God and Time
Augustine wrote famously in his Confessions book X that "I know what time is, until someone asks me about it, and then I cannot explain its existence." [paraphrased]. The Augustinian conundrum appears to be a fairly common malady, for exactly just what time is is highly ambiguous. In a famous exchange between Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, and Gottfried Leibniz, the three argued whether time (and space) were absolutes, existing independent of the bodies which they contained (Newton and Clarke both argued for this view) or whether or not space and time were nothing more than descriptive of relations between bodies, there being no absolute reference frame of "time," nor "space," within which objects moved. This both anticipated the now famous transition from Lorentzian relativity at the end of the 19th century (which still assumed some sort of Newtonian absolute space and time) to Einsteinian relativity, which, like Leibniz, argued that space and time were merely the function of relative trajectories among different bodies or focii with no absolute reference point. But also in its own way, the Newton-Clarke-Leibniz debate replicated a particular and ancient dilemma posed earlier by the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus to the Aristotelian tradition of philosophers, who wrote that time is a measurement of the motion of the celestial bodies. Yet, as Plotinus pointed out, motion presupposes time, so that the definition of time by the mere invocation of motion created an entirely circular definition (which is the same peculiarity we have today when time is referenced by the constant of the speed of light--the question of time itself has, in the words of Heidegger, "been forgotten.").
But of course despite the elusive nature of the concept "time," itself, whatever its philosophical or ontological reality, its everyday existence seems perfectly obvious, right? Of course there is such a thing as time, or passage, or decay, or movement. To deny such would generally be to trade in absurdities, and perhaps even to be seen as completely nuts (its probably no coincidence that Nietzsche's madman in The Joyful Science notes that the world only reels to and fro, but does not observably go anywhere, and even less coincidence, as I briefly point out at the end of this note, that this reeling only occurs after God's death). Yet the concept itself is hardly as obvious as we would have ourselves believe, and philosophers have regularly questioned the concept as a useful, mutually shared fiction (much like currency in economics, it only works because we think it works!). The most famous example (though general invoked in relation to "motion) are Zeno's "paradoxes," as recorded in Aristotle's Physics (there are nine paradoxes, though only two of them are any good). Following the 5th century b.c.e. Eleatic philosopher Parmenides, who argued that nothing truly ever entered into or fell away from, existence (since nothing and something are not, argues Parmenides, convertible with eachother--meaning they are quite different from one another--something cannot come from nothing, and something cannot become nothing, which means always there was the one thing, Existence), Zeno (or Xeno) argued--using the analogy of Achilles running after a tortoise--that movement (and so, also, time) does not exist. For Achilles to catch the tortoise ahead of him, he would first (logically) have to cross half the distance. But then again, he would have to cross half of that distance, and half again, and so on ad infinitum. But of course by this logic Achilles could never actually arrive at the tortoise but only asymptotically approach it. And yet of course Achilles, in reality, would catch the tortoise--we ourselves catch up to things all the time. Yet Zeno, valuing the logic of the argument, and devaluing knowledge from the senses, said that our senses deceive us and there is no actual motion, for reality is One. Parmenides would have been proud of his student, yet few have found the arguments compelling enough to be more than an intellectual curiosity. In fact it would be equally as expedient to argue, given Zeno's illustration, that since we do perceive ourselves as catching up to things reality itself is not infinitely divisible into parts, rendering the logic of the illustration moot. Zeno's argument is really not a matter of sound logic so much as it is clearly favoring one side of the evidence.
Moving forward in time (maybe?), David Hume--arguing against the vaunted arrogance of the empiricists, who thought everything could be proven empirically, through the senses, via science-- pointed out that in fact the empiricists stood on ground much more unsure than they cared to admit, and that we can never know "causation," empirically because we never perceive the cause itself merely the "constant conjunction of events," which, through inference, causes are assumed (which did not mean that Hume thought the idea of cause was useless--quite the opposite. Merely that it is a useful fiction which makes science possible). Less well known is the implication that Hume draws from this argument that time itself is an illusion in the same way "causes" are: we never "perceive," transitions from one moment to the next, in reality, Hume says, echoing in his own way Augustine and foreshadowing later William James, we in actuality merely perceive punctiliar moments that the brain, through conjunction, posits together in a continuum. The philosopher Immanuel Kant took up this line of inquiry from Hume. In a nutshell Kant argued that "time," (as we perceive it) does not exist as anything more than a category of our understanding of the world (in his exaggerated language, time is phenomenal rather than noumenal). The difference between Hume and Kant on this score is that while both thought tim was merely an effect of the intellect, Hume believed this was inductively produced from constant observation of the world, while Kant believed the notion of time was deductive, hardwired into the very way we understand, and so a function of the brains active organization of the sensory.
Recently In a famous paper published in 1908, J.M.E. McTaggart argued that there is in fact no such thing as time, and that the appearance of a temporal order to the world is a mere appearance. Different from his long line of predecessors who questioned the obviousness of our everyday experience of time, yet nonetheless carrying on their quest, McTaggart produced his argument based on an analysis of tenses in language. McTaggart begins his argument by distinguishing two ways in which positions in time can be ordered. First, he says, positions in time can be ordered according to their possession of properties like being two days future, being one day future, being present, being one day past, etc. (These properties are often referred to now as “A properties.”) The focus on these "A properties of time," should emphasize being two days future, as McTaggart is, in using this phrase, indicating the phrase is saying that the thing exists two days in the future, or has the property of "two-days in the future-ness". (This is bizarre, but stay with me, it will hopefully make more sense).
That seems counterintuitive, right? Of course when we want to say time exists we dont mean, when talking about things in the future that there is a thing called future actually existing already ahead of us, in which future-things exist and have the attribute of being future, right? I know I dont normally mean that. Which brings us to what McTaggart calls B-series attributes like two days earlier than, one day earlier than, simultaneous with, etc. In this case, B-series time is indicating merely a relation of these things to our current state. B-series tends to represent the more unreflected, everyday use of the term. And yet this is exactly the trap McTaggart has set with his paradox.
McTaggart argues that for time to actually exist (to be "real," and not merely "perception," like Zeno, Hume, Kant, et al argue) it would have to be time as indicated by the A-series. Why must it be the A-series for time to be real, you ask? Good question! McTaggart argues B-series time (which, recall, is only relative to any given "now") cannot describe motion, since it never records motion, simply the moment of the "Now" of the observer who is understanding things as past or future relative to their own immediately present moment. Again we are back to the idea that time is mere perception, that transition is illusion, or, perhaps, convenient fiction. Thus, for time to be real, McTaggart notes, it must be A-series, which is to say things would have to actually exist as future-things, and past-things, and present-things (picture, if you will, time as a line extending infinitely in two directions, and a dot on that line is you in your present moment. McTaggart argues A-series time means the whole line of time always exists for time to be real). Yet here the problem comes up.
If time is A-series, then a contradiction appears according to McTaggert. If time only exists because things have time-properties as part of their existence (i.e. there are things actually future, approaching the present, being present, and receding into the past, but all equally "exist") then the A series is inherently contradictory. For (he says) the different A properties (being future, being present, etc...) are incompatible with one another. (No time can be both future and past, for example.) Nevertheless, he insists, each time in the A series must possess all of the different A properties. (Since a time that is future will be present, and then past, and then further past, and so on.) McTaggart thus concludes only the B-series "works," and thus time is not real, but linguistic (or perceptual) convention (this is perhaps a conclusion that comes from Einsteinian relativity as well).
Certainly not conclusive (analytical philosophy of time has become something of a hot-topic amongst philosophers, and certainly a majority have moved beyond some of the antinomies briefly spoken of in review here) yet, if we can learn anything from this, it is that often reality--especially that reality we take so for granted--is often something that itself is taken on faith as the presupposition for the possibility of experience at all. It should be noted, if I am allowed to preach for a moment, that in this "faith," and "common sense," or "everyday experience" are actually synonymous rather than, as is so often presented in popular culture, oppose. Hence we are back to where we started, with Augustine's "I dont know what time is." Yet in saying this Augustine--as Pannenberg argues--invokes the very notion of time as a sacral space itself indicating a relationship to God (who is, for Augustine, and Pannenberg) the only sensible explanation for the perceived continuity of ourselves as continuing through time. But this means, as Catherine Pickstock, John Milbank, Michael Hanby, and David Bentley Hart argued recently (referring to Aquinas, Maurice Blondel, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa as their exemplars, respectively) that our everyday existence is itself a doxology, an orientation to the infinite, a disequilibrium and displacement in our movement "toward" God, whose continuity can only be established extra se by referencing something infinitely greater than the self in faith. The supposed obviousness of the very "facticity" of the common world that post-Enlightenment science has supposedly turned against religion and against the concept of "faith," as opposed to "fact", showing the world's voice--as a collection of science facts-- is muted in regards to God because the divine is everywhere absent among the facts, is itself perhaps nothing more than an illusion constructed through the very forgetting of our questionability, our worlds own mystery, and non-obvious nature.
But of course despite the elusive nature of the concept "time," itself, whatever its philosophical or ontological reality, its everyday existence seems perfectly obvious, right? Of course there is such a thing as time, or passage, or decay, or movement. To deny such would generally be to trade in absurdities, and perhaps even to be seen as completely nuts (its probably no coincidence that Nietzsche's madman in The Joyful Science notes that the world only reels to and fro, but does not observably go anywhere, and even less coincidence, as I briefly point out at the end of this note, that this reeling only occurs after God's death). Yet the concept itself is hardly as obvious as we would have ourselves believe, and philosophers have regularly questioned the concept as a useful, mutually shared fiction (much like currency in economics, it only works because we think it works!). The most famous example (though general invoked in relation to "motion) are Zeno's "paradoxes," as recorded in Aristotle's Physics (there are nine paradoxes, though only two of them are any good). Following the 5th century b.c.e. Eleatic philosopher Parmenides, who argued that nothing truly ever entered into or fell away from, existence (since nothing and something are not, argues Parmenides, convertible with eachother--meaning they are quite different from one another--something cannot come from nothing, and something cannot become nothing, which means always there was the one thing, Existence), Zeno (or Xeno) argued--using the analogy of Achilles running after a tortoise--that movement (and so, also, time) does not exist. For Achilles to catch the tortoise ahead of him, he would first (logically) have to cross half the distance. But then again, he would have to cross half of that distance, and half again, and so on ad infinitum. But of course by this logic Achilles could never actually arrive at the tortoise but only asymptotically approach it. And yet of course Achilles, in reality, would catch the tortoise--we ourselves catch up to things all the time. Yet Zeno, valuing the logic of the argument, and devaluing knowledge from the senses, said that our senses deceive us and there is no actual motion, for reality is One. Parmenides would have been proud of his student, yet few have found the arguments compelling enough to be more than an intellectual curiosity. In fact it would be equally as expedient to argue, given Zeno's illustration, that since we do perceive ourselves as catching up to things reality itself is not infinitely divisible into parts, rendering the logic of the illustration moot. Zeno's argument is really not a matter of sound logic so much as it is clearly favoring one side of the evidence.
Moving forward in time (maybe?), David Hume--arguing against the vaunted arrogance of the empiricists, who thought everything could be proven empirically, through the senses, via science-- pointed out that in fact the empiricists stood on ground much more unsure than they cared to admit, and that we can never know "causation," empirically because we never perceive the cause itself merely the "constant conjunction of events," which, through inference, causes are assumed (which did not mean that Hume thought the idea of cause was useless--quite the opposite. Merely that it is a useful fiction which makes science possible). Less well known is the implication that Hume draws from this argument that time itself is an illusion in the same way "causes" are: we never "perceive," transitions from one moment to the next, in reality, Hume says, echoing in his own way Augustine and foreshadowing later William James, we in actuality merely perceive punctiliar moments that the brain, through conjunction, posits together in a continuum. The philosopher Immanuel Kant took up this line of inquiry from Hume. In a nutshell Kant argued that "time," (as we perceive it) does not exist as anything more than a category of our understanding of the world (in his exaggerated language, time is phenomenal rather than noumenal). The difference between Hume and Kant on this score is that while both thought tim was merely an effect of the intellect, Hume believed this was inductively produced from constant observation of the world, while Kant believed the notion of time was deductive, hardwired into the very way we understand, and so a function of the brains active organization of the sensory.
Recently In a famous paper published in 1908, J.M.E. McTaggart argued that there is in fact no such thing as time, and that the appearance of a temporal order to the world is a mere appearance. Different from his long line of predecessors who questioned the obviousness of our everyday experience of time, yet nonetheless carrying on their quest, McTaggart produced his argument based on an analysis of tenses in language. McTaggart begins his argument by distinguishing two ways in which positions in time can be ordered. First, he says, positions in time can be ordered according to their possession of properties like being two days future, being one day future, being present, being one day past, etc. (These properties are often referred to now as “A properties.”) The focus on these "A properties of time," should emphasize being two days future, as McTaggart is, in using this phrase, indicating the phrase is saying that the thing exists two days in the future, or has the property of "two-days in the future-ness". (This is bizarre, but stay with me, it will hopefully make more sense).
That seems counterintuitive, right? Of course when we want to say time exists we dont mean, when talking about things in the future that there is a thing called future actually existing already ahead of us, in which future-things exist and have the attribute of being future, right? I know I dont normally mean that. Which brings us to what McTaggart calls B-series attributes like two days earlier than, one day earlier than, simultaneous with, etc. In this case, B-series time is indicating merely a relation of these things to our current state. B-series tends to represent the more unreflected, everyday use of the term. And yet this is exactly the trap McTaggart has set with his paradox.
McTaggart argues that for time to actually exist (to be "real," and not merely "perception," like Zeno, Hume, Kant, et al argue) it would have to be time as indicated by the A-series. Why must it be the A-series for time to be real, you ask? Good question! McTaggart argues B-series time (which, recall, is only relative to any given "now") cannot describe motion, since it never records motion, simply the moment of the "Now" of the observer who is understanding things as past or future relative to their own immediately present moment. Again we are back to the idea that time is mere perception, that transition is illusion, or, perhaps, convenient fiction. Thus, for time to be real, McTaggart notes, it must be A-series, which is to say things would have to actually exist as future-things, and past-things, and present-things (picture, if you will, time as a line extending infinitely in two directions, and a dot on that line is you in your present moment. McTaggart argues A-series time means the whole line of time always exists for time to be real). Yet here the problem comes up.
If time is A-series, then a contradiction appears according to McTaggert. If time only exists because things have time-properties as part of their existence (i.e. there are things actually future, approaching the present, being present, and receding into the past, but all equally "exist") then the A series is inherently contradictory. For (he says) the different A properties (being future, being present, etc...) are incompatible with one another. (No time can be both future and past, for example.) Nevertheless, he insists, each time in the A series must possess all of the different A properties. (Since a time that is future will be present, and then past, and then further past, and so on.) McTaggart thus concludes only the B-series "works," and thus time is not real, but linguistic (or perceptual) convention (this is perhaps a conclusion that comes from Einsteinian relativity as well).
Certainly not conclusive (analytical philosophy of time has become something of a hot-topic amongst philosophers, and certainly a majority have moved beyond some of the antinomies briefly spoken of in review here) yet, if we can learn anything from this, it is that often reality--especially that reality we take so for granted--is often something that itself is taken on faith as the presupposition for the possibility of experience at all. It should be noted, if I am allowed to preach for a moment, that in this "faith," and "common sense," or "everyday experience" are actually synonymous rather than, as is so often presented in popular culture, oppose. Hence we are back to where we started, with Augustine's "I dont know what time is." Yet in saying this Augustine--as Pannenberg argues--invokes the very notion of time as a sacral space itself indicating a relationship to God (who is, for Augustine, and Pannenberg) the only sensible explanation for the perceived continuity of ourselves as continuing through time. But this means, as Catherine Pickstock, John Milbank, Michael Hanby, and David Bentley Hart argued recently (referring to Aquinas, Maurice Blondel, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa as their exemplars, respectively) that our everyday existence is itself a doxology, an orientation to the infinite, a disequilibrium and displacement in our movement "toward" God, whose continuity can only be established extra se by referencing something infinitely greater than the self in faith. The supposed obviousness of the very "facticity" of the common world that post-Enlightenment science has supposedly turned against religion and against the concept of "faith," as opposed to "fact", showing the world's voice--as a collection of science facts-- is muted in regards to God because the divine is everywhere absent among the facts, is itself perhaps nothing more than an illusion constructed through the very forgetting of our questionability, our worlds own mystery, and non-obvious nature.
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