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Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Theological Q&A > (No Subject)
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ReasonableDoubt
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 655
| Posted 1/28/2003 5:37 AM (GMT -6) |   | "Einstein's first major contribution to the study of time occurred when he revolutionized physics with his "special theory of relativity" by showing how time changes with motion. Today, scientists do not see problems of time or motion as "absolute" with a single correct answer. Because time is relative to the speed one is traveling at, there can never be a clock at the center of the universe to which everyone can set their watches. Your entire life is the blink of an eye to an alien traveling close to the speed of light. Today, Newtonian mechanics have become a special case within Einstein's theory of relativity. Einstein's relativity will eventually become a subset of a new science more comprehensive in its description of the fabric of our universe."
"Your entire life is the blink of an eye to an alien traveling close to the speed of light."
Cannot God travel at the speed of light? Or is that not possible for him? If it is, then why isn't our life time just a blink of an eye to Him?
I am sure I am oversimplifying this- so help me out! Thanks
"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher."
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) | | Back to Top | | |
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Starkman
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Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1747
| Posted 1/28/2003 6:38 AM (GMT -6) | | God can't travel anywhere: He already be there!
(That's my imput, that's all I can say on this, cuz I don't know no more!)
Starkman
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a_theist
"Thy will be done."
Date Joined Dec 2002
Total Posts : 286
| Posted 1/28/2003 6:40 AM (GMT -6) | | You are really pulling out all the guns you can that go against open theism,aren't ya?
Here are a few questions:
1.Is God presently (future-tense for me; future perfect (?) for God?) comforting me while I will pray (?) to him?
2. What is the point for God to speed ahead into the future?
"14 And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. 16God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. "
Was this the point of conception he could (for lack of a better word) zooooom into the future and check out what was going to happens so he could say, "it is good"? Could God have done that before he created light?
3. There is an interesting book--which I own--called, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, which was recommended to Doc and others to read a while back. I haven't read the time part, but I know that they view it as a metaphor, and not an "actual entity." Maybe you should check it out.
OK, time to stop pretending like I know what I am talking about.
Peace
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is nothing to write home about either.
-Daniel C. Dennett
Edited by - A_Theist on 01/28/2003 11:43:59 AM | | Back to Top | | |
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GregBoyd
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Total Posts : 1818
| Posted 1/28/2003 8:27 PM (GMT -6) | | Philosophy in the Flesh is excellent on showing how our metaphors on time, when taken literally, result in all sorts of impossible philosophical quagmires. Among other things, it leads us to think that the future is "there" as an existing thing before it IS there.
On the Relativity thing: NOTHING in Einsteins theory suggests that the future already exists for some point of reference. It simply shows that how (when) any FINITE point of references experiences other FINITE points of references is relative to their relative locations and velocity. As several have insightfully noted, it says nothing about how an omnipresence being would experience the whole of reality. An omnipresent being would experience the whole of reality CO-TERMINOUS with EVERY finite point of reference, and thus COULD and WOULD experience a "NOW" for "THE COSMOS AS A WHOLE" -- a "NOW" that would have a PAST and a FUTURE.
Doc
ps. The best book I've ever read on this topic is William Lane Craigs Time and Eternity. His chapters on Einstein are truly insightful.
"In Christ...the ONLY THING that matters is faith energized by love." Galatians 5:6
Edited by - GregBoyd on 01/29/2003 01:28:17 AM | | Back to Top | | |
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a_theist
"Thy will be done."
Date Joined Dec 2002
Total Posts : 286
| Posted 1/28/2003 9:56 PM (GMT -6) | | I own Time and Eternity as well, but his views on forknowledge are different than the open view.
Doc, could one refashion craig's ideas on God's relationship with time towards an open theism metaphysics without compromising his beliefs on time? (I hope I said that right.)
Basically, would adoptin this books beliefs on time compormise one's view of open theism?
Thanks,
Paul
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is nothing to write home about either.
Daniel C. Dennett
Edited by - A_Theist on 01/29/2003 03:02:28 AM | | Back to Top | | |
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Matthew Timothy Short
Huh?
Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 635
| Posted 1/29/2003 12:21 AM (GMT -6) | | 1Cr 8:2 And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 1/29/2003 12:42 AM (GMT -6) | | Gina-
An excellent book to check out on this (as if you don’t have any reading material!  ) would be William Lane Craig’s Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2001). Relativity applies to finite observers, not to an omnipresent observer (God). For us finite observers, dependant on the speed of light for the relaying of information, time is relative. But for God, who is not dependant upon the speed of light for acquiring information but who is everywhere present, information doesn’t travel from it’s source to him at the speed of light. God’s knowledge is immediate and unmediated. So though our finite, localized perspectives yield measurements of time relative to speed and relation to one another, God’s perspective encompasses all our “moments” in one, single, moment. Since he is omnipresent, time is not relative for God.
Tom
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a_theist
"Thy will be done."
Date Joined Dec 2002
Total Posts : 286
| Posted 1/29/2003 2:00 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
An excellent book to check out on this (as if you don’t have any reading material! ) would be William Lane Craig’s Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2001).
Did you notice Doc recommended that book to her three posts ago?
LOL
Peace
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is nothing to write home about either.
Daniel C. Dennett
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Tom
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Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 1/29/2003 3:41 AM (GMT -6) | | Paul: Did you notice Doc recommended that book to her three posts ago? LOL
Tom: No. Wasn't paying attention! So what's new!
Tom
Love never ends | | Back to Top | | |
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ReasonableDoubt
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 655
| Posted 1/29/2003 3:42 AM (GMT -6) | | | Tim- do you have a point in posting Bible verses? I am familiar with Scriptures, thanks. | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 1/29/2003 4:58 PM (GMT -6) | | This tread began specifically focused on God within time, traveling at the speed of light.
quote:
ReasonableDoubt : Cannot God travel at the speed of light? Or is that not possible for him? If it is, then why isn't our life time just a blink of an eye to Him?
Starkman seemed to have a good answer: God can't travel anywhere: He already be there!
Doc took it another step, to the realm of Einstein.
quote:
Philosophy in the Flesh is excellent on showing how our metaphors on time, when taken literally, result in all sorts of impossible philosophical quagmires. Among other things, it leads us to think that the future is "there" as an existing thing before it IS there.
On the Relativity thing: NOTHING in Einstein's theory suggests that the future already exists for some point of reference. It simply shows that how (when) any FINITE point of references experiences other FINITE points of references is relative to their relative locations and velocity. As several have insightfully noted, it says nothing about how an omnipresence being would experience the whole of reality. An omnipresent being would experience the whole of reality CO-TERMINOUS with EVERY finite point of reference, and thus COULD and WOULD experience a "NOW" for "THE COSMOS AS A WHOLE" -- a "NOW" that would have a PAST and a FUTURE.
Doc
Worth repeating: "how an omnipresence being would experience the whole of reality … experience the whole of reality co-terminous with every finite point of reference, and thus could and would experience a "now" for "the cosmos as a whole" -- a "now" that would have a past and a future."
That's an "omnipresent" being, and that omnipresent being's experience of time.
With THAT said, I'd like to revisit Starkman's contribution. Starky said "God can't travel anywhere: He already be there!" And I think that we knew what he meant. We can, perhaps say that most clearly when we say the negative: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" Psalm 139:7 In saying what is not true and in digging a protective trench we begin to see the truth. There is no "place" that we can go that we flee God's presence.
But we also must resist the temptation to define God's being and God's operations in merely nominal terms, as being the "sum of all the places He is." That is to quantify God, and to ultimately make God to be part of His Creation. That is not the Psalmists gist. The Psalmist continuing, says: 16Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance; And in thy book they were all written, [Even] the days that were ordained [for me], When as yet there was none of them. 17How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! The Psalmist conveys most powerfully that it is God's "thoughts of him" that are precious. Ordained is something personal, and not nominal. This is not a deterministic passage. But neither is it nominalistic. So, as Starkman said, "God is already there." But "there" and all the other "theres" does not exhaust God's being or His operations.
That leads back to what Doc relayed regarding Einstein.
By virtue of being omnipresent, that being still experienced time only as now, remembers the past, and anticipating the future seeing it emerge as now only to slip immediately into the past.
I can't help but think that God acting in Creation acts in the now. Everywhere. Yet in addition to that we also have what the Psalmist voices: "(God's) eyes did see mine unformed substance." That unformed substance is neither here nor there, but is very surely in God's eyes. Before he ever was, God had thoughts of him.
All the "theres" and all the "nows" do not sum up God. God acts in creation, in time, in places. But as Creator he is not measured by them. God is too wonderful.
There is an analogy. Only an analogy. But in Math there is the work of Godel. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is an example for us of how: " You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules an axioms, but by doing so you'll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical system of any complexity are, by definition, incomplete; each of them contains, at any given time, more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own defining set of rules." (Jones and Wilson, An Incomplete Education)
An important tradition ... the apophatic tradition. Apophatism is not ignorance or mysticism. It is the refusal to exhaust truth with its expressions. … constantly use antinomies and think in tensions in order to approach the ineffable. Dionysius the Areopagite says "to the Cause of everything which transcends everything, suits the anonymity and at the same time all the names of all the beings." (Argyris Nicolaidis)
From that we can think back to the Psalmist. The "anonymity" of God's wonderfulness, even before our being does not prevent us from celebrating that precious wonder. The wonder of the One who names all and speaks all into being. The Cause of everything Who transcends everything.
All of creation, its time and its locations are incomplete. They do not point only to themselves. They do not explain themselves. Absolutely necessary is recognition that transcending it, yet intimately involved with it is God.
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 1/30/2003 2:17 AM (GMT -6) | | Doc: ps. The best book I've ever read on this topic is William Lane Craigs Time and Eternity. His chapters on Einstein are truly insightful.
Tom: I just read Craig's chapter on Relativity (STR and GTR) again. It really is excellent, Gina. Doc hit the nail on the head. God is not a finite observer and doesn't depend on the speed of light for his information. He is the universal clock that encompasses all our finite measurements. WE can never discover absolute, metaphysical time by means of experiment, but there's nothing about STR that requires us to abandon belief in it.
Tom
Love never ends
Edited by - TGB on 01/30/2003 10:40:06 AM | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 1/30/2003 11:35 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom: "He is the universal clock that encompasses all our finite measurements."
Al: That is a clip from a larger paragraph. Fairness dictates that I do not tack Tom down to that clip as though it was a stand-alone statement. And, personally, I don't think that that exhausts ALL of what the gentleman serving the Lord in the Middle East believes.
I'm guessing that Tom (who can speak for himself) thinks that thw word "is" belongs in small-case and not CAPS. Or, said another way, The universal clock is IN God. But God is not coterminous with the universal clock.
Taken that way I very much like what Tom said.
Seems to me that to read it the other way would be the domain of Process Philosophy -- of which I'm no expert.
But read as I've cast it, it indicates (as I think Tom does in choosing the word "encompasses") that God transcends his Creation, all the while operating in it too.
Al
Edited by - Al2Si2H4O9 on 01/30/2003 10:38:38 PM | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 1/30/2003 5:50 PM (GMT -6) | | OK, this has been bugging me all day. I wrote: The universal clock is IN God. But God is not coterminous with the universal clock. Do I need to revisit that? Hmmm...
That "IN" sounds wrong somehow. Get what I mean? A little creepy that a clock is in God. No. That's not it. Taken too literally -- the most likely way it might be taken -- it could say that Creation is just a part of something larger. Sounds like a Matrix thing? Ooops.
When I wrote it the word choice was more of an artistic thing. "IN" felt like a good way to convey that God SPOKE the Word for Creation. So I'm guilty of an anthropomorphization. (Is that a word?) My words come out of my mouth -- so they come from "IN" me.
But there are some things that seem worth pondering. Creation isn't really "IN" God. But God is "IN" Creation. In every way, God's word gives Creation its nature, and sustains it. That's something.
Coming back to Tom's phrase: it is poetic.
Al
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PotOnWheel
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Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 1/31/2003 1:15 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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