Getting to the Bottom of Time

One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time. --Dávila 

They say that for God all time is but a moment, and that a moment contains all time. Or something like that.

For us, the moment is the only place where freedom, potential, and creativity can exist. 

Obviously the past is not subject to freedom or creativity, since it is fully determined. Nor can we say that the past absolutely determines the present, because this would imply that the present likewise absolutely determines the future, which therefore extinguishes the differences between past, present, and future.

Only the present moment contains potentialities and possibilities, but how is it possible that there are possibilities? How do they enter the chain of cause and effect, essentially bringing a range of possibilities out of causes, instead of the causes bringing about one particular effect? 

Uncle Screwtape says -- and he's not wrong -- that "The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present only -- and all of it -- humans have experience."

Thus, the present moment and experience as such are very much intertwined, for one can never experience the past or future, which only exist as memory and anticipation, respectively. Screwtape goes on to say that 

It is out of this present that they [human beings] must draw all that they know of you. In it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He [God] would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present -- either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

It seems that this is where the "disloyalty of time" enters the picture, because the demon wishes to interfere with our concern with eternity and the present, which is to say, "the point at which time touches eternity."

Einstein said there was no such thing as time, and that "For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

If that's true, then what are all the clocks for? QED.

This logic, of course, follows Michael Scott's famous proof of God: 

But when it comes to metaphysics, Einstein was no Einstein. Rather, he was partial to the block universe theory, whereby all of space and time exist as a single, unchanging four-dimensional block. In this view, the past, present, and future are equally real, and the passage of time we experience is just our perception as we move through this block. 

Sure, time is annoying and enigmatic, but you can't get rid of it that easily. If we move through the block, movement is change, and change is time. In other words, we change as a result of the movement (or vice versa), so there's some kind of time. 

Interestingly, Einstein made that obtuse comment in the context of trying to comfort someone over the loss of a loved one, who had merely "departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing." It signifies nothing because in the larger scheme of things we're all already dead. But why try to comfort someone if the Block has already determined everything?

This four-dimensional block has a fixed and unchanging structure. All events that ever have happened, are happening, or will happen are already "laid out" within this structure. Every particle and object has a worldline extending through this spacetime block, representing its entire history. These worldlines are fixed, meaning all events along them are also fixed.

You have a better idea?

Certainly not a worse one. Schuon has an idea, but it's a little cryptic:

Time is but a spiroidal movement around a motionless Center.

But I say the Trinity is a spiroidal movement around a motionless center, so is our time a spiral around that spiral, similar to how the earth spirals around the sun? Except the sun itself spirals around the center of the Milky Way, the Milky around Virgo Supercluster, and the Virgo Supercluster around the Laniakea Supercluster. It's spirals all the way down. And up!

Concrete time is the changing of phenomena; abstract time is the duration which this change renders measurable (Schuon).

I suppose there can be duration without change, which is another name for eternal boredom. But how can there be change without duration? 

As for subjective time..., it is divided into present, past and future: what we are, what we were and what we will be, and in addition, what our surroundings are, were and will be (ibid).

That's true, but what is objective time, and can it even exist without a subject? In other words, how can there be past, present, and future without an observer to bind them together? Otherwise they't just unrelated moments, similar to how Hume described it. But if the past is related to the present and future, what accounts for the relation? What -- or who -- holds them together?

I've heard of psychedelic experiences in which the glue that holds time together is dissolved and one suddenly finds oneself in a terrifying succession of unrelated instances. The same thing can happen in psychosis, in which each moment brings about a terrifying, dis-integrated novelty in which nothing makes sense.

These preluminary thoughtlets were provoked by chapter eleven of Norris Clarke's The One and the Many, called Being in Time. Reading it made me really want to get to the bottom of this whole time thing, once and for all. 

How can we live in time without having any idea what it is? I find this totally unacceptable, nor do I think God would want us to live in total ignorance of something so foundational to our existence. But what clues has he given us? In his revelation, has he revealed any particular insights into the nature of time?

They say that the Creator does not create in time, but that time is one of his creatures. I get it, but I suspect that even -- or especially -- God can't eliminate the mystery of time so easily, for I say God himself is "subject," so to speak, to his own primordial freedom and creativity. 

Our pal Berdaev thought so. In fact, in his Philosophers Speak of God, Hartshorne introduces some other thinkers who leaned this way, for example, Socinus (1539-1604):

If it were correct that God knows the the future as determinate, there could be nothing accidental or contingent.... Everything must then be necessary and determined from all eternity known by God. But then there is not human freedom. There is also no divine freedom, since from all eternity God could act only as he actually does act.

But God is free, and cannot not be free. If he weren't free he couldn't create, any more than we could create if we were totally determined. Nothing could ever really come into existence, since its existence has been determined from all eternity.  

Harthorne next discusses Lequier (1814-1862), who also recognized that "an eternal knowledge of all events would render these events themselves eternal, since they would be items in a whole which never becomes but eternally is." 

Lequier asked, "Can an eternal knowing have noneternal objects?" If the answer is Yes, then God is involved with time: "The customary explanation, 'God knows our future acts not in advance but eternally' .... only makes matters worse," for then "all notion of indeterminate potentiality for free determination is sheer illusion." Hartshorne suggests that Lequier is even  

the first man in history to see clearly and comprehensively what freedom means from the metaphysical standpoint.... that freedom is the philosophical principle.

He comes close to Berdyaev's later idea that "freedom is not created by God" and that "human freedom means genuine creation -- means, indeed, creation of something of the actuality of God himself." In other words, in man the Creator creates creators, for real! And who knows ahead of time what a genuine creator will create?

Lequier puts forth the orthoparadox that God "has created me creator of myself." 

The human person: a being who can do something without God! who can, if it pleases him, prefer himself to God, who can will something which God does not will, and refrain from willing what God wills, that is to say, a new God who can offend the other! What a terrifying marvel: a man deliberates and God awaits his decision.

More orthoparadox:

The relation of God to the creature is as real as the relation of the creature to God.... The act of the man makes a spot in the absolute which destroys the absolute. God, who sees things change, changes also in beholding them, or else he does not perceive that they change.

A change in God! It is an idea which disturbs, a phrase which one does not pronounce without terror. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recognize that either God in his relationship to the world contracts a new mode of existence which participates in the nature of the world, or else this world is before God as though it did not exist.... God, who sees things change, changes also in beholding them.

 I guess this post is a cliffhanger. To be continued...