Time and a peanut butter sandwich

Part #3

Of Time, infinity, & Eternity and a peanut butter sandwich

Gentle readers,

I brought a peanut butter sandwich this time as a jelly donut won’t be enough as we delve into the mysteries of God , what He has provided us and where we (you and me) fit into the scheme of things. If you need to refresh your memory you can find the previous 2 studies on this site and if you need a basic understanding then refer to our study (where this all began) on "Time and Space".

Now I might point out that you don’t need to be a member in good standing of MENSA (Mensa's only requirement for membership is that one score at or above the 98th percentile on certain standardized IQ tests, such as the Standford-Bient).However these studies are rather like the time we lived in Florida and Marti and I went to the ocean. Now Marti is five feet nothing and she dipped her toes in the water (I should tell you that it was January came back to our apartment and called her mother to tell her we had been swimming in the waters of the gulf)! That wasn’t swimming . But I never could convince her that she had to actually get in the water before she could call it swimming Just like Peter had to step out of the boat to walk on the water. These studies are designed to get you out of the boat ( or in most cases out of the box [the narrow thinking which prevails in many today].

So with that as a lead up lets consider munching our peanut butter sandwich as we consider time from God’s point of view.

　

The Theory of Relativity has forever changed our concept of Time. everyone 'knows' that time, viewed objectively, began "in the beginning" and flows by with a past, a present, and a future until it ends "when time is no more". Time began, said Augustine, with creation. Time has no meaning or existence, said Einstein, apart from the physical universe.

So one asks, How much "time" was taken for creation? Did God work "slowly" or did He create it all in a moment of time? Would He create something and give it an appearance of age it didn't have? Is eternity an extension of time? Can time and eternity even be compared? And what will heaven be like without time?

Everyone 'knows' that time, viewed subjectively, is relative: it slows almost to a halt in suffering but speeds by in joy. This has a bearing on what happened on the Cross during those three hours of darkness.

"Actual time," whatever that is, may be much faster or much slower than we apprehend it to be. Our time may depend upon the mean temperature at which our minds operate. If all life on some other planet operated at a temperature of, say, 70 F. or 110 F., the time frame would be very different. Presumably the order of events would remain the same but the time intervals between these events, and therefore the speed at which things happen, would be experienced very differently. The problem is that we could only discover it if we, unlike that other planet's inhabitants, wore some kind of insulated clothing to keep our body temperature precisely where it now is, while we visited with them.
Such, then, is one of the factors which conceals from us the "real" rate at which time flows by

Size: Now it is also possible that the size of our bodies relative to the Universe has a bearing on how we experience the passage of time. To a tiny insect with a life span of only a few hours, a geological age would be an eternity. The size of an organism obviously has a bearing simply because a highly complex creature of large proportions needs more time just to reach adult size, and thus has to "take longer at meals" in order to get enough food to sustain itself and to grow up. Cell division and multiplications at a certain "normal" rate, and obviously the larger the number of cells that have to multiply to generate the adult organism the longer the time it will take. Within certain very loose limits a larger animal will have a longer life. The insect that lives for a few hours presumably passes through all the phases of maturing and the experiences which accompany them from birth to death in those few hours. Though it is difficult to conceive of it, it seems likely that such a creature would pass through its carefree childhood, anxious adolescence, bored middle life, and disappointed old age: and who knows but that it looks forward in its childhood to a lifetime as stretching out before it, or thinks back in the retrospect of old age upon what is past, in a way which is somewhat analogous to the human situation. This may not be true of insects, of course. But it seems likely that it is partially true of such a creature as a dog whose life span is nevertheless only about one fifth of ours. So size obviously has a bearing on experienced time. One Victorian writer, Ambrose Bierce, wrote:ld

‘Now it is also possible that the size of our bodies relative to the Universe has a bearing on how we experience the passage of time. To a tiny insect with a life span of only a few hours, a geological age would be an eternity. The size of an organism obviously has a bearing simply because a highly complex creature of large proportions needs more time just to reach adult size, and thus has to "take longer at meals" in order to get enough food to sustain itself and to grow up. Cell division and multiplications at a certain "normal" rate, and obviously the larger the number of cells that have to multiply to generate the adult organism the longer the time it will take. Within certain very loose limits a larger animal will have a longer life. The insect that lives for a few hours presumably passes through all the phases of maturing and the experiences which accompany them from birth to death in those few hours. Though it is difficult to conceive of it, it seems likely that such a creature would pass through its carefree childhood, anxious adolescence, bored middle life, and disappointed old age: and who knows but that it looks forward in its childhood to a lifetime as stretching out before it, or thinks back in the retrospect of old age upon what is past, in a way which is somewhat analogous to the human situation. This may not be true of insects, of course. But it seems likely that it is partially true of such a creature as a dog whose life span is nevertheless only about one fifth of ours. So size obviously has a bearing on experienced time.

4. Bierce, Ambrose: quoted by E. L. Hawke in a written

communication for the discussion of a Paper presented by F. T. Farmer, "The Atmosphere: Its Design and Significance in Creation", Transactions of the Victoria Institute (England), vol. 71, 1939, p.54, 55.

　

Life span
Man lives three score years and ten. The period is long enough relative to the life of an insect to make our estimate of time very different. Did we live as long as the pre-Flood patriarchs who survived for almost a thousand years, a geological age might strike us as not quite such a long period, and an historical epoch might seem very brief.
There are among us a small number of unfortunate individuals suffering from a disease called progeria which brings about a frighteningly accelerated rate of aging of the body. Within a period of ten to fifteen years these people pass through infancy and childhood, adolescence, middle age, senility, and death. Each stage is marked by all the symptoms more or less characteristic of a normally spanned life. By the age of twelve or so, the sufferer is already an old man, decrepit in physique, hard of hearing, dim of eye, bald and toothless, shrunken in appearance. All the tell-tale marks associated with old age are evident, even sometimes to the hardening of the arteries. One foot is already in the grave.
To such individuals, we who survive to the presently allotted span of life must appear as the pre-Flood patriarchs do to us. A corollary of this would naturally be that, to the pre-Flood patriarchs, we who think we are in health would actually appear as pitiful progeriacs. And possibly this is the truth of the matter: but because we have come to accept our present life span as normal, we discount the records of antiquity as

unbelievable.(6)
While they are reported to have lived to almost a thousand years, we may live to almost a hundred: and while we live to almost a hundred years, the progeriac lives to about ten. The proportions are curiously much the same -- ten to one. Who can say what a normal life span really is, or ought to be? But now, if our life time passes at a normal rate for us, did the pre-Flood patriarchs live at a much slower rate? Did time therefore seem to pass much more slowly in each of their days? Who knows whose biological clocks are actually telling the right time? We don't know what a short time is or a long time: and it seems virtually impossible for us ever to find out how long, long is. Their one thousand years may have seemed to them, experientially, no longer than our mere three score years and ten. The progeriac, in his "younger" days, perhaps watches those around him growing slowly into potential Methuselahs, while he himself experiences the flow of time at a "normal" pace.

(6) Progeria: for the implications of this disease upon the Genesis record of longevity, see Arthur C. Custance, The Seed of the Woman, Hamilton, Ontario, Can., Doorway Publications, 1980, p.26-28.

Drugs
Some drugs have the effect of so slowing up the time at which things happen that the subject appears to have been provided with 'more time' to examine events that normally occur too rapidly for comprehension of what is happening. One has to put the words "more time" in quote marks because we do not really know whether this is the way to describe the situation or whether it is the mental processes that are enormously speeded up instead. Constance Holden speaks of a pianist who under the influence of drugs worked out an interpretation of a Bach toccata, condensing what she considered to be eight hours of practice time in ten minutes of trance time. She also refers to a song writer who during a drug-induced trance imagined that she walked down a street into a cabaret, ordered a sandwich and a beer, and then listened to a singer rendering three songs. All of this took place in a clocked time interval of only two minutes. Afterwards she was able to sing the songs, each one of which was new to her. This was done entirely by normal speed recollection of events which had been imagined under drugs at a vastly accelerated rate.

Who knows but what we ourselves may wake up some day and find that our whole life has in effect passed in a moment or two of real time -- as Psalm 103:15 and 16 almost seem to suggest "As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more." (Psa 103:15-16)

Think about these things, Gentle reader, and get back with me next time.

Love, Denis