The Creation of Time?

[Erik]

First I must say that I am not an open-theist. But consider this: if God is outside time, and he knows all the past as well as all the future, then He knows evereything He will do in the future which would include every thought He will think. So it would not seem possible for God to ever have a new thought.

Methinks we are in over our heads.

If God is outside of time, the terms "past" and "future" do not have the same meaning to Him as they do to us. You're imagining Him, from the vantagepoint of "before time began" looking at things happening "in the future," which would firmly place God inside of time. So if God is outside of time, he is not IN it and to "know everything He will do in the future" is nonsense. The best way I can think of to try to grasp this is to imagine that for God, all events in our time happen in the same instant for God. Time and all events in it become like a carpet called into existence all at once (yet somehow still consonant with us having wills that are not fully constrained).

I find no problems with the idea of God not being able to ever have a new thought. The word "new" immediately places Him inside time, calling out a comparison between "before He had the thought the first time" and "after He had the thought the first time."

No, if God is outside of time, while it raises just as many questions as it answers, the sort of questions it raises seem easier to accept (being naturally bound up in what it would mean to be outside of time) and the answers it gives seem satisfactory to me.

I agree, Homer, but no one seems to be willing for God to simply choose not to know some things that He otherwise "could" know so as to "experience" something. If I had the "cheat sheet" I could look at the answers or choose not to, couldn't I? Do I get more joy out of the discovery than I would simply looking at the answers? I could read Cliff's Notes before reading a novel, but I'd lose a vital part of the enjoyment of the experience.

Why does God need to enjoy anything in this way? While humans gain much enjoyment from newness, who are we to suppose that God's purposes for creation have anything to do with "surprising Himself?" Steve has answered questions like this on the radio show several times by talking about movies he's seen more than once—and fully enjoyed each time.

Again, I would have to point back to the ramifications of being outside of time (if God is, in fact outside of time): He would not experience things in the same way we do. Not only would he not "get joy out of discovery" but he also would not feel sadness or boredom from "lack of discovery." He would simply have simultaneously created all events, His interactions with those events, and His allowance for and interaction with our free will. That singular creative act would give him all the "experience" he wanted, if that was something that God could be said to ever want (which I am in doubt of).

[kaufmannphillips]

My objection to the notion of G-d being outside of time: it yields a cosmology where the universe never resolves into a state of shalom with G-d.

Let us imagine that the world to come has finally arrived, and it is in peaceful harmony with G-d. This is pleasant for the humans who participate in this world. But G-d, if he is outside of time, finds the prior millennia of rapine and murder and injustice to be just as immediate as the shalom of the peaceful world. For the G-d outside of time, sin and death and suffering would be eternally experienced.

Could this be the case? Perhaps. How do any of us know? But I prefer to imagine a universe where G-d gets to be free from sin and death, along with G-d's faithful - where for G-d and for the faithful, such things slip into the oblivion of the past.

[TK]

excellent point, KP. wonder what CS lewis would say to this objection-- i believe he subscribed to the God is "outside time" theory.


TK

[Erik]

I don't see any reason to assume that the new heavens and the new earth are the same spacetime we are currently in. Neither do I suppose that they will be exactly like the ones we have now.

It's so easy to fall into thinking in time referents. When all are finally at peace with God, He will not be experiencing anything that troubles him from "the past." To me, thinking this way about God is to disrespectfully assign human weakness and concerns to Him. Even if He was inside of time, I don't see how a perfect God with perfect memory could possibly have the passage of time soften the "pain" of the clear memory of past rebellion. Whatever pain he might feel from it, he is equal to the task without needing forgetfulness to ease some kind of discomfort.

I am rather more of the opinion that God, through His sovereign plan, will in some way remake time and our lives, or erase past evil in some way. Bundled up with this is how He can cause or allow such terrible pain, yet still not be guilty of "the ends justify the means," since in my book, they don't.

I doubt our past corruption could in any way trouble God's "future" peace.

[kaufmannphillips]

Erik wrote:
I don't see any reason to assume that the new heavens and the new earth are the same spacetime we are currently in. Neither do I suppose that they will be exactly like the ones we have now.

It's so easy to fall into thinking in time referents.

It's also easy to fall into indulgence of fancy.

When hypothesizing a future beyond this spacetime, one faces a key question: is the authentic Christian narrative about an abandonment of this world, or about the redemption of this world?

Erik wrote:
When all are finally at peace with God, He will not be experiencing anything that troubles him from "the past." To me, thinking this way about God is to disrespectfully assign human weakness and concerns to Him.

Are grief, sympathy, and outrage at injustice to be regarded as weaknesses and shabby concerns?

Erik wrote:
Even if He was inside of time, I don't see how a perfect God with perfect memory could possibly have the passage of time soften the "pain" of the clear memory of past rebellion.

One is on treacherous ground when imagining G-d based upon one's notion of perfection.

But revisiting a perfectly clear memory does not equate to an immediate experience. A perfectly remembered event can only be engaged as a memory, but an immediate event can be engaged in its actuality. And a perfectly remembered event is yet only a shadow of what has existed, while an immediate event is fully extant. For better and for worse, the passage of time constrains actuality and transforms existence.

Erik wrote:
Whatever pain he might feel from it, he is equal to the task without needing forgetfulness to ease some kind of discomfort.

Freedom from pain is not merely a question of tolerance or need. Let us imagine that you have some sort of nervous condition where you experience chronic pain. The pain is not debilitating to you, and you can perform all of your requisite duties, but it is unpleasant. In the world to come, would you expect to retain this condition, even though you are equal to enduring it and do not need to be free from it?

Erik wrote:
I am rather more of the opinion that God, through His sovereign plan, will in some way remake time and our lives, or erase past evil in some way.

Perhaps by pounding on a nuclear device with a rock?

Time naturally obliviates the past, and affords the transformation of the present. Nothing more fanciful is needed.

Erik wrote:
Bundled up with this is how He can cause or allow such terrible pain, yet still not be guilty of "the ends justify the means," since in my book, they don't.

G-d may have a different book.

When there are no alternate means, and when ends are truly necessary, then ends do justify means. Then again - when means are of negligible significance, they do not need to be justified.

[Erik]

is the authentic Christian narrative about an abandonment of this world, or about the redemption of this world

I am thrown off by phrases like "the authentic Christian narrative." What narrative? How do you decide whether it's authentic? If you're trying to ask "what it's all about," it's about relationship with God. That time/space/heaven/earth is all tied up in it is, in my mind, secondary, even in the case of a possible view of God's ultimate purposes working at the level of creation rather than individuals: people are the pinnacle of creation, Jesus died and rose for people (not rocks or spacetime), and a new heaven and a new earth without new people would be pure nothings.

Are grief, sympathy, and outrage at injustice to be regarded as weaknesses and shabby concerns?

You misunderstand. That God experiences something of these (though we have to be careful about what of our own experience we project into His) I do not doubt. That they trouble Him in a way so that He needs the passage of time to diminish them is what clearly (to me) maligns God. This idea, to me, makes God some kind of shrinking violet, far less than Absolute Master of All. God is a bit depressed and under the weather now, but will "feel better" given enough time? No way.

One is on treacherous ground when imagining G-d based upon one's notion of perfection.

You're imagining on exactly the same scale as I am! You're also indulging in fancy, but (in my opinion) giving far weaker support for your position. You fancy that God's immediate experience of what we think of as negative emotions is somehow worse for him than past experience of those same emotions. How curiously like man you make God. Even a God inside of time would be time's master, but you are painting a picture rather more like time being God's master.

But revisiting a perfectly clear memory does not equate to an immediate experience. A perfectly remembered event can only be engaged as a memory, but an immediate event can be engaged in its actuality. And a perfectly remembered event is yet only a shadow of what has existed, while an immediate event is fully extant. For better and for worse, the passage of time constrains actuality and transforms existence.

Honestly, you're sounding really far "out there" to me. "An immediate event is full extant" for God, but God's remembered events are only shadows, and the passage of time constrains His actuality and transforms His existence. Whoaaaaah. I have to mention "indulgence of fantasy" again. Your knowledge of what time does to you does not necessarily have much relevance to what it does to God (if He is inside of or subject to time in some way).

Freedom from pain is not merely a question of tolerance or need. Let us imagine that you have some sort of nervous condition where you experience chronic pain. The pain is not debilitating to you, and you can perform all of your requisite duties, but it is unpleasant. In the world to come, would you expect to retain this condition, even though you are equal to enduring it and do not need to be free from it?

I am not God. The Bible is clear that God will wipe away every tear, to me a clear meaning that pain will be gone (or transformed in some way so that it is not the same beast as it was). While I believe that God does feel emotional pain over the sins of His created people (sort of automatically making it impossible for me to be a good Calvinist of any kind), I don't think this pain is unpleasant to God in the same way that pain is unpleasant to you or me. When God enters pain it is by His foreknowledge and in accord with his ultimate Divine Will. We experience all kinds of unavoidable pain that we wish we didn't experience. But God intentionally entered pain in a clear plan to work out His own will for His own purposes to His own glory.

Before creating the universe, God knew man would fall, knew He would feel this emotional pain, knew the eventual need for Jesus' sacrifice to right it all again. So in your book, you imagine Him thinking, "well, it's going to feel real real bad, and this will be so intolerably unpleasant, but thank God—er, Myself—that in time it will simply become a memory and no longer 'fully extant' so it won't feel so bad for Me any more." Sorry, man, I can't accept that kind of reasoning. It diminishes God to be the same kind of victim of His feelings that we are. Life is so much about discarding the apparent primacy of pain in favor of the reality of eternity. We are stuck in our broken, fallen humanity, in a fallen world, and pain seems so important, so immediate, so strong and powerful. But it is as nothing to be compared to what is to come. So then, when you paint God as somehow suffering in the same way through all this, you place God not only firmly inside of time but also firmly inside of His own fallen creation, which cannot be. Creation is fallen, but God is not.

Time naturally obliviates the past, and affords the transformation of the present. Nothing more fanciful is needed.

Where does your insight into this nature of time come from? And what makes you say that your understanding of this nature applies to God? God needs no "obliviation" of His past, nor a transformation of His present, nor reassurance about His future. I really think you're allowing experience to take you too far. Experience is very important and can teach us things about reality, but experience is itself not ultimate, universal reality, nor can human experience ever be automatically assumed to apply to God.

When there are no alternate means, and when ends are truly necessary, then ends do justify means. Then again - when means are of negligible significance, they do not need to be justified.

I think you don't get the saying of "the ends don't justify the means." I also think it's important to explore what necessity means in the context of God's creation of everything (and its foreseen fallenness). God did not need to create us at all.

Look at it this way: God cannot do evil in order to do good, because a good end cannot make an evil means also good. If some terrorist tried to force me to to shoot my innocent son in the head in order to save a million people from vaporization, I would not do it. It would only be "necessary" within the accepted context of the terrorist's plan; his action to vaporize a million people would be his own evil, not mine. My action to not kill my son would be good, and saving a million people could never make it good. What I propose is that God can simultaneously "shoot my son in the head" yet orchestrate all events so that He participated in no evil. From my limited perspective, I cannot see now how God could possibly make that happen, but I trust that He will: when all is said and done, God's hands will remain unstained by evil. One way for Him to do that might be to raise my son from the dead and transform our memory (or even the event in past time) so that we took no damage.

Think of a movie that has many twists and turns. You watch it, thinking how terrible it is that the protagonist's wife is killed, that he is falsely accused of treason by the government and shot in the leg and chased into hiding, all sorts of bad things. Then the twist comes and you have to remake your understanding of all the events. Perhaps part of the movie was only virtual reality, or the man travels through time and fixes all the problems, or his wife wasn't really dead and the government had to put on a show to catch a whole ring of supervillains, but now the man is a hero, gets a completely regrown body (fixing his leg and more), plus a billion dollars and so on.

You also find out that he was specially trained for the mission, agreed to embark on it, and intentionally had his memories erased so he could play the part of the victim more believably. It's not that the ends of the good things justified all the rest: his wife was never killed, or he changed the timeline. And he went into it knowingly, and in the end when his memories are fully regained he gains new perspective on the terror he felt, reinterpeting those events in light of his training and choice to go through it all. Your own understanding of the movie is also remade: the second time you watch it, you don't experience the same distress as you did the first time.

This time you see the evidences of the real future that's coming. Aha! Now you see the van driving his supposedly dead wife away to safety. Now you see the government officials that seemingly wanted the man dead also ensuring that he is not actually killed and also protecting him from the real supervillains. The means that the unwise watcher witnesses (that is, unwise to the ultimate story) are false, and different from the true means that you witness the second time around! It is no wonder they would call them evil, not yet knowing the real story. God, seeing the movie the first time, never experiences the same trouble that an unwitting first-time watcher would. He is in the position of the person watching the second time: still sympathizing with the man's distress and pain, but needing no sympathy Himself, understanding all in the proper context.

When the world asks how a good God can allow evil, God will, in my opinion, not use the sophistry of "the ends justified the means" but will reveal something amazing that changes it all so that all evil only accrues to the guilty (not God) and all pain has been transformed or remade into something good, exactly like my movie analogy above.

I also believe that God Himself will stand apart from this transformation, needing no remaking or forgetfulness or passage of time to fix anything. God has emotions, but no emotional problems, and he doesn't need to see the movie the second time to get His understanding remade. No, He remakes our understanding, instead.