Is Time Real?

[Cow Poke]

It keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...




into the future.

And flowing under the bridge




like a river.

[Leonhard]

"now" is an illusion.

I'm not sure I used the word 'now', anywhere.

God knows all of space-time at once. He knows what you will eat for breakfast two weeks from now. The person you are when you are reading this post won't know that. But the person you will be in two-weeks will know because it will have happened. You made a free will choice and God already knows what it is. The future is just as real as the past and the present.

I'm not sure you actually answered the question I gave you. Is your view, that God know about this, because in some sense He's experiencing the space-time he's created, or would He have known about this prior to creating the world?

Yet, unless he forces you to eat a specific breakfast in two weeks, taking away your free will, then there is no way for him to know what you will eat if the future does not exist.

How wide a discussion do you want here? Seer started with a question about what time was. Now you're talking about the how freedom of the human will is compatible with Divine Omniscience. Is this strictly relevant to the discussion?

Not quite. I think that God knows the future because when he created the universe, he created the entire universe which includes the 4th dimension of time, just like he created the 3 dimensions of space. Also I am a molinist but that might be getting in too deep for this thread.

I'm still not certain I understand why you think this view of time is necessary then in order God to know of the future. Sure the future could just exist potentially, the universe moving in a succession of changes. The past would then exist objectively only in the sense that the universe passed through those stages in the past, not that these "slices" of the universe are still hanging around in the 4th dimension.

The discussion is bifurcating too much to go into any details, but I'm not sure that view really makes sense. That's really as much I feel comfortable saying, because right now this thread is growing like a fractal.

Changeless means God's essential qualities and nature. It doesn't mean he can't experience anything.

There's not distinction in God, there's no complexity. He's perfect simplicity, which means He simple is His properties, and you can't seperate them. So there's nothing in God that can undergo change, without God litterally changing his nature and becoming a different God. That's why classical theology has always held that God must have known of the future from all eternity. Molinus would actually agree, he would merely say that God has middle knowledge of humans actions, and is by knowing this that He could set things in motion knowing perfectly what would happen in the future.

[Leonhard]

Everyone who watches Star Trek knows that time is made up of Chronoton particles emitting Chronometic radiation.

[Leonhard]

Btw Sparko I didn't mean to imply something bad about you when I said 'cartoonish model', thinking back it might have come off like that which wasn't what I intended.

[Sparko]

And flowing under the bridge




like a river.

I keep time in a bottle.

[Sparko]

I'm not sure I used the word 'now', anywhere.



I'm not sure you actually answered the question I gave you. Is your view, that God know about this, because in some sense He's experiencing the space-time he's created, or would He have known about this prior to creating the world?

I thought I was clear about my view of time. God created all of time and space at once. It included all of our free will choices which from a "future" perspective might seem fixed, just as we see the past as fixed from our perspective, but that doesn't mean the people in the past did not have free will or that we do not.

[Leonhard]

Anyway its getting late and I really need to avoid becoming a night raven. See you all some other time.

[Catholicity]

Seer A black hole is made of nothing but exists.

[Boxing Pythagoras]

Seer A black hole is made of nothing but exists.

A black hole is actually not "made of nothing." A black hole is composed of matter. It's a very large mass with a very small volume.

[Cow Poke]

It's a very large mass with a very small volume.

Kinda like junk food. Lots of calories, precious little nutrition.

[37818]

If by Logos, you mean The Son, then no He didn't undergo change during the Incarnation, but a nature was added to the Divine Essence: the human nature and a human will.

As God the Son did not change. But how He was with God did change. The incarnation was a change. Not from being God. But from being God and with God. How He was with God did change in the incarnation. The Logos, God's Son was and is God's agent of change. Always has been. A cause is a change. The Son is the uncaused cause of creation. Uncaused being that He was God. A change in that He is the cause of creation (John 1:3).

[Teallaura]

I think it provides the wrong kind of explanation for how God can know the future: "He can see it, he just looks into the past, or into the future to see what's coming." I think its a nice cartoon model for how God experiences the world, but I don't think it captures it. For one simple problem:

God has no sensations. He can't them, because He can't undergo change, and he doesn't need them because He's omniscient.

Also His knowledge of the world, is not dependent on the world, but here you seem to be saying that God only knows about the future because He can see it somehow.

Do you agree?

*emphasis mine

Presumes facts not in evidence. I don't see how you could possibly support this.

So, how do you support it? I'd like to know because I really don't see this.

[Teallaura]

So time has no physical substance. Like I asked, is there anything else in the universe that is real but does not have physical substance?

Yes, matter.

When you boil matter down to particles it gets less and less 'material' as we understand the term in the macro sense. Assuming string theory* 'matter' is somewhat illusory - an experience we have but not a good description of the actual reality.


*As I recall, other theories of particle composition have similar conclusions. Your mileage may vary.

[Teallaura]

I didn't claim that God can't perform actions, but it remains the case that God Himself does not undergo change during these, and in as much as a sensation requires a change in the one having it, God can't sense anything. Also since God is omniscient on His own, from eternity, even without having created the world, it can't then be the world that is the cause of God's knowledge of the future. Otherwise God would have undergone change, when He caused the universe to exist.

Then how could He love in either the emotional or the 1 Cor 13 senses of the term?

[Teallaura]

The fact that it is not "made of" anything does not mean it has no physical substance.

Um, what? Even in the view that matter is ultimately formed of energy it still has a composition.