Muses about Time, Space, and God.
Monday, December 18th, 2006So, I’m sitting here contemplating time and space.
It can get paradoxical really fast.
I was thinking about the whole God thing, how he is said to be ‘outside’ of time.
Now, our whole reality is fixed in a linear path encapsulated by time. Our perception is limited to express itself to us within the limits of our experience. Consequently, we can’t even conceive beyond an inadequate premise even to discuss such things.
So, as the blind talking to the blind, I was considering the length of time a day might be when there is no time. Such a consideration obviously borders on the ridiculous. One might as well ask how nothing compares to something.
Yet, in the first passages in the Bible, after God creates something from nothing, it says that God looks at what he has done, says that it is good, and then there is a division that occurs that is said to be the first day–it words it as “the evening and the morning were the first day.”
I’ve heard people get into rather acute arguments over the seven days of creation thing. But, even in the Biblical account, there can’t be a twenty four hour day until after the fourth day. A twenty four hour day occurs in the first place because of the earth’s rotation on it’s axis and orbit around the sun. Well, if you read the Bible, the sun and moon weren’t created until the fourth day. So, there couldn’t have been days in the sense of twenty four hours. Also, even after their creation, nothing says a rotation of the earth was twenty four hours. It could have just as well been twenty four hundred hours, for all we know. It simply doesn’t say. But, within its reading, it is obvious that it for sure had no rotation and orbit around the sun to define a day until after the fourth day. Also, for those who may be caught up in the fact that the original Hebrew text uses their word for twenty four hour day, note that their word was applied to the first day, the second day, and the third day—-all before there was a sun to be displayed by rotation in a twenty four hour day. There simply was no such thing as day or night as we think of it without a solar system.
To take the whole biblical side of this another step, when does the passage of time begin in the first place? It speaks of days, to be sure, but time, as we know it, has as one of its elements the laws of thermodynamics. From all I gather in the creation account, the destructive, decay spiral of time didn’t occur until after man sinned. At that point, death, destruction, and the elements of time are first mentioned. So, just how many billion years of non-time were spent before time began? Before there was a sun or moon, how many billions of whatever could have passed before then? It’s foolish to get into arguments over such things. Even science can’t say with any fairness to empiricism that a year was a year as we know it in the distant past. To speak of anything as we know it in an effort to describe billions of years is as frail as catching a comet with a spiderweb. Such science relies on the weakness of extrapolation based on everything having the same linear properties throughout the entire time of the extrapolation. It is as limited and formed upon the same inadequate premise as is describing anything outside experience with only the elements of experience that I mentioned in the onset of this discussion.
So, back to time. What I mean to show with the above few words is that neither religion, nor science, nor any mix of the two, can adequately describe that which lies outside what we can see and know, or even believe. Thus, the freedom of license for what I am about to say. For the religious, weigh it against the words you believe. For the scientists, weigh it against what you can see and test. These words are not intended to prove or disprove anything. They are spoken for the speaking. If they expand your thinking about anything, they exceed their pledge.
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To begin, one must remove all the elements of experience to consider the heart of this discussion.
Even the act of thinking requires a point ‘A’ point ‘B’ line. A reality without time won’t even allow for thought as we know it. A place without time can’t even exist, as we describe time. The elements of time and space are pieces of a whole. We can’t remove time from our reality and have a reality at all.
For a moment, consider with me the snapping of a photo. We look at a photo as a point in time. Yet we all know it is really a small blur across time for the length of the exposure. In fact, I issue a challenge for anyone to give an example of true stasis with regard to motion. It is nothing known in this universe. It is impossible for anything we know to be outside time. In fact, we don’t know anything that is stationary. Everything of which we are aware is moving through space—which movement is actually one of the components of time.
Remember the old example used in physics of shooting a B-B at an on-coming locomotive. Remember all the discussion around when did the B-B stop to reverse direction, and how it was against the train when it reversed direction, and the argument about how a B-B could stop a train, bah, blah, blah. The point is that there isn’t even anything we know of in this reality that is ever ’stopped’ or stationary at any point in time. Even a complete reversal in direction translates forces to the molecular level (and levels we can only dream about) within the shape such that the ’stop’ never truly occurs. Further, even apparent stasis is on a planet spinning in a galaxy moving through a universe at a speed we ‘think’ we have measured [relative to what?]. Even the center of our universe could be the center of a small system in a much larger system—prove it isn’t! Wait, now prove it with string theory too.
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Here is the logical conclusion based on what we can know, but read below.
With what we know about time, if God is outside time, then he is at a place with no beginning, no ending, and no linear movement related to space and time as we know it. In such a ’stopped’ state, a ‘view’ of time would be all at once—before it, during it, and after it. When God said, “let us make man in our image”, he was talking to us—later. Well, later, after we escaped time and were outside it, which would place us ’stopped’, looking at time for all time, with no beginning and no ending. You see, eternity is always misconceived as linear–but outside time is ’stopped’ in a way we can’t conceive.
OK, has this stretched around your head and gotten ridiculous enough yet?
The ridiculousness of everything this implies can lead us only to one conclusion. The spirit world is so different to the physical world that we can’t think of it with any of the terms we think about anything. When Jesus walked this planet, He said that God is spirit. So, if you believe in God, this blasts you into a confrontation with reality. If God is real, then He is the realest real–He is real if all else isn’t. Since God is spirit, this means that the spirit realm is the realest real. What we perceive as reality is a pocket of decay within the pure stasis of the spirit realm.
“And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. . .to be remembered no more.” How can this happen in a place where nothing happens? You can quickly see how twisted things get when we apply what we know to things we can’t know. Spirit math has to be different from reality math. It totally removes the laws of thermodynamics. So we can’t even talk about spiritual things with the language of this reality. God made dirt and man from it. In our reality, dirt is a product of thermodynamics, so there wouldn’t have been any dirt for a long time.
Have you seen those explorer style programs and books that look at the miracles in the Bible and validate them with a mix of science, archeology, and history? Doesn’t it strike you as ridiculous that anyone believing in God would, then, have to prove or disprove a miraculous occurrence by proving how it could happen with the normal laws of science—you know, all the laws a miracle is said to be breaking?
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In a nutshell, the spirit world is as far from our physical reality as life is from death. A further discussion might circle around how the absence of the Spirit in this present reality is time and death in this physical plane, and the absence of the Spirit in the spirit plane is the ultimate separation from all reality and all that we are, with no hope of anything else–forever.
