Time Use it or lose it (Part 8)

Gentle reader,

If you get through this study I’ll put you in for a degree in Philosophy! This is more like what we do when we sit around the table drinking copious amounts of coffee listening to the songs from home (Ireland, in case you have forgotten). And speaking of God and eternity and our place in it. No time for the petty things in life like “Did you she how she came dressed for church today... Well I never” (No and like my father use to say “They don’t build cars the way they use to . . . and they never did!” People talk about things that interest them, some talk about the failings of others, politicians and their sex life (like who really cares except gossips and those trying to raise their Television ratings) or the fact that you think you understand the news and the tax code. {Get it straight Gentle reader, unless you make MORE that $250,000 a year your not going to pay more taxes. Also your missing the bigger picture of what is happening in this country. Most claim to Christian (although I rather doubt they are willing to do this) And all that believed were together, and had all things common; (Act 2:44) or this But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.
(1Ti 5:8) So until the American public gets a hold of what it means to sacrifice they will never get to where you are Gentle Reader...

Now where were we? Oh yes in our study of Time...Lets look at the Acount of Time from the point of view of the Philosopher.

"Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away." This is the common-sense view. Time is a river that sweeps on whether we are waking or sleeping, living or dead. It is a stream within which events happen, as space is a box within which things exist. This seems so obvious as to be self-evident. Time is uniform in its current, precisely measurable by clocks set by the sun, and everywhere the same throughout the universe in its rate of passage. It starts to the right of our screen of consciousness, passes dead centre in front of us as NOW, and is wound up on the left, to be preserved for always. Thus we divide time into past, present, future; each of which has a reality that is unquestionable.
The passage of time is at a fixed rate, and it becomes our standard of reference for the speed with which events succeed one another. Even if events should seem to happen more slowly sometimes and with bewildering speed at others, nevertheless we "know" that such fluctuations are apparent only, and that clocks everywhere in the universe never vary except in so far as they may be (in our world) mechanically imperfect. There is a real speed at which events happen, fixed in the mind of God whose time-piece regulates everything else. We would set our clocks by His if only we had the means, and then we would be correct in our estimate of the time taken for everything that has happened since the world began, and indeed even for events occurring before the sun and moon were set in the heavens to regulate time on earth. We assume that time was kept even before the creation came into being. This again is the common-sense view.

It is perfectly true that we each have private inner clocks that reflect our own personal sense of time, and by and large our personal clocks agree quite accurately when compared with those of everyone else who shares our framework of reference. But what we now know is that this only happens so long as we all share the same segment of space and move through it at the same velocity. Anyone who happens to live in some other galaxy moving through space at a different speed with a different rate of acceleration in our supposedly expanding universe would experience a different rate of the passage of time. And this difference would not be the result of imagination: their clocks would actually confirm the difference. This is where a real problem arises. This is where the common-sense view breaks down.

As soon as we move we change the flow rate of our time. But because we and our private clocks move together, the change in rate is concealed from us. The first recognition of this real change in time rate was a philosophical one, but we can now verify it as a fact — only the change is so tiny that we require extraordinary devices to detect it. But there is little doubt that it is real.

The particular movement we happen to be involved in through space has the effect of modifying the rate at which time flows by us. Thus this flow rate of hours or minutes or seconds proves to be relative, relative to our speed through space — or more precisely, to our change of speed through space, our acceleration or deceleration. In terms of actual experience even our grossest movements (to the moon and back by space craft, for instance) are so tiny when compared with the distances involved in traversing the span of the universe, that we cannot detect the change in the flow of time except by using special instruments of quite fantastic sensitivity. So we are unaware of any change. The changes are far far smaller than the normal inaccuracies characteristic of man-made mechanical devices.
But certain experiments which have been performed in recent years have fully confirmed what Einstein predicted, namely, that time is relative to the rate of acceleration of the clock through space. It doesn't matter how little the change is: from the philosopher's point of view the classical and common-sense picture of time as an ever flowing stream with invariant speed of current has been shattered.

'Common sense' view of time shattered

Yet the concept itself of the relativity of time goes back a very long way, far beyond Einstein, to Augustine (354—430 A.D.) in fact — and before Augustine to Philo (c. 20 B.C.—c. 42 A.D.) and his contemporaries.(2) According to the Jewish commentators in the time of our Lord, God produced ten things on the first day of creation. He produced the heavens and the earth, Tohu and Bohu, light and darkness, wind and water, the duration of the day and the duration of the night.

The Jewish rabbis believed that the duration of the day and the duration of the night were actual creations and not merely the result of the creation of the heavens and the earth. They held specifically that "time" was created simultaneously with the world. Philo Judaeus was a Hellenized Jew who imbibed much of the spirit of Greek philosophy, and he argued strongly against an older view held by his contemporary Jewish brethren that the world had been created in time. He held that until creation, time did not exist. Time had just as much reality in its own right as the world did, though by no means independent of it. When Augustine proclaimed that God created the world with time and not in time, he may conceivably have arrived at the conclusion by the exercise of his own profound insight, but it is more probable that his wide reading had made him thoroughly acquainted with the arguments that had gone on between Philo and some of the older Jewish writers, since Philo's work, De Opificio Mundi ("Concerning the Fabrication of the World"), was quite widely known the time. Here are his actual words, as translated from the Greek of his original by F. H. Colson and G. H.Whitaker:

Then [Moses] says that "in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth," taking "the beginning" not, as some think, in a chronological sense, for time there was not before there was a world. Time began either simultaneously with the world or after it. For since time is a measured space determined by the world's movement, and since movement could not be prior to the object moving, but must of necessity arise either after it or simultaneously with it, it follows of necessity that time also is either coeval with or later born than the world. . . And since the word "beginning" is not here taken as the chronological beginning, it would seem likely that [only] the numerical order is indicated, so that "in the beginning He made" is equivalent to "He made the heaven first." [My emphasis throughout.]

The concept itself of the relativity of time goes back a very long way, far beyond Einstein, to Augustine (354—430 A.D.) in fact — and before Augustine to Philo (c. 20 B.C.—c. 42 A.D.) and his contemporaries. According to the Jewish commentators in the time of our Lord, God produced ten things on the first day of creation. He produced the heavens and the earth, Tohu and Bohu, light and darkness, wind and water, the duration of the day and the duration of the night. The Jewish rabbis believed that the duration of the day and the duration of the night were actual creations and not merely the result of the creation of the heavens and the earth. They held specifically that "time" was created simultaneously with the world. Philo Judaeus was a Hellenized Jew who imbibed much of the spirit of Greek philosophy, and he argued strongly against an older view held by his contemporary Jewish brethren that the world had been created in time. He held that until creation, time did not exist. Time had just as much reality in its own right as the world did, though by no means independent of it.

Since Einstein was himself a Jew and undoubtedly acquainted with the literature of his forebears, it is not perhaps so surprising that such a thought as the coincidence of the creation of matter and the creation of time should have been in his mind when he formulated his special theory of relativity and made time part and parcel of the physical world.

Linear time vs. endless eternity

Now Einstein wrestled with the problem of time, with the nature of time as opposed to eternity, of time as an abstract reality. The problem arises from the fact that one cannot have a span of time. It won't stay still long enough for us to measure it. Eternity is not time stretched to infinity on either side. There is a very significant difference between eternity and some immense stretch of time, for the simple reason that no matter how long this span of time is, we can always shorten it by chopping some off. Whereas eternity remains as endless as ever no matter how much we "cut off it." At least we imagine we could do this, though in actual fact we don't know how one can reduce the length of something which has no extended existence. Only NOW exists, and it exists as a point, not a dimension. It has only location. The past is gone, and the future is not yet. We are therefore left with nothing to shorten; only with something which has no length. Ten days never exist at one time, nor even ten seconds, nor even ten millionths of a second! How then could we ever speak of reducing them? Time becomes a position in eternity, nothing more.

Thus while we do seem to reduce time by having spent some of it, we cannot ever seem to shorten eternity no matter how much we have spent of it. In the very nature of the case, eternity remains unaffected by what has already passed. The categories of time and eternity are clearly not the same. What is appropriately spoken of as shortening in the one case becomes meaningless in the other. If we have a very large number and we subtract something from it, what remains is less than it was. If we have an infinite number and subtract something from it, we still have infinity remaining. When something is forever, as much remains no matter how much has already been subtracted. Thus while we may speak of time which is passed, there is no such thing as eternity which has passed. Otherwise we would have to ask the absurd question, Is God older today than He was yesterday?

One of the earliest symbols for eternity was a circle. We walk around the circle through so many degrees of arc but we do not actually shorten the distance we yet have to journey to complete the circle. As much remains of it to walk around as ever. The circumference persists intact and unchanged. We can go on and on endlessly, like the marching column of caterpillars whose head has been induced to link up with the tail and so they journey on, each following the leader in front, until at last they starve themselves to exhaustion.
Eternity does not flow past us, for if it did some would already have been used up. The concept of an exhaustible resource can never be applied to the word eternity. Only if eternity was like a circle would it then escape this inevitable limitation: but circular movement imposes a no less undesirable limitation, namely, repetition. Some ancient philosophers viewed heaven as cyclical, but even then they saw it as ultimately having an end, as though the circling movement gradually slowed down and finally stopped.
It is not surprising that cultures which emphasize material things and reify (make a thing of) time, tend to view history as linear, as a long line of successive events with a firm beginning and a well defined ending. As we have already seen, cultures which attach more importance to the spiritual aspects of life have tended towards a view of history which has no beginnings or endings in the linear sense. Things just go on forever. Such is the Hindu view, mand so are all reincarnational views.

Next time Gentle Reader, we will consider

Dilemma of beginnings and endings

But for now remember, no matter what time it is in your part of the world God still loves you... You are accepted, you are valued, you are loved! By the Heavenly Father and by us.
Love,
Denis