(Something I posted on Facebook, about "Time")
Time. Does it exist? Well yes, of course it does."Time" is the word we apply to a manifestly self-evident reality, a part of God's creation. Once I was five, now I'm sixty-five. That change is fact. Our sequential experience of...experiences, our memory of them (the past) and our anticipation of them (the future) is all what we neatly tie up in a handy definition: "Time."
Which is not to say, however, that everything we suppose Time to be is accurate or real. There might be things that we think Time is, which it isn't at all--which aren't "there." So in that sense it would be legitimate to say that "Time"...at least what you always assumed Time was...doesn't exist.
The pop-science-fiction notion of a "time tunnel" (fancifully depicted sometimes as a long corridor with doors lining both sides) is one that I am quite sure isn't really there. That kind of Time, I'm convinced doesn't exist. There is no "back there" you could do a U-turn and go back to, no matter what sort of time machine you try to devise. No machine can ever be ingenious enough to transport you to a place that doesn't exist. There is no corridor, no doors behind which the two-year old you or the twenty-year-old you, and all the people you knew then, are hiding, and if you could only open that door you could live that day again. No, there's no time tunnel with swirling, psychedelic wallpaper. It doesn't exist, not that kind of "Time." There's no "back there" to go back to.
Nor is there any "up ahead" to travel forward to, at least in any other time machine than the one you and I are riding right now--it's called life and it's transporting us into the "future" absolutely every moment. Of course, "the future" never ever gets here. The only thing that ever "gets here" is...Now, since Now is all we ever live in.
Time is only ever measured, perceived, quantified, by change. I think that's because, ultimately, time IS change and change IS time. Time doesn't propel us forward to some presumed point farther down a putative corridor, as much as the unrelenting morphing of space (in the "space-time" synergy that includes all matter) creates, actually IS, "time," i.e, the sequence of change, motion, development to which we give the name "time."
So where is the five-year-old me? Well, right here of course, writing this post. I am what the five-year-old me became. That becoming is the phenomenon we register as time. There's no other five-year-old me somewhere "back there," because no "back there" co-exists with Now at different points along the tunnel, since there's no tunnel. There's only now--"Now" generating the change we call "Time."
It's kind of like the image of a balloon being inflated. It only inflates by being one and the same balloon, and its state at any moment is the sum of all the states through which it has developed. It's not five or twenty or a million different balloons all scattered along a time continuum, since the whole balloon is right here, right now. If it weren't...there would be no time. If there were no motion, no change, no unfolding or development in matter (and the space defined by matter), there would be no time. No one, after all, has ever identified or located a thing called "Time" in isolation from space and matter. No one's ever found the "tunnel," because, I feel sure, it isn't there at all.
(To this a friend wrote asking "What about eternity?" and the popular notion that the Bible reveals tim itself will finally cease to exist. I replied....)
As for eternity, no, I see no biblical foundation for the idea that there is no time in eternity. Time is a function of created reality, of movement and development, of limitation--and we will always be limited, since to be unlimited is to be God. There is a single verse in Revelation that is used as justification for the idea that time will stop existing, and that's where the text says "there will be no time," but that verse is not pointing to the cessation of time itself; it means there will be not time FOR certain things. Just like I would tell someone, "I'm sorry, there's no time" (e.g., for a conversation after lectures, because I must rush to the dentist).
(The friend further wrote that, understanding my last reply, there still remained the question of what, then would be the gauge by which time would be measured in the absence of the heavenly bodies, as the book of Revelation says "There will be no sun there." I replied....)
But there will be movement, change, growth, progression. And space. For something to move from one place to another, or develop from one state to another, requires time (we know it does because we have to wait!). Even in our present universe, our solar system's star that we call "the sun," isn't of course the only sun with planets orbiting it. Or even in our own solar system, Earth isn't the only planet orbiting our sun. Other planets orbit our sun at different rates, and, also, they revolve at different rates. So even in our own solar system, not even to speak of other systems throughout the universe, the measurement of time is relative. There is no "day" or "month" or "year" on, say, Venus the same as our "day," "month" or "year." The constant factor throughout all creation, however, is "time" understood as the present moment embodying all change and motion and "becoming" that has ever taken place.
(My friend replied that, yes, time measurements, or rather their standards, in the given order of creation are relative, but the question is still, what would be the gauge or standard in the eternal kingdom. I replied....)
God.
Perhaps that is the deeper meaning concealed in the revelation that there will be no sun. Not simply as a source of light, but as the orientation of all reality and its movements.
We, as created beings, contingent, finite, dependent, will eternally be in movement toward the Creator. In movement toward His creative love, wisdom and purpose which will be expressing themselves through us. Movement is time. Becoming is time.
(And, finally, I added this contemplation....)
At first glance, my thoughts might strike some as a bunch of mystical gobbledygook, but that's only because we are so inured to our fantastic, actually preposterous fairy tales about time tunnels (entertaining as they can be), and useless (if, again, entertaining) theorizing about things like, what would happen if you went back in time and killed your own grandfather. Talk about gobbledygook! What I'm talking about is infinitely simpler and manifestly based in simple reality. Here we are. Everything that has ever been has grown into everything that's here right now. There's no time tunnel, no hall full of doors to visit. This is it. Everything you see and do and are right now is "Time" in action. You're producing it as much as it produces you.
Again at first glance, some might think that such a view of reality would tend to divorce one from the past, from its lessons, from respect for our forebears, even from faith since faith depends on what God has done in the past. "If there's no Time Tunnel, then there's no Back There, so there's no Past, so the Past doesn't matter, if that's so!" No, not at all. It only takes a moment's further reflection to see how perfectly wrong that is. On my view, the past is infinitely nearer and intrinsic to everything we are now because, in fact, it's all here now, in us--we are nothing but everything that has been, now here at this moment of everything's continual becoming. Yes, that brings us, to my thinking, FAR closer to the past. It's as near as our every thought and breath, it makes who and what we are right now. That's sure a lot closer than some fictitious past hidden away in other rooms back there in the corridor.
