to force a modern scientific materialistic worldview onto this ancient literature, sure. But it has to be read within the parameters of the ancient worldview, as well as with consideration to the literary genre. In that context, “speaking” is the important point because it suggests that, as opposed to the situation in various other creation myths, creating all that there is was not some endeavor that required YHWH-Elohim to exert Himself but was an accomplishment He could manage without even breaking a sweat.
I wish I still had a tee-shirt I got from the university Campus Crusade for Christ ministry so many decades ago; it took “And God said, ‘Let there be light!’” and redid it with “God said” followed by several equations (Maxwell’s, I think) about light. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship had a similar one except the equations were replaced by a list of basic constants.
I remember one late night after a physics midterm where someone was propounding the idea that spacetime was initiated when God said, “Let (there) be” and time started rolling with the word “light”. It involved computer code scrawled on study room walls.
Don’t recall who it was, but I managed to get in to hear a presentation by a Roman Catholic cardinal (who had a physics PhD and a ThD [Doctor of Theology]) on Genesis, Aristotle, and Creation. One point he was adamant about was that we not identify Genesis 1 and the Big Bang – and before he moved on to his next point he sighed and observed, “But it’s so tempting!”
Time does exist, and so needed “creating”, but in a way it’s an attribute of a spatial universe where there are things that change. If everything in the universe was transformed into just photons, time would become meaningless because photons don’t experience time.
When I was in the university education program we had to read heavily in Piaget, and I was an oddball in class discussion because I made this article’s very point – that Piaget was wrong, something I was convinced of due to having taught sixth grade confirmation class at a Lutheran church.
[One incredible moment was when a usually very quiet kid declared that it was Jesus who talked with Abraham, among other instances, on the grounds that the only body God had was Jesus’ body – pretty mind-blowing from a 12-y.o.]
If time doesn’t exist for God then describing Him as “omnitemporal” is meaningless. Sequential time exists for Him, it’s just that He isn’t bound by it, plus that it may not be the only time-like dimension He can operate in.
A fun way to get a handle on it is to consider God with respect to someone falling into a black hole: to an observer outside the black hole, the person who is falling will never actually pass beyond the event horizon, while to the person who is falling all the rest of the universe speeds up and heads for heat death – but to God both of those time perception are equally valid, and not just in theory but in Him experiencing time along with both the observer and the person falling, so that to God the person falling both does and does not pass the event horizon . . . .
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
In a literature class one strange exercise we did was the professor handing out a printout of a book one chapter at a time – starting with the last chapter. Then we did the same with another book except he started in the middle chapter and alternated giving us the previous chapter and the following chapter.
I’m currently stumped in a novel-length story I’ve been writing online because the characters have effectively boxed me in such that “You can’t get there from here” is an accurate statement of the relationship between my most recent (and unsubmitted) chapter and where the story is supposed to end up.
Check out spacetime slices – his omnipresence entails his omnitemporality. (I’m not saying we can get our heads around it – it’s a wonder-full mystery how he orchestrates events – timing and placing – in his providence.)
There are definitely other (‘spiritual’) dimensions we are not directly involved in in usual experience.
There’s a theme in some ancient near eastern writings of “the kingship”, meaning the rule/reign by the monarchs of the preeminent city, that partakes of this a little bit, as though the kingship is bestowed in just one location and when it goes to another city it’s almost a case of the entire Earth being shifted so this next city is in the spot where the kingship dwells.
It has to do with time dilation and traveling at the speed of light – as speed approaches that of light, time heads towards zero, so for something traveling at the speed of light no time passes.
Agreed about them ‘not experiencing time’, but they began somewhere (from wherever they were transformed? ; - ) and are traveling at a finite speed, namely c, so time is not meaningless in my estimation.
They are traveling at c according to an outside observer – to the photon, they just are.
This is what leads to the collapse/loss of metric once/if the universe had faded away to nothing but photons: since photons don’t experience time, then space fails to have an definition, so that there is in effect no difference between the universe being a trillion trillion kilometers across and it being zero kilometers across.
In the realm of modern physics and philosophy, time is often considered a fundamental aspect of the universe, but it is not viewed as a “thing” in the same way that physical objects are. Time is not a tangible entity or a physical substance that can be created or destroyed. Instead, it is a dimension or a concept that helps us measure and understand the sequence of events and changes in the universe.
