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| Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > The raging debate continues here... > Eternity: Timelessness or Never Ending Time?? | Forum Quick Jump
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Joe McCowan
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2008
Total Posts : 39
| Posted 3/26/2008 12:18 PM (GMT -6) |   |
readingagoodbook said...God is dynamic, but time is a creation. Time can be seen as being an expression of that dynamism, but that dynamism is not caused by time.
If God is dynamic, time is simply the means of differentiating particular moments of His existence. Time is the result of God being dynamic, but they are not mutually exclusive. For God to live in time, He must be dynamic. For God to be dynamic, He must live in time. One is not the product of the other, they are merely two observations of the same truth.
Grace and Peace, Joe | | Back to Top | | |
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jessemorrell
Registered Member
Date Joined Sep 2007
Total Posts : 77
| Posted 3/26/2008 5:20 PM (GMT -6) | | Time is linear sequence, linear duration, linear succession. To be outside of time is to be frozen. To be in time is to be dynamic, active, with the ability to think, feel, and decide.
In order for God to create anything, God must be a linear being, since creation requires activity, and activity cannot occur without time. The concept of God creating time is a self-contradiction, since there can be no creation without time.
The concept that God chooses to enter into time is a contradiction as well. Unless God is a linear being, He cannot choose anything. And if God is outside of time, God is frozen, and if God is frozen, He cannot choose to enter time and cannot actually enter time. If God were outside of time, He could not enter time, since God would be frozen.
For the Audience of One
Jesse Morrell
www.OpenAirOutreach.com
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/26/2008 5:53 PM (GMT -6) | | jessie: ...there can be no creation without time.
(o): Creation brought time (which is a creature) into being.
jessie: The concept that God chooses to enter into time...
(o): That would put God outside of time, and God is "everywhere present filling all things." It would also, by making God "enter time," make time something autonomous; which is not the truth. God DID enter time, but that is language for the incarnation.
Time is a creature; and as such needed Christ to enter it. So he did.
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/26/2008 6:00 PM (GMT -6) | |
jessemorrell said...
- He must also be thoughtless
- He must also be emotionless
- He must also be decisionless
- He must also be actionless
- He must also be unconscious
. . .
And if God is these things, God is neither a personality nor a sentient being, in which case, God is not a person at all. Jessie, God is personal -- in three hypostasis ("persons")!
Yet we should not think that those Greek Fathers who chose that language were intending to say "three personalities."
And so, we should not define God's personhood by OUR concept or experience of "thought," "emotion," "decision," "action," or "consciousness"; for to do so is to try to make God over "in our image" -- which would be backwards, though often tried.
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/26/2008 6:15 PM (GMT -6) | |
jessemorrell said...
The reason that we have:
- Free Will
- Intelligence
- Sensibilities and Emotions
Is because God does, because we were made in His image. Technically we are created "after" the image of God. The Son is IN the image, IS the image of the Father (God).
But I agree that we have our free will -- when we have it -- because of our being created after the image of God. Rationality too. All these must be given to back to God in service.
Our emotions are a creaturely-thing of unique sort. They too must be given to God: passions are god-created and intended to be God-glorifying; but, they can rule over us if we let them, and that is sin.
As for "sensibilities" I think that too is uniquely creaturely -- art and music being examples....which can POINT TO God, but are not God themselves.
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Joe McCowan
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2008
Total Posts : 39
| Posted 3/26/2008 8:07 PM (GMT -6) | |
readingagoodbook said...Joe: For God to live in time, He must be dynamic. (o): For God to create the grace of time, and to act in time, God must be alive/dynamic. But God is "beyond being" and even beyond that. God chooses to enter time (with the creation, and the incarnation), but is not contained or modified by it. God "lives" before time. And btw, I did not write that time is a "product" of God's being -- that's what Jessie is saying that time is! Rather, I merely said it is an "expression" of the dynamism of God's being.
We may be losing something in the semantics. I agree that God is beyond our ability to measure in "time", and beyond His creation, preceding the existence of anything outside Himself. What I don't ascribe to God is the ability to exist prior to any internal dynamic which, as existence denotes time of some sort. For Him to originate something, or for Him to even conceive of anything internally, He had to experience a time prior to that moment, in the present, which ultimately made the future an inevitable. This denotes a linear sequence of events, even if the sequence is beyond our ability measure. This is the definition of time I am ascribing to the existence of God. I believe this is what Jesse is conveying also.
Grace and Peace, Joe | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/26/2008 8:25 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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Joe McCowan
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2008
Total Posts : 39
| Posted 3/27/2008 7:12 AM (GMT -6) | |
I spoke with a scientist some time back and he made the same contention (at least a similar one I think). What he said was basically this; "Time is not a constant, it is directly related to our position in the Universe. If God created the Universe, He obviously exists outside of the time we experience and trust to be constant. Being everywhere present, He must experience time in way that our experience prevents us from understanding."
I understand his contention, but at the same time, it provides no real answers. If God is present in every part of the Universe and outside of it, He obviously experiences time different than we do. However, in the case of the time curve in space, time does not cease to exist; our measurements of its duration are just altered. Even if time is experienced completely different in Heaven, than on Earth, it still exists. If ten days in Heaven are ten thousand years on earth, the midpoint would be five days and five thousand years. Once the differential is known, the correlation is known also. If God is everywhere present and experiences time/duration at every level, His experience is constant even while our experience varies. The argument could be made that God alone experiences time as it truly exist, but not outside of time altogether. The existence of God denotes the existence of time and from His perspective, time as He experiences it would be infinite. The moment He would cease to exist in time, He would cease to exist for all time.
This may or may not have addressed your contention, but I hope that it provided some insight to my position either way.
Grace and Peace, Joe
Post Edited (Joe McCowan) : 3/27/2008 7:15:46 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Joe McCowan
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2008
Total Posts : 39
| Posted 3/27/2008 1:14 PM (GMT -6) | |
wedging_clay said...Joe, I think the underlying point of Carved's post is not that one example but the existence of many ways of dealing with this than the single one which you and jessie rightly react against. No, God is not static, nor uninvolved in time. But God is far beyond even beyond our categories. Though he "bends down from heaven" to us, who "bend our necks in prayer."
I agree. There are many ways of dealing with this, I just like my explanation best  . I can be convinced otherwise, I just haven't been up to this point.
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Ronald A. Newcomb
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 45
| Posted 4/12/2008 9:30 AM (GMT -6) | | Jesse,
Well stated throughout. Full agreement on all. Well done!
Plato, above, I fear sees the Augustinian view as most do today in the classical theism groups, that absolutely everything is created except God himself.
But for God to exists there are necessarily things that must also be true also, not preceding God, rather coexisting with him. The most fundamental things, the dimensions, one of which is time.
Time, of course causes the linearity mentioned above, allows for sequencing, and so on, and without which there is nothing but the Greek concept of a god who is in the perfect position, and cannot move because he would no longer be in that perfect position and therefore no longer by god (the so called “ultimate being”). So the Greeks defined what perfection is, and this, quite different from the Hebrew concept of completeness, and then defined the top of their pantheon of gods as the best of the.
Of course, if you are not going to move, or change in any way whatsoever, including learning new things about free will beings, you don’t have motion or change of anything, ergo, you don’t need time, and thank you Augustine for poisoning the church with that piece of sweet Greek pastry. We swallowed it, hemlock and all.
To Plato (above); if there were not time, God cannot have created anything because nothing could change including creating time itself because that would, of course, require a “before” and “after” which did not exist.
You see, time is not the kind of thing that is created.
God created everything (the beginning of everything, that is, not me, but the first humans who could then procreate to me) everything that was created. Conversely he did not create anything that was not created and he is the only self existent, non-created being, not the only non-created thing.
But then we covered all this years ago, look up a subject I started called simply "Time".
R.A.Newcomb
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