God is Time

As the reader, please realise I have not yet connected all my sources. And that many sections are roughed out and not yet fluid. Please do your best to move through any logical jumps or give me ideas as to how I can make such movements. Thank you!

God Is Time

The Analogous Conspectus

4^th Draft

Daniel Lewandowski

April 26, 2012

Outline

Introduction

Chapter One - A Philosophical Definition of Time
1. In reference to linear time
2. In reference to cyclical time
  1. Macro-cyclical
  2. Micro-cyclical
3. In reference to relative time
4. In reference to homo-centric time (we are time)
Chapter Two - A Physical Definition of Time
1. In reference to the cosmos
  1. Heliocentric influences
  2. Relativity influences
  3. Affects of theoretical influences
2. In reference to biology
  1. Our biological cellular clocks
  2. The time of biology at large
  3. Affects of theoretical time
3. In reference to the particle
  1. The atomic clock
  2. Faster than light neutrinos and their implications
  3. Affects of theoretical time
Chapter Three - A Working Definition of Time
1. The common thread of the theoretical
  1. How our concepts are items (intangible is no less real)
  2. The intangible reality of time
2. The pitfalls of metaphor
3. Time: a definition
Chapter Four – What is God?
1. A broader definition of a god
2. The intangible reality of God via effect
3. A specific definition of God
Chapter Five – Classifying the Traits Assigned to God and Time
1. Recalling the use of metaphor from Chapter Three
2. Structural Attributes
  1. The metaphor of supernatural traits
3. Personality Traits
  1. The metaphor of anthropomorphic traits.

Chapter Six - The Infinite Nature of Time and God - How timelessness effects all other attributes and conditions of Time and God
1. The infinite nature of God
  1. The etymological roots for YHVH
  2. The mythological roots for YHVH
  3. The historical roots for YHVH
2. The infinite nature of Time - how Time is timeless
  1. The logical path to infinite time within our universe
  2. Time as a function - adding “one” to each end ad infinitum
Chapter Seven - The Omnipresence of Time and God
1. An omnipresent God
  1. Advantages
  2. Dependance on infinity
2. The necessity for the omnipresence of Time with in our universe
  1. The dependance of omnipresence on infinity
Chapter Eight - The Omniscience of Time and God
1. The omniscience of God
  1. Advantages
  2. Dependance on infinity
2. The potential omniscience of Time
  1. Collective physical record of events (the earthquake)
  2. Collective physical record (space)
  3. The neuronetwork of space
    1. The “Electric Universe”
    2. The hypothesis of residual information carried by time itself into new time-lines.

Chapter Nine - The Omnipotence of God and Time
1. The omnipotence of God
  1. Advantages
  2. Dependance on infinity
2. The apparent omnipotence of Time
  1. The universal cadence established by Time
  2. Neg-entropic forces of thermodynamics
  3. Examples of what time can accomplish in geology
Chapter Ten – The Holy Righteousness, Loving Justice and Other Traits of God and Time
1. The mind set to have as we talk about highly metaphoric personality traits
2. The way God and Time answer prayer
3. Determining the governing personality trait of God and Time
4. Viewing time as loving
5. The Holy Trinity
  1. The alleged misinterpretation in regards to Christianity's take
  2. The identities of each figure and their roles in theology
  3. Applying this metaphor to Time
6. The limits of metaphoric anthropomorphizing
  1. For God
  2. For Time
Chapter Eleven - The Personalization of Time and God
Chapter Twelve - How to Create a God and Give Him a Job
Chapter Thirteen – The Worshipping of Time as God by Modernized Man

Introduction

“[A]mong our instinctive beliefs some are much stronger than others, while many have, by habit and association, become entangled with other beliefs, not really instinctive, but falsely supposed to be part of what is believed instinctively.”

-Bertrand Russel, The Problems With Philosophy

Is God time? Perhaps a better question with an answer more attainable is; Is time god?

Why make the psychological and philosophical connections between God and Time? What service will it do? Isn't time a fact of nature as experienced by man? Isn't belief in God a personal choice? Perhaps it is that simple. But if I just left it at that I'd have nothing to write about, would I? Humanity affords to God certain attributes that have a striking similitude to the attributes of time, as the human perceives time to be anyway. Better said, we talk about time as though it were God. Phrases such as, “Time heals all wounds”; “It's all a matter of time”; “Time waits for no man”; “Only time will tell” (a few among many) all give time an ethereal personification in the human mind. That is a pretty simple idea and if I may begin impugning my own thesis, it's a grade school one at best. However, I believe there are some wonderful ramifications for us to consider, no matter what position we take on the subjects of the reality of God and the limited, or unlimited, nature of time.

The failure of words is one reasons for me to at least try to express this nominal idea. If we really want to be specific about any one element of our existence eventually at some point words begin to become quite cumbersome. In fact, that's just the suchness of nature. It's kind of complex (to be trite) and since the language of the universe is most aptly translated into tangible tidbits with the use of math, it leaves us at bit of a loss when using words as our tool of conveyance. Even in terms of mathematics the universe is ineffable. But we have to boil it down or no one would really be able to talk about anything at all. Since I don't believe in knowledge for the elite, but instead follow the idea of enlightenment for all, I will attempt to use layman's terms whenever possible to best communicate my idea, since that is really all I am. All the while I will do my best to avoid my predisposition for contracting logorrhea. I guess, it is a human trait we picked up somewhere, that when one someone tells us we can not do something it only adds to our fervour of trying. The idea of over simplification for the edifying of the common man is not all too rouge of an idea. I think it is safe to say we have all heard of Einstein and his innumerable contributions to modern physics, the most popular of which being E=mc². As many of you know, and for those of you who don't, this is not the true equation. It is merely the equation in its simplest terms, so that people like myself and perhaps some of you, can at least follow along the implication trail and see with some perspective what the math really means to us. But don't disparage, just because we may not be able to do the math doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't live our lives in reflection to it's implication. The same goes for the little tidbits I would like to share in this brief conspectus.

The description of God has failed people for thousands and tens of thousands of years. Too many to list are the passages in the Torah, the Bible and Koran in which the writer explicitly states his words fail him. Incidentally, God gave Moses (the supposed author of the first five books of the Bible/Torah) a name to call him by and that was YHWH (Exodus 3:14). Would you like to know what it means? So would have Moses. It is unpronounceable and beyond definition but again, with a need to boil things down for the sake of communication, we get; “I AM THAT I AM” or Yahweh.

Time too used to be a simple idea, until a fellow named Sir Isaac Newton showed up to mess it all up. Then, add to that the compounding affects of the advent of relativity and modern theoretical physics and the waters really begin to get murky. And by murky I mean clear; if you can do the math, that is. Do we understand that minutes and seconds are arbitrary divisions of a twenty-four hour period on our planet as it goes around our sun? Of course, we do. So, that makes time just a term, does it not? It's nomenclature, colloquial, perspective, relative and subjective to us as human beings. Yet if it were only those things, why is trying to explain an extraneous concepts such as time, like describing what something looks like by using the descriptive terminology of taste? I mean, sure it can be done but are you getting anywhere? In the process of writing this paper I asked a number of people to define time, and most, if not all, couldn't do so effectively. They did however, knew how it felt. But we will try anyway, for the sake of understanding the big picture, to do our best, just as the others did for me, to define this thing we only know by experience. Time baffles all understanding. The best we can do is throw a few words at it and a few equations that link it to space in hopes that some of them stick. But, at the end of the day, we haven't done it much justice at all. However, if you're going to get anywhere you have to at least try.

A fundamental question that often arises soon after embarking on such a discussion is the question of what is real and what isn't? Depending on how you choose to define it, time might not even exist at all. Starting with science that predated even Newton and specifically in light of some of the discoveries and theories that have come out of places like CERN in the last few years, the reality of any one part of nature (or the reality of all of it) has become quite a slipper fish to catch. The theory of a holographic universe for one, has thrown a wrench into the potential perception of reality for many of us and by extension, the perception of both Time and God become skewed in such an lopsided universal view. And depending on where you weigh in on the issue of God you may pass a broad stroke over the idea that God can be Time and promptly just dismiss it altogether, which might be just as well. If you are the person who believes neither in time nor God, what does this paper mean to you? Can it mean anything to you? The answer is, yes. The reason being is that there are many people you know that believe one or both of these ideas to actually exist, and at the very least, I hope to shed some light on why that is and help us to expose the deeply buried connections our brains have made, by look at the stuff that makes us who we are.

Regardless of all of that, my first duty will be not to necessarily confirm the potential or factual existence of both, but to assiduously correlate the specific perceived nature of God to the perceived nature of time. My second, to show the function a god serves to man (and his psyche) and subsequently how modern man has replaced God with Time in said function.

Chapter One

A Philosophical Definition of Time

I will state again, for the record, the specific point of this paper is to show the correlation between the perceived nature of Time and the perceived nature of God. Then it will be to show the function of a god and how man has replaced god with time in that function. So then, though I will do my best to help us arrive at reasonable understanding of God and time, one that we can successfully use in the juxtaposition, it is not an imperative that I get the actual definition of those two variables “correct” (assuming there is a “correct”). I would not be so pompous as to think that I would be able to define and validate these two integers, in a lsdkj page paper. Even if I had all the pages in the world to do the job, how would I triumph in consideration that all the great minds who have ever made the attempt have failed to establish any cohesive, universal definition? Whether it be from a philosophical or theoretical stand point, assuming that I can accurately define time is a bit, presumptuous.

Be that as it may, I must admit that the simple task of defining time pushes the very limits of my abilities. Sad, I know. But it is a monumental task, to say the least and certainly not as easy as it sounds. As I mentioned I have asked many people to define it for me and it even took me several weeks, and several false-starts to figure out how I wanted to approach the issue, seeing as how just this simple exercise alone, once all things are considered, could be a book unto itself. I have found that when coming down to a definition of time, more so than any other aspect of our lives, many people are prone, even in the interest of having an open discussion, to reassign certain attributes of their God long before they are willing to let you tell them what time is supposed to be. Even for arguments sake, people are very protective of their idea of time. It is truly an odd occurrence and one that I believe needs to be explored. Which we will, later.

For thousands, if not tens of thousands of years man has contemplated the essence of time and God and not until recently have we really begun to grasp their perspective nature and the role the former plays as it interacts with the physical and mathematical restrictions of our universe and just how both are intertwined into our human psyche. Or have we even begun to unravel it at all? What ever vague understanding we do have, it has become quite clear that it is indeed only just that, a vague one at best.

Fascinating exorcise; pinning the tail on the donkey. Why not start with a game of dancing the fallacious fine line of a persuasive definition? Just the idea that time is God puts me in the ballpark of about a dozen acts of fallacious thinking. Without getting into all the ones which I am most likely to commit, I will try to establish first, the terms and definitions that I will use throughout this essay.

In this chapter, I will break time down a number of ways in an effort to arrive at a mutually pleasing definition of it and its properties. There are several ways we can look at the definition of time and of those ways, still several more ways in which each of them can be broken down further yet. The two most common ways of looking at time are first, that it is part of the rudimentary structure of the intellect or what we will call philosophical time and second, that it is is part of the cardinal structure of the universe and this we will call physical time. Of the philosophy of time, it seems apparent to me, that the major ways it is identified is first, in a linear sense; second, a cyclical sense; third, a relative sense; and fourth, a man-centered (homo-centric) sense. Of the physicality of time there are three main ways I can see that it is most often referred to and they would be, first, according to the cosmos; second, according to biology; and lastly, according to the atom. I would like to acknowledge now of course that I am taking some liberty when referring to some of the philosophical outlooks on time, in that a few could be considered not philosophical but physical. But I feel once explained, my motive for doing so will be a bit more clear. Once we have explored these various identifications of time, I hope that for the sake of analogy, we will be able to arrive at an agreeable working definition of what time is so that we may compare its' perceived attributes to the perceived attributes of God.

Collins and Gage International defines time as,“1 the past, present and future: We measure time in years, months, days, etc.” Assuming that time (which will be capitalized when referencing my theory that it is analogously God) and God cannot be truly and satisfactorily defined merely by etymological means, it is still interesting how almost every definition of time is not a definition of time at all but instead, an explanation of how we measure its' nature in relation to it being experienced. That's because by-and-large we are often referring to time philosophically rather than physically. Which is a larger problem when we note the only chance we have for considering time in anyway real, is to consider it's philosophical impact. Which we is what we are here to establish first and foremost. Webster's puts it a little better by combining the philosophical and physical by defining time as such; “1.indefinite, unlimited duration in which things are considered as happening in the past, present, or future; every moment there has ever been or ever will be...” This of course, being a much broader definition that more directly accounts for all of time, rather than what we are present to measure, and one that is perhaps closer to what I am trying to estabelish as our working definition.

Many will argue (and have) that time doesn't exist outside of man's mind, that it is only concept and that any “physical” existence of time is virtually just a physical measurement of a conceptualization and that it is not an actual physicality, in the same sense that the desk I am writing on is physical. I agree to that, in part, as being true. The concept of time, as we know it, is indeed a perspective unique to man, but the idea that time can not be properly defined to be part of the physical reality of the cosmos is still to this day, at least to me, a bit of a bodacious assumption. From a philosophical standpoint, science has attempted to radically change our view of time on regular basis, due to physical discoveries that dramatically affect the way we see the cosmos. These physical discoveries, having a physical affect on the philosophy of time, is what produces the physical concept of time. It really wasn't that long ago that we had a geocentric view of the universe and in the course of a few hundred years we have come to the realization that not only is there more than just our solar system out there, but perhaps that it's at least remotely possible, that this might not even be the only universe out there. All of the progress we've made in our understanding of the cosmos and all the progress we will make in the future is due to the exploration of not just the physicality of it all but also the philosophy. Philosophy after all, always has been the appropriate place in which we may indulge the logical progressions that lead us to fanciful and unfathomable conclusions. It is the job of the philosopher to take a small and innocuous assumption and extrapolate it to a bold and sometimes brazen theory. These seeds of strange and opposing ideals are what produce the energy and drive that grow the fruits of science and they are those seeds from which have grown every discipline that has ever proven to give us anything of any real value. After all, the only things that really exist, the only things we can know with any real certainty, are our ideas.

The first of these philosophical views of time that establish a certain universe-view is the idea of linear time. Not withstanding the theoretical beginning and ending of this time-line, it holds that all events occur in a “single-file line”, so to speak. No event that has happened or is happening will ever happen again and all future events are unknown and dependant upon what events that have or are happening. A linear view of time is described by Harper Collins at collinslanguage.com as,” 1. The continuous passage of existence in which events pass from a state of potentiality in the future, through the present, to a state of finality in the past.” The potential nature of the future and the final nature of the past is what really stands out as the defining characteristic of a linear view of time. It is this view of time that has influenced a great deal of science in the past, a miriade of mystics of acient times and theologans even into the present. And may I reinforce the fact that, though this idea of time seems so standard and common place, it is still in all reality, just a theory! As familiar as this approach to time is to our human minds, there is really very little to prove it real.

The second philosophical view of time that has lent itself heavily to both modern theoretical astrophysics, as well as many religious views, is the concept of cyclical time. I have, in the interest of not wanting this to become a compendium on time, divided cyclical time into just two catagories of influence. These catagories I will call “macro-cyclical” and “micro-cyclical time”. Macro-cyclical time has had a profound influence on theoretical astrophysics in the theory developments that stand as stating that this universe may one day return to its singularity (point of origin i.e. the spot of the “big-bang”) only to again expand back out eventually to reach the size it is today with or without a similar apperence in the laws of physics that we enjoy today. This theory or philosophy is a basis for a good number of physical mathmatical constructs that go about attempting to explain the universe around us. Somewhere, in the theories of special and general relativity, string and superstring, and a host of others you will find, in one form or another and to some degree or another, the idea of macro-cyclical time lurking below the surface. Related, albiet almost conversely so, is the idea micro-cyclical time. This idea of cyclical time is one that has an astounding influence on the theology of many a people reaching from more modern eastern mystic religions and spiritualism all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. The micro-cyclical concept is one that would be the foundation of ideas like reincarnation, for instance. Many religions look to the world around them and to nature to find some absolute truth, some constant that is across the board. What many people of many lands and nationalities first notice is of course, that there is nothing absolute, but there are some patterns that can be relied upon. Some of which are that as one thing dies another is born, as one season leaves another is ushered in, as the rain falls so does it dry up again. These are the cycles of nature and these are the foundations of micro-cyclical time.

Third, in terms of philosophical views on time I would like to mention the view of time according to the theory of relativity. I will delve into the specific drives and appropriate functions of relativity as it applies to my own theory, a bit more in the following chapter. According to relativity, time is different according to what reference frame you are experiencing it from. Several factors come into play in determining your time experience. Such as, how close you are to a massive body, and which one you are close to and how fast you are going. But that is assuming you buy into relativity as being an ample explination of the universe. Exceedingly, more and more people are rejecting the working theories that have a long and tried history of being successful and fruitful, in favour of an array of alternate theories that range from the fringes of the absurd, to some that are so technically convoluted that it isn't even remotely safe to say that they would be even slightly effective to use in any sort of a professional or academic environment. Before the men that brought us relativity came on the scene, Newton had devised a working (but clumsy) theory that incorporated all the same goodies as relativity, like the speed of light (Newton's was variable, relativity's is constant), mass, gravity, time, etc. Then when relativity came around at the turn of the century, Newton's theories and mechanics became subsets of the new and more favoured theory of relativity. Newtonian thought, not done entirely away with even up to present day, takes a back seat to the theory championed by men like Einstein, and rightfully so. Some day, it is hoped we will produce a more sound, better funcitoning, and more simple theory for the universe, better even than relativity. At such a point the theory of relativity and it's Newtonian subsets would become further subsets of this new theory. They would not be abondoned. That rarely happens in science. Besides the gears being assemble slightly different from the old theories to the new, the philosophies that men like Newton based his mechanics on are still, to this day, debated with great heat. Newton (based on Galilean mathematics) saw time as being more of entity onto its self in which events “flowed” through. It was seen by Newton as a “container”, meaning it existed as an absolute constant regardless of what (or who) was in put in to it. This idea has, at it's base, that it time is a fundamental, a “demension”, and a building block of the universe. Many people still fight to consider it as such to this day. But as mentioned, we will discuss that a little later, when we consider time in a more physical sense.

That said, perhaps even more tied to my thesis, is the fact that the passage of time is directly linked to entropy, i.e. the second law of thermodynamics. This has been described as the, “arrow-of-time” (ironically, by none other than Sir Eddington; a huge proponent and experimentalist for the theory of relativity which does not account for, and in many ways opposes, the an idea of the arrow-of-time) meaning that, as time is passes-crap brakes down. I'll talk about how this relates a bit more in the chapter called, “The Omnipotence of Time and God”. There are several theories that attempt to rectify this seeming duality, including one that states that, at some point the universe must have had some force come into play to encourage entropy to begin. A big assumption of relativity is that time is symmetric, that it is in fact, not an arrow and that thermodynamics ought not necessarily have to break down. But as we all know, they indeed do. Regardless, every attempt to rectify the issue of entropy, none seem to do so satisfactorily.

Due to the problems of relativity, modern physicists have devised the splendorous string theory and even super-string theory to help iron out the wrinkles left by Einstein. Personally, I am quite fond of the theory and find it an extraordinarily elegant idea. However, there are still some issues with which I have to take contention. Especially with the development of the Dirac equation and of course not forgetting the convenient absence of the graviton.

At this point, I feel we are getting bogged down by the details of what can otherwise be summed up by saying, despite the sometimes credulous acceptance of theory by the scientific world as being more than hypothesis, it is safe to say that when it comes to a true physical understanding of space, gravity, the constant speed of light, time, etc., we are merely postulating and I think it important not to forget that, no matter how compelling the speculative math may sound, it is still just that; speculative. Regardless of whether time is symmetric and all times are now or whether it is an arrow and directional and regardless of whether there is entropy in the universe or not, that fact remains that time is still very, very real for us. Even in the face of theory after theory that “proves” it's nothing more than an illusion, the reality of time, though it may surpass all tangible definition, is none the less a brutal and honest fact of our existance.

When it is all stripped down, even if we could get everyone to agree that time is just a persistent figment of our human imagination, time still moves forward. The idea of time floats somewhere in the no-man's-land of real and realization. The strongest arguement that I can make for its existance is to ask you, with your imagination, to define it by what it is not. Often, when something is so vast and so inconsevable it is generally of aide to identify those things which this particular something is not. More applicably, in terms of physical experiences, we as humans often find it useful to be able to compare or experience with the absence of things in order to better discribe and detail their presense. For instance, I could go on about gravity in a text book way to help you understand the mechanics of it. I could give you all the dominate theories on how it works and I could even set up some trit little experiments for you to do, so that you may understand basic Newtonian mechanics like falling apples and terminal velocity and such. Or I could shoot you up into space and let you experience the lack of gravity found in orbit. It would be through this exercise that I would feel most assured of your understanding of what gravity really is to you and your biology. It would be through the abscence of this element of your existence that I would feel you could then best describe to others and align in your own mind what gravity means. I could do the same with light. But even ideas, even emotions are often delinated in this manner. “Better to have loved and lost, than to have never have loved at all”. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”. These are all ways we understand things through a change in perspective. However, to give us a proper perspcetive of time, what experience could I issue that would take us outside of time that we may better understand life within it? You see where I'm going? It is in this aspect that time might be the most real of all pieces of the puzzzle.

That not withstanding, and more so in only slight contridiction to the above, the fourth and final philosophy of time I would like to appeal to is a homocentric phiolosophical approach. This is an approach that by the shear nature of it, all of us are most likely to commit, invoulntarily. That is, that time is, as previously mentioned, of our design. Stated more bodly, that we are time. This statement is putting forth that not only does time exist as as scaffold for the intellectual pursuits, but also that we are simultaneously the designers and builders, the keepers and tenants, the masters and slaves of time. It is an abstract idea that is difficult to explain, but one that is prevalent in many theoretical constructs. It is not only an assumption, but it is found at the end of an equation as well, in that, it is postulated that we are both the creators of time in our minds and also that we are the “flow” of time as well.

I decieded after much consideration and several previous attempts of explination of the definitions of time to first address the philosophical elements, because if modern philosophy and logical excersises have taught us anything it is that nothing physical can be varified to be real. Even the solar system, about which I will refer to next in refernce to time, can not be assumed to be real, in the way we perceive it anyway. Is there a solar system? Of course. Now, is it in all reality exactly how it is perceived? Quite certainly, no. What we have learned about the nature of light and what our eye (and subsequently, our brain) does with that information, should be ample reason to call into question whether we are perceiving anyting around us as it actually is. In fact, there may not be an “actually” that actually exists that anyone could ever know with real certainty.

Thus, our philosophy or our intelectual approach and preface to what we perceive dramatically affects the way our mind interperets the world around us. Therefore, it seemed logical to place ahead of concepts like heliocentric time and atomic time, those foundational philosophies that can, in one way or another be found as a commonality in this physicality or the next.

Chapter Two

A Physical Definition of Time

In the previous chapter we attempted, as best we could given the confines of this paper, to outline the philosophical nature of our perception of time. I stated, that the philosophy is tightly bound to how we describe and relate to the physicality of time and the universe as well; that it is, in a way, part and parcel. In this chapter we will discuss three specific ways in which physical scientific discoveries have framed the philosophical time-related views we hold on the cosmos, biology and the particle (atomic and subatomic).

It was tough to choose whether, in the interest of progression, to address our biological time before our cosmic time or visa versa. It goes without saying that because of this hospitable, extremely rare environment in which we find ourselves, we are issued the ability to gain access to the kind of knowledge that lets us view the systems around us and learn how they function. But it is our learning that gives meaning to these functions in ways they would not have without our existence. To be more direct, the product of a mechanism is what gives the mechanism it's meaning and it's purpose. I'm not trying to say that the universe revolves around us and that we are the crowning achievement of all of nature, just that to know a mechanism, you must know what it is capable of producing and you learn the most about the mechanism with it's potential product as a reference. I also acknowledge my duty to critique by what standard I label which product of nature is “the best”. For instance, if I were to measure the meaning or value of lifeform based solely on the ability to survive, I might pick instead, the lowly cockroach. And who am I to say that their aren't more advanced cultures on distant planets most likely orbiting brown dwarf stars (the most likely candidate for being both host to life and limiter of communication with said life) that could be considered to be the “crowning achievement” of nature.

It wasn't that long ago really that we thought everything in the universe was rotating around our flat earth in an eternal daily dance across the sky. This earth was the centre of the universe, the whole of which was placed in the heavens for us and us alone. In the perspective of today's science it is a rather conceded view to think that God made such a vast and unfathomable universe just for one little planet with a few organics dashing about. The derivatives of this “scientific” view of the flat earth and the philosophy/theology that propagated it, took a major blow when Copernicus and Galileo came on the scene and completely restructured the way we looked at the cosmos. Now, with the earth as just one of several bodies orbiting our sun, and eventually with the understanding of our system being one of billions which make up our galaxy, and that, being one of hundreds of billions that inhabit the universe we don't seem so important anymore. This had a dramatic affect on the way we establish our philosophical stances in regards to our galactic and spiritual importance.

Heliocentric time (in my opinion, one of the two most important ways in which we measure and judge time) has, as previously mentioned, an affect on how our brains developed the hardware they have. In addition, a heliocentric solar system though once just theory, contributes massively to the way we govern our time expenditure, allowing us to determine the usefulness or wastefulness of certain activities we may find ourselves engaged in from a “big picture” point of view. It is this greater view of nature that has brought about a shift in ideology as a whole and a shift in how we relate to time.

That is of course, the view from our terrestrial vantage point, which has changed actually very little from ancient times. Although we know that it is the earth that spins and not the sun that moves through the sky, that has ultimately done very little in the way of changing our sense of time in a day to day and individual way. It is that sense of time, rooted in our biology that we will address in a moment, that has only somewhat changed now that our vantage point has changed from somewhere on earth to somewhere zipping around it. It is this change in the view of time that is accounted for in the theory of relativity. I am of course, aware that relativity is hardly a physical definition of time and that this chapter is titled as such. However, what relativity does, is quantify the degree in which the physical and non-physical aspect of the universe are, or are not, affected by one another. So, in that sense, I feel this a proper place to point a few things out. For instance, it is relativistic accounting that says a clock should run faster and faster the higher off the ground that it is (also known as gravitational redshift) or that time runs slower next to the sun then on earth, or when standing next to a pyramid, or the closer to light speed that you go the faster time goes for everyone else around you. It's this astounding mathematical conversion that goes a long way in showing that time is a figment. That our experience of it is dependant completely on the set of circumstances (inertial frame) we find ourselves in. And if any one thing were to change, so would time. In fact, it is postulated that anything travelling as fast as light doesn't experience time (as we know it) at all and anything going faster than light (like subatomic particles) might be able to arrive before it has left. It is an interesting theoretical view that makes us scratch our heads in dismay to its' apparent paradoxical assertions, but logically we have to ask ourselves, if time doesn't exist at the speed of light why then, if a distant star stops shinning, isn't it's evidence of it being extinguished immediately apparent? If there is not time for light, why doesn't light act instantaneously? Of course, the answer is that the evidences of these things is all dependant on the inertial reference frame we are in as the observer and the light perceives no passage of time as it makes the 250,000,000 light-year journey to us to inform us that the star has taken a break. But to me, this has always begged the same relativistic rationale but in ways against relativity. Can anyone who is travelling at the speed of light have the authority to say that time doesn't exist, being that they are only saying so from the evidence they have been given from within their own reference frame, any more than someone moving slower than light can say that time does exist? I am not being equitable of course, because I am asking a mathematical system to answer a metaphysical question. But an astronaut is wearing a wrist watch when shot into space. The wrist watch speeds up the higher he gets. He can look at the watch, check it regularly and see with his own eyes that time has sped up, that he is in essence moving faster through time then his kin back on the rock of earth. But that doesn't mean he “feels” time moving any differently then he has always felt it move, does it? Homo-centric time.

One of the most intriguing pieces of info I have come across in this regard is the fact that not a single NASA craft (including Hubble) is reported to use any relativistic calculations to correct the timing issues between space and earth for the purpose of communications and operations. That's not to say that they don't use relative corrections, but there is no report of them using the theory of relativity to determine what those relative corrections might be before launch. Most GPS satellites for instance, are not corrected for the difference until after they're up. Once they are, the corrections are made practically, rather the theoretically. Newtonian physics has been and continue to be adequate for all spacecraft prior to launch.

But is the theory of relativity complete? No. There many things it can't quite explain, and that's fine because eventually we will come up with an other theory that works better and relativity will go the way of Newtonian and Galilean theorems and it too, will become a subset of a greater theory. I feel as though we've gotten off track a bit, so to bring us back, suffice it to say that this is not intended to be a physics paper, but instead a philosophically analogous comparison to the psychological similitude of human perceptions and personifications and nothing more. So to get back on track, our view of time has changed dramatically in just a few hundred years. When you stop to think about it, we went 250,000 years with the same basic idea of time until we arrived at where we are today and now all of a sudden we have been asked to believe that time is a nothing. It's hard to do from our practical perspective here on earth (or any other theoretical perspective from any place else in the universe) no matter how good a grasp we have on the cosmos. What makes it so hard for us is that from every single cell in our bodies, all the way to complex areas of our brains (known as locus or loci), we “feel” time passing.

In looking at the world around us we can measure time in an number of ways. Rotations of the earth, spins around the sun, seasons, migrations, matings, births, deaths, or any one of the numerous natural occurrences that happen like “clock-work” every day. The categorizations of time are omnifarious, classifying the same element of our existence in different terms. If we were to ask a biologist what time is, their answer may well be something like, “It is the measurement of growth or expansion of a entity”. Much of the metaphoric language that we use in reference to time is how it relates to our biology. All of us have heard the phrase, one's “biological clock is ticking”. We are a mass of cells and as such, millions of cells die and are born on a daily basis. Upon conception, we are creating many more than are perishing and that trend continues for some years. Until roughly the time that we reach physical maturity, we are a cellular manufacturing powerhouse, but then things slow down and level off. Eventually, everything switches up and many more are dying then are being effectively replaced and so begins the process of ageing, this, leading to our inevitable death. And that is our “time” on this planet, in a nutshell, baring any unforeseen tragedies or illness, of course. An animal, although I'm sure it has some instinctual motivation driven from it “knowing” its' biological time is limited, has a different perception of time from a human. The human having a much greater and much more imperative sense of his time on this planet. Our understanding of our biological time is driven by our biopsychological time, which is measured by (among other large and important parts of our brains), the suprachiasmatic nuclei for the day to day circadian rhythm and the ultradian for the shorter periods of timekeeping within the brain. These structures in our brain developed in accordance to and in demand to the solar patterns we experience here on this planet and thus, it is this very real and very physical measurement that our “awareness” uses as the springboard for concocting all the other more philosophical and esoteric ways in which we measure the passage of time. That really being naturally my main argument when it comes to the existence of time in any sort of reality. We sense time, we feel it in our brains, on a very rudimentary, psychological level. So, in a very real and chemical reaction sort of way, time exists.

Most of us can't help but think or our own mortality from time to time. In fact, I use it often, as I am sure many others do, to help put into focus both the painful and pleasurable things encountered in my life. It is our biological mortality that gives us that sense of urgency about the affairs of life and getting certain achievements or arriving at certain personal goals by a certain “time”. Many of us are not at all unfamiliar with thinking of time in terms of lifetimes or generations. These are biological allocations of time and they are just as real, if not more so, then hours and minutes and seconds. Albeit perhaps, just as arbitrary.

It is our conceptualization of our biological time that first fuelled our perceived need to measure time and develop the theoretical constructs and mathematics in an effort to grasp it on both a minuet and detailed level as well as, a larger, grandiose and universal scale. It was this biological ticking that caused us to look to the stars and planets for some sort of ratifying unity. It is this biological ticking that causes us to look at the atom for the answers to time-related questions and then drives us to look even further to what lies beyond the atom and further still to what lie beyond even that.

Currently, we have a few very precise clocks on this planet and the accuracy is due to the atom. More precisely, atomic clocks work by measuring the spin property of the caesium atom. A second would be 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation coming off that atoms. That information is then used to calibrate other clocks and timekeeping devices around the world.

But as we have refined our ablility to look at ever smaller particles we have looked past the electron, proton, and nuron to subatomic particles like the gluon, muon, and neutrino. We have done so at labratories like the LHC and CERN. It is in the experiments that they are running that we are begining to get a more acurate view of the working of the world and subsequently, the universe around us. But unfortunately, as is the case with all answers man is ever given, it only causes us to ask two fold the questions we started with.

CERN for instance, is still in the middle of recalibrating between a few test were they tracked the speed of a neutrino in one test going faster than light and in a successive test they tracked it as going slower. If it can be validated that a neutrino can indeed go faster than light then there are some interesting scientific and philosophical implications. One of which is the idea I hit on earlier, where a particle could arrive at B before it leaves A. Effectively meaning traveling faster than light is taking a shortcut through time. If traveling slower than light is foward in time and at lightspeed is no movement in time, then faster than light is backwards in time. (As an aside, all three speeds are still “in” time.)

The theoretical implications of what we learn as we attempt to measure the immeasurable are vast and fanciful, and a treasure trove of imagination inspiring thought experiments are presented to us so that we may tie our up brains into knots. In this chapter, we discussed several ways in which theory is applied to our physical existence and how those theories attempt to account for time. Conversely, we looked at how the physical restrictions of our existence has influenced the theorizing and philosophizing on intangible things that lie outside of the realm of the empirical. So, although most of what we have discussed, though relevant, is not imperative because we are not attempting to know time in way other than the way in which we instinctively know it to be to begin with. That instinctive knowledge of time is what we are really here to compare to our perceived notion of God. But as I have learned, you can't bring up anything that is conceptually based like God and time unless you cover as many bases as humanly possible when establishing your initial assumptions. That's just a fact of life when you're dealing with philosophically motivated discussions. So, hopefully we find ourselves adequately prepared to venture forward into the next chapter where we will attempt to establish our working definition of time for the aforementioned analogical usage.

Chapter Three

The Working Definition of Time

In the previous chapters, we have briefly hit on a few of the many ways that we as humans measure and relate to the passage of time. We have done so to help us understand what constitutes the reality of what time actually is or is not. We have done this, all in an attempt to nail down what we will be refering to whenever we henceforth speak of time. As we have seen in the first two unfairly lengthy chapters of this paper, the common thread that runs through our concept of time is the theoretical. We even find this commonality in how we think of time in terms of our own biology, one of the most basic of ways that we measure it. But the further that we relagate time to concept and ideal the more real and concrete it becomes. Time is an ideological universal. And in the spirit of Plato, Kant and Russell, time is therefore one of the realest intangible realities we as human beings can experience.

In his book, “Problems With Philosophy”, Bertrand Russell goes to great lengths in both recalling the groundwork laid by the ancient philosopher Plato and in building upon and bolstering the ideas of his contemporary Immanuel Kant concerning our ideals as humans and what concrete form they take. In the first few chapters it is established that everything around us is unknowable. Only our, what he calls, “sense-data” of these things can be known to us. For instance, due to things like the variations in the wavelengths of light, the construction of your particular eyes, the fact that no two people can ever share the exact same vantage point at the exact sametime, all the physical things around you are, if being assessed honestly, not entirely knowable to you. You can only know about your computer, for instance, what your senses tell you about it and since your sense are limited, you can not know what this object “your computer” really is. However, there are things that we know that are defined in our minds outside of this “sense-data”. These things are ideas, and Plato and consequenly Russell, disect this very old problem like this:

“The way the problem arose for Plato was more or less as follows. Let us consider, say, such a notion as justice. If we ask ourselves what justice is, it is natural to proceed by considering this, that, and the other just act, with a view to discovering what they have in common. They must all, in some sense, partake of a common nature, which will be found in whatever is just and in nothing else. This common nature, in virtue of which they are all just, will be justice itself, the pure essence (the admixture) of which, with facts of ordinary life, produces the multiplicity of just acts. Similarly with any other word which may be applicable to common facts, such as 'whiteness' for example.. [t]he word will be applicable to a number of particular things because they all participate in a common nature or essence. This pure essence is what Plato calls an 'idea' or 'form'. (It must not be supposed that 'ideas', in his sense, do not exist in minds, though they may be apprehended by minds.) The 'idea' justice is not identical with anything that is just: it is something other than particular things, which particular things partake of. Not being particular, it cannot itself exist in the world of sense. Moreover it is not fleeting or changeable like the things of sense: it is eternally itself, immutable and indestructible.”

Russell goes on to rename Plato's “ideas” for a word less misconstrued in the past by calling them “universals”. He then establishes that univeral entities must exist and goes on to propose and prove that these universals do not rely on thought for their existence but instead are derived from the independant world from which “thought apprehends but does not create” he does so by using an example the relation of two cities one being north of the next and how regardless of whether there are minds that know the realtion of these two cities or not, the one will always be 'north of' (the universal) the other. In the next chapter he goes on to say this:

“In like manner I become aware of the relation of before and after in time. Suppose I hear a chime of bells: when the last bell of the chime sounds, I can retain the whole chime before my mind, and I can perceive that the earlier bells came before the later ones. Also in memory I perceive that what I am remembering came before the present time. From either of these sources I can abstract the universal relation of before and after, just as I abstracted the universal relation 'being to the left of'. Thus time-relations, like space-relations, are amoung those with which we are aquainted.

It is in this sense that time is a universal and in this sense that time is an indesputable reality of our existence as humans. It is in this intuitive, a priori and homocentric birth of the idea of time that time is eternaly a part of the cosmos now, with or without our stop-watches keeping track. Time, like justice in our first example, can not be pointed to and said to be this or that. But many things can partake in time and can make up time. I can not hope to explain it any better than the greatest philosophers that have ever graced the breast of this planet, but I will still say that regardless of this science or that, I know based on solid philosophy that time is.

As a general rule, man measures time in a heliocentric way. Although a big part of time is merely our measurement of it and what standard of measurement we choose, I propose we attempt to set up an agreement that allows us to contentedly say that it exists with or without our stop-watches keeping track. Still, we have expressions like, “the time before time”, which speaks volumes in terms of our anachronistic sense of time as opposed to time's actual constitution. There isn't really such a thing as a “time before time” but we use the colloquialism to describe a era before mankind anyway. The concept that if we weren't around to count it then it is in a different category, is symptomatic of our collectively skewed psychology.

But before we go any further, I think we should for the sake of my particular point of view explore the explanation of space and time proposed by George Cantor.

The last thing I would like to briefly touch on before we define time is the above kind of metaphorical linguistic tools that stir a debate in the worlds of science and philosophy due to the fact that they belie perhaps a more fundamental issues in the theoretical reasoning. Fundamental issues which may arguably outweigh the extent of the metaphor's heuristic ambit¹. Dispensing with metaphor all-together may be a bit ambitious, to say the least. For instance, in the forthcoming chapters, I will be broaching again the topic of the brain which, in the field of neuroscience, metaphoric language such as “pathways, circuits, memory space, gateway, shortcut and detour” are all part of the vernacular and almost common place in the lexicon of anyone who made it through ninth grade biology. But the truly determining factor in all of this is of course, whether or not these linguistic tools are helping or otherwise clouding our judgement and vision in the pursuit of truth. Although it is true that this debate has gone on since the days of Aristotle, we can make some headway, I believe, if we stay keenly aware of our natural tendency to rely on these conceptualizing techniques and even that to some degree, we need them. I will attempt to be mindful of my usage of metaphor and do my best whenever possible to elaborate in the areas where I am riding solely on such language in hopes that you, the reader, will actively be aware of the metaphoric language used and that it is a necessary evil.

Relevant to the conceptualizations of God and Time is the heavy reliance on the use of metaphoric language. In fact, some might even argue that the lack of time's physicality, but it's existence instead in man's mind, is due largely to just this sort of metaphoric conceptualization. But are the metaphors used to comprehend and communicate such ideas so intrinsically nefarious that we won't be able to conclude anything substantial? I do not think so. Largely because we have already established our idea of a universal. Time is a universal, but in establishing it as such and using the logical pathway I did to do so, did I also build the argument for the existence of God, since we could identify God as a universal as well? Maybe, but we'll talk more about that later.

But again, what is Time? Everything we have discussed thus far in reference time being defined is still but a measurement of something, from cellular growth, to the distance our planet moves in its' orbit around the sun, to only a certain moment in a continuum. Can we give a description to it that lies outside of what is tantamount to it being an intangible yardstick? Let us begin to lay down our initial assumption on time by saying that; First, time is the chronological progression which, whether forward, backward or simultaneously, allows for the present condition of the universe. Second,it is the property of the 4^th dimension that allows us to relate to the first three dimensions and that which stands in the way of our experiencing any dimensions that may exist beyond the 4^th. Third, it is the universal expressed by chronological relation that, as a universal, transcends the world of the senses and has being in that area of existence of eternal immutability where minds “may apprehend but not create”.

I know that there are far more complicated ways to describe this phenomena we call time, the best of which isn't words at all but it is math. For the sake of being concise and avoiding the quagmire, this definition should serve our end.

Note to self: I think time could more technically (and more obtusely) be defined as: The total summation of infinite events and causation of this and/or any other possible universe going from infinity past to infinity future, taking into consideration the relative framing of each universe, the theoretically simultaneous existence of all tenses of time and the infinite integers of said summation or in a strictly ideological sense it is the conceptualization of all of the above which places it in the territory of a universal truth where it may exists and have entity regardless of the mental apprehension of it by man.

But for the sake of clarity, I will work with the one previously established.

Chapter Four

What is God?

In the previous chapters we discussed in what ways we as humans have learned to measure time and in what way time can be considered to be 'real'. Then we established our working definition of time. I hinted earlier in the book that people have an easier time playing devil's advocate with their ideas of God, then they seem to have with their ideas of time. That is a very interesting phenomena that I really want to delve into later, but in this chapter, it is my hope to condense what took me three chapters for time, into just one in this instance and arrive at our working definition of God before we leave this chapter and go to the next. It is overall, much easier for me to describe what 'god' I would like to use in my comparison and it is fairly easy for people to go along with that idea. They and you, may have your own idea on what or who God is or isn't, but that doesn't, and shouldn't, stop you from seeing the analogy. Time, for very peculiar reasons, doesn't respond so well to such generalizations. I think that has to do with the kind of metaphor people are most familiar with using when referencing time. If I were to tell a physicist that “time is money”, although he might not outwardly protest the metaphor, he would have a gut reaction because he has a set way of looking at time in reference to his work. If I were to tell a 911 dispatcher that time is a “no-such-thing” he would I'm sure, at least internally, protest the concept. We cannot generalize time for interesting psychological and sociological reasons. But God, though acceptance of a particular one over the other is usually attached with eternal consequences like heaven and hell, lends itself to generalization for the sake of argument much easier. And even though I identify this characteristic about the idea of God, I would still prefer we come to a concise idea of God anyway. For the sake of this analogy...of course.

Fortunately for us, many folks far more educated and disciplined than myself, have contemplated the nature and idea of god/God from a philosophical and theological perspective for thousands of years prior to our merge existence on this planet. The unfortunate part is of course being, that almost none of them could agree.

Let's be fair and consult (the 'god of references') the dictionary once again, and see if it can shed any empirical light on the matter. Collins and Gage on the subject:

“1 God in the Christian, Jewish, Muslim and certain other religions, the creator and ruler of the universe. 2 a being considered worthy of worship. 3 a person or thing intensely admired and respected.”

I should think it would be best to start with the latter definitions of God and work our way to the former one. In this case I think it advantageous to work from the general to the specific before we jump back out to the general in the last few chapters of the paper. So, let us first note that 'god' could be anything from something as esoteric as Shiva of the Hindu religion all the way to something as mundane as my television set or a chocolate bar. And it is in this sense we begin to see the second half of my purpose for this paper starting to come into focus and that is, time may be god. In a very general sense, god can be a veritable pantheon of things both physical and intangible. Even science and knowledge can be treated as gods. But this multiplicity isn't what we are after, yet. We'll get there.

There will be things about time that we discuss later, that I will not be able to prove, as no one can. We will have to take these traits at face value, as that they are what may be said about time, rather than what can be said about time in actuality. This is only being fair because all things said of God are only things that may be said, as opposed to things that can said. In the previous chapters it was not my main motivation to prove that time truly exists, although I feel I did so adequately (in a philosophical sense), but to merely identify the way in which we 'know' it to exist. So therefore, in this chapter it is not my intent to truly try to prove or disprove the existence of God, but rather to define what conceptualization of god I will be comparing with time. We should limit ourselves, for the sake of this not becoming an atheist manifesto (of which I am indeed not intending this to be), to only speaking in terms of the idea of God rather than in terms of God's actual existence. These are two vastly different things.

I do not wish to try and prove that God does or does not exist. And I do not even wish to prove that belief in the idea of God is a legitimate one or that it is not. I do however want to say before we go much further, that classically speaking, the notion of God is not a universal and neither is it (though often claimed to be) a self-evident truth. In just the slightest defence to believers of God, I must point out that many people, many very empirically driven logicians, often assume that all things believed ought to be believed in because of proof presented and understood. But a great many things are believed by all of us on a daily basis, the truthfulness of which we have no direct proof for believing. Or at the very least, we don't take the time to break down the bread crumb trail of conclusions that led us to believe, say for instance, the fuel we are about to put in our vehicle isn't really water. All of us could, if asked, bring to mind a legitimate reason for believing that it is fuel and not water, but most of us do not walk around with all this sort of reasoning present in our mind. But we have no way, before we begin pumping, of knowing the nature of the liquid. We must go largely on faith, or shall I say “trust” for the first few steps of our reasoning, until some of our sense-data confirms our belief. There are many truths (that when we take logical steps backwards in our reasoning to prove the one we were just at was valid), we eventually hit a wall with and arrive at a belief that we can not trace back any further.

I do feel it is my duty, before we leave behind the discussion of the actual existence of God behind for good, to ask those who believe if it is God they believe in or the idea of Him. Is the belief in God one that, those who believe can believe without having the reasoning at present mind? Is it one that, when asked the reasoning for the belief, can be traced back, until arriving at a point to which they can not give satisfactory answer to their final reasoning? And if so, can they still maintain that the notion is a valid one? Is the truth of a living God truly self-evident? Now the truth or lack there of, in the matter of determining the existence of God, is best left for another argument, and even better left for a fitter debater. That being said, it is enough to know that the idea of 'God' exists and it is that idea that we will be comparing in our analogy.

As I try to set up our framework for what God is, it would be an appropriate time to mention perhaps the most important connection between the perceptions of God and time and that would be, the personalized nature of both. What is God really, other than “all things to all men”? Rather, is it not that the idea of God is so varied in its' definition that it can hardly be said to be one thing over the other? Even those who share the exact same theology will have a sensationally different God experience. God and time are personal. Within one sect of a pop-religion there can be innumerable spins off the one notion of the “God of the Jews”.

The idea of god/God is a individualized notion of a personal choice. Its' main difference from time perhaps being that the notion of God is a belief and inveterate, where as the notion of time, no matter how relative, is indeed a perceivable, confirmable, and measurable affect. The idea of God is taught to us, passed down in its various forms from generation to generation. Along the way, the God (or gods) involved has changed and no amount of staunch dogma and catechism will in any way keep that from happening. There isn't one god that exists today in the precise way, with the precise traits and with the exact compass as that god was attributed to have just a few hundred years ago, let alone a few thousand. Culture shapes the idea of god. Even if you are among those who believe that your God is never changing you must admit, based on your own scripture, that his predilection for how his people ought to conduct themselves is ever-changing based on the dynamic tides of culture. It is on this basis that I say that the concept of God is inveterate. It is confirmed by habit, culture and experience. It is not confirmed by any absolute regulation or anything outside of ourselves or outside of the interpretations of our fellow man.

Conversely, the concept of time, though flexible enough to be individually confirmed and uniquely experienced, is universal and absolute. There is no amount of scientific study, no theories specific or general on the relativity of time, that can change how we experience it. In many ways it is completely untouched and unaffected by the sea of cultural change. Although culture may respond to it differently. Time has always been a constant, and barring of course our solar system slipping to near a black-hole changing it's rate of passage, it's perception by man always will be the same, meaning our concept (day to day) has and will remain relatively the same. And even then, with our physical bodies entering this cosmic anomaly along with the solar system, I highly doubt we would notice a change in time at all. Much the same way our astronaut from earlier still experiences time the same as he always has even though it is moving slower for his comrades on earth. No matter how deeply your belief that time is a figment and a illusion of your mind, you do not stop ageing. No matter how passionately you want to convince yourself that time doesn't have any reality behind it, you cannot run from it.

Ultimately though, both of our integers are defined by the person having the experience. We all experience the perception of God differently then the next. It is in this way that time stands up to being considered a universal where God does not. I have no relation to God and can have no relation to him. In time I can say this or that happened before or after that and this. But in respect to God, I can make no regulatory connection. But there are thousands of people who would violently disagree with me and feel they experience God at every moment. But I again ask, what are they experiencing; God or the concept of God?

I can think of one view of God that lines up so well with the analogy of time, that it's almost like I planned it, that would be the view of a Deist. The Deist's view of God is that, he has all the traditional attributes of the “Judeo-Christian” (term used for the sake of familiarity) God with out all that pesky meddling. The Deist's God is also known as the “Grandfather Clock God”. The idea is that He wound up the universe like a giant clock and is now standing back to see how it all works out. What? A God and a clock in the same theistic view? What a coincidence...

Time is universal and depending on how you want to measure it, reaches from past the edges of visible space, all the way to the depths of our human hearts and down to every cell in our bodies. So then must our concept of God be ever-reaching. Although comparisons could be drawn to 'lesser' archetypes of god(s) (i.e. Ones that have power over one or just a few realms in nature), which concept of God best suits our analogy? In this instance I follow the mantra, “go big or go home”. Although, I will from time to time make references outside of what we are establishing here, the analogy best lines up with an eternal, infinite, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, holy, loving God. For the sake of this thesis, we are going to compare time with the 'one true God' of The Bible (or the dictionary).

I would like to give a nod to the fact that there are versions of the 'Bible God' that are much older. The God of the Bible most likely has its roots in older Sumerian mythology¹. The reason I chose to stay with a “younger” God is mostly because his pervasive influence throughout the past few thousand years has made him the staple ideal of God with which most of us can best associate.

For the purpose of effective communication of my ideas we will assume, unless otherwise noted, that from this point on when I use the word “God”, I am referring to the God used as the basis of the modern Christian and the ancient Judaic religions (i.e. YHVH). Let us lay down this definition of God; 1 an infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, holy, loving, God most closely found in the Judaic/Muslim religions who transcends all cardinal, ordinal, and dualistic limitations of reality.

The current version of God (and by current I mean of course, the Judaic version established some four thousand years ago, give or take) describes 'Him' as having always been and that He always will be; He is the “alpha and omega”, as it were; that He is infinite. Christianity and many other religions, hold the tenant of the eternal nature of the human soul; that it is created at birth and lives on forever and which is of course, different from infinite which goes in both directions. This was the first notable trait attributed to YHVH by the author of the Pentateuch (The first five books of the Bible. The accredited writer being Moses), done so by incorporating God's timelessness right into his name. The description of God has conveniently failed people for thousands and tens of thousands of years. Too many to list are the passages in the Torah, the Bible and Koran in which the writer explicitly states his words fail him. I don't think that that is an accident. Interesting to me, is that another way to look at the name of YHVH is, “I am what I will be”. In the interest of the topic of this essay, we could say, “ I am (now in time) what I will be (later in time)”¹. Our very comprehension of the name of the one true God rests on the concept of infinite time, not timelessness as many would argue. It is also interesting that the bed rock of understanding when it comes to the essence of this god, we rely on something as difficult to articulate as time. Not exactly putting things in simplest terms, really.

Whether there was an actual man named Moses (or whether it was a group of scribes tucked away in some cave or hovel), is of little consequence. What matters is that there was significant knowledge of the Egyptian pantheon and thus the name of the Jewish God was chosen; with reasonable cause. It was no accident that the author started off with a God that was, by the very definition of that God's name, infinite. The allegory of the captivity of the Jews put them in a land that had gods that were entirely 'un-god-like' (in the sense that western culture has come to know God). Within the context of the Jewish mythology of Moses, he was a Jew of the house of Levi, raised by Egyptian royalty and would have most certainly been trained and instructed in the religion and mythology of the Egyptians. Subsequently, when the hero of our epic decide that it was his job to free his people from the grip of Pharaoh, he [the writer(s)] invented a God and a theology that was the exact antithesis of the Egyptian train of thought. Where the Egyptians were content in having multiplicity and flexibility as an underlying characteristic of their deity belief system (being based in oral tradition that could change and bend with little worry to the dynastic leaders), Moses was not. Instead, the writers of the Pentateuch wrote one cohesive story based on one all-powerful God. They would have noticed the Egyptian pitfalls of not writing a cannon¹. As Moses was being schooled he would have asked questions regarding the beliefs of those that went before him and he would have got different answers depending on who he asked. Even if he could get straight answers, they would have told him of just how mailable the gods of the Egyptians were and how little the gods involved themselves in the events that transpired on the earth at the present². It was common knowledge that only the unsophisticated people and the lower tiers of society believed the myths to be literal. It is in my opinion that the Jewish writers wanted to tear down that barrier and to make a religion that was not only for the common Jew, but also one that could not be tailored to the whims of whom ever maybe found leading his people. 'Moses' wrote a collection of books that coalesced all the ancient myths into one dogmatic text that gave credit to his YHVH.

Most importantly and perhaps most applicably, Moses would have been instructed in the ideas that Egyptians held on time. They believed that deep in the past lied a very linear set of events that brought about the existence of all that is. The cosmos, the earth and man at some point, began to run on the cycles that are seen in nature, then and now and by reenacting the linear events of the primordial past, they would restore the order of the cycles in heaven and earth¹. Such was the fate of each cycling generation until this physical world's eventual return to a primordial sea². The God of Moses would have not only broken this cycle and shown supremacy, but He would even reach past the linear time of origins that the Egyptians set up and into infinity past, as well as beyond the extent of the existence of the physical future. Infinity past, the present cycles and infinity future, in Egyptian mythology, were all separate domains of distinctly different gods (or sets of gods). The God of Moses would transcend time and be the one and only creator and governor.

Although the exact origin of the name YHVH is from an era, that for now, reaches beyond any reliable record, the true origins of the Israeli people has become quite clear in recent times. Contrary to the story of an Egyptian exodus and wars with the inhabitants of Canaan, the archeological evidence points to the Jewish community peacefully collecting their numbers in the hills of Palestine most likely in quiet revolt to the opulent and superfluous concerns of the city-states³. It wasn't until Saul, the first king of Israel, did the entire nation adopt one god. Since Saul was from Edom and the likeliest origin for YHVH is in the far southeast of Canaan (Edom) it makes sense that he would unify his nation under his local supreme being. Thus, a cohesive religion, cannon, tradition, a supernatural mandate and consequently, the authority of Moses and subsequently the divine right of the lineage of Saul was born. There are of course, a few archeologist with sharply contrasting opinions on this theory. One of which, is jadfkldff, a well respected Egyptologist with a strong inclination towards the Biblical account. And although many of his arguments and evidence are compelling, I must still side with the majority of researchers, for I am certainly no archeologist.

This brief synopsis of the history of Israel and their God, though it seem a bit off the trail, is indeed very necessary for us to understand the God we have come to know and take for granted in Christendom. It is essential that we understand where our perceptions come from and with what motivations and upon what ideals the fathers of this Judaic theology operated. The culminating result is our concept of an infinite God. It is important for the reason found in the quote I began this paper with. Some of the things that we think we know to be instinctive and natural, are only believed from habit and association and are inveterate.

It is at this point that I feel comfortable in saying that we have effectively defined the two terms of our equation, “God” and “Time” and it is at this moment that we can go forward and begin to talk at length about the exact way in which these to integers are so tightly wound together in our minds because of our limited ability to comprehend the so-called supernatural, our modern and ancient metaphoric linguistics and our almost willing confusion between theory and fact.

Chapter Five

Classifying the Traits Assigned to God and Time

Now that we have our terms well defined and satisfactorily articulated it should be safe to begin drawing our analogy that God is Time. These past four chapters have brought us to this point, but before we dive in there is one more thing to cover and that is understanding the type of traits to which we will be drawing comparisons. Some of the traits of God, like his infinity, omnipresence, and omnipotence and the like, are different then traits like his love, grace, patience, etc. So, it seems it should, at least, mildly concern us to identify which we are talking about and when. The category of traits which we will deal with first are what I would call, the 'structural attributes'. Whereas, the second kind, we will call the 'personality traits'. The importance in the delineation is in determining from which of the two categories we choose God's one main governing attribute. What one trait governs all the others? Does one trait necessarily have to govern all the others? Many religiously minded people tend to think so, often without second thought. For instance many liberal Baptist and other denominations will state, as I'm sure all of us have heard ad nousium that, “God is love”. In other words, God is not actually love, but that it is his love that governs all of his actions. A simple check with the scripture would convince even the novice theologian that that is simply not the case. If God were love, he certainly would not condemn so many people to such awful eternal fates. So, what is God's (and Time's, for that matter) one governing attribute? Before we answer that, let us discuss the two categories of traits first and see what we can agree upon in reference to “God is Time”.

The 'structural attributes', as I have called them, are better known, by and large, as the 'omni' attributes (i.e. Omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience and the like). There are many ways of looking at these traits assigned to God and they are often each thought of independently from the next. However, there is one structural attribute that should stand out to us as a so-called 'governing attribute' within the subset of the 'structural attributes' and it is actually not an 'omni' trait at all but it is God's infinity. The infinity of God must be that core structural trait upon which all the others are hung like coats on a coat-rack. We will discuss in further detail in the subsequent chapter exactly why I feel that is and what implications are held with this position. But is this the trait which governs God's actions and motives? Let us consider the next subset of traits.

The second subset of attributes is what I have deemed God's 'personality traits'. These, intuitively, would be his grace, patience, love, holiness, righteousness and so on. So among these traits we must carefully choose which trait it is that governs the manifestation of all the others. We have all ready mentioned God's love, and although a major theme in the scripture, it can not possibly be his defining personality trait because then a great many of his deeds seem largely unjust, if put mildly, and certainly not done out of love. What about his patience or grace? I think those too fail to meet the bar for a 'governing' attribute. From much of the learning that I have been subject to through out my years, it has remained a common theme that, at least in my opinion, the most likely candidate for a trait that can be identified as being a true “looking glass” for the totality of God's actions and reactions would be definitively, his holiness. It is the dominance of this trait that may justify the condemnation of sinners and the exultation of saints and it is precisely this trait that brings into focus his love and sacrifice, his grace and mercy, his righteousness and patience.

So, of the two trait subsets I think it easy now to identify which of the two 'governing traits' is indeed preeminent in my point of view. God's structure (power) is defined in terms of his infinity (or 'timelessness') and his deeds and actions (the application of his structural attributes) are sanctioned and governed by his holiness. The former claim I feel is a logical conclusion and the later is one based on the intricate subjective experiences I went through in my own theological academics. Before I rest may case for the foundational work of dissecting the attributes and traits of God and Time, I think it only fair to mention again that in all the cases (and with each trait), the way in which we communicate our ideas is through extensive use of metaphor. If I were to say, “Time heals all wounds”, you would inevitably contract the idea in your mind of a benevolent force slowly and carefully caring for and nurturing the wounds laid upon your soul from say, the loss of a loved one. But we know it is a metaphoric linguistic tool that better and more aptly says that, with the passage of time and the removal from a painful event by separation of days, months and years, we tend to focus less and less on the discomfort of said painful event and begin to move forward with our emotional lives by building and strengthening our existing relationships and by forging new ones. Such metaphors, although pervasively used are obvious, in most cases, to our cognition and rarely go undetected when we are referring to things that are obviously not considered to be sentient entities. This is just like when I say my car doesn't like a certain kind of gas. I know and I would hope so would everyone with whom I share that information, that it is understood that my car doesn't really have a preference as to what petrol I put in it and from what station it was purchased. Through anthropomorphizing I can attribute a certain human quality to my vehicle and then say it likes this or dislikes that, and as long as we are speaking in terms of things that we 'know' to not have consciousness, like a storm or the sea, we are generally not confused upon the issue of the metaphor.

However, I have noticed, as I am sure many have, a disconnect when it comes to the metaphor that we use to describe living things like plants and trees, the family pet and most importantly and most seriously things we believe to be living, like god. There are many people who genuinely believe and will passionately argue that upon returning home from work, their dog is indeed “happy” to see them. Some people even feel that upon transplanting or pruning a plant or shrub, it becomes unhappy or dejected. More directly, in the case of god, for some reason we forget that all the traits and most specifically his personality traits, are nothing more than complete metaphorical linguistics. There is no way that god loves (like we do), or that he hates sin. It is simply a non sequiter to think that an immortal, perfect, timeless, all-powerful god has anything remotely resembling what we deem as emotions. The Bible often refers (in the Old Testament) to god being 'jealous'. But that just simply isn't true. The way in which he acts based on his specific traits maybe interpreted by man as love, hate, jealousy and the like, but that doesn't mean he possess those traits in any real human way. And to assume that he does is to lower him from his god status and make him quite human. So does that stop the devout from thinking their god loves them? In most cases no, because they pick and chose what emotions god feels and doesn't feel, based on what they themselves want their god to be. But that is besides the point here.

I would like to put forth that in the forthcoming chapters, as we talk about the traits of god and time and your mind begins to fight with my ideas (on specifically what traits I assign to time), remember this, that even in terms of god it is nothing but metaphor. All of the ideas we use to 'understand' and talk about god are metaphoric. Even such traits as righteousness and justice. Even his holiness is not immune. god is not holy. He just is. It is our minds that have assigned him his holiness based on our perceptions and construction of this entity.

The first few chapter have been an excessive but necessary dissection and definition of exactly what terms we are using when we say “God and Time”. Establishing the constituents of the phrase was the hard part and for the next several chapters we will be comparing the two concepts, in hope that we see more similarities then we do differences. It is my expectation, that by the end of this book, I have done what all good philosophy does and nothing more, and that is, to make the reader question the world both around him and the world in his head. Causing him to see things as possibilities rather than facts set in stone and to make him step outside of the walls of his mind, if but for a moment, even if just to disagree with me, before once again returning to his fortress. This is really my only goal. So, it is upon this foundation that I feel confident in observing the first similarity between god and Time, being the first of the structural traits and perhaps as previously stated, the most important of them and that is, the infinite nature of god and Time.

Chapter Six

The Infinite Nature of God and Time

In this chapter, we will explore the first of several 'structural attributes' often attributed to god and less often to time, especially today, in this post relativistic world. I think however, that the consideration of infinite time is still one worth at least quickly pausing in regard. It is, I confess, an impossibility to prove, but that is not reason enough for a philosopher to consider it moot. Leave such staunch judgements for the sciences.

To be completely fair to modern theology, there are many theistic explanations on exactly how god is or is not connected with time, each of which, as I have mentioned, have distinct ramifications on the way we view the rest of god's attributes. For instance, there is the camp that says that god is infinite yet temporal, meaning that his life did not begin and it will not have an end and he experiences events in a sequential way, like we do. Also, there is the view that god is completely timeless in that, he dealt with the issues of creation and early man at the same time he answered the prayers of those who implored his help in church just last Sunday. Some hold the view that god is neither timeless nor temporal but completely and utterly outside of our time by being in his own time. This ideology stands on the concept that god's time-line is sequential but his relation to our time-line is 'all-at-once'. There is also the view held by Stump and Kretzmann known as 'eternal-temporal-simultaneity' and though revised since they first published in 1981, it still has met with strong criticism for very fundamental reasons including it being based it on analogical presuppositions, that being a damning fact regardless of the heuristic intent¹. But who am I to judge analogous content?

So far, the best and most cohesive concept on the timelessness of god is perhaps that of Brian Leftow, and his view of the QTE of god (Quasi-Temporal Eternality of god¹). This claim is, as far as I can see, the one most in-line with the theology of a metaphysically simple god, meaning god's “lifespan” is made up of an infinite amount of points (rather than innumerable amount of discreet parts), but also that god's life is made up of non-temporal events that are somehow in successive relation to one another. Not only does god experience all universal events “all-at-once”, he lives his entire life all-at-once, as well. There is no point in which a moment of god's existence ceases to be and there is no point in which a moment of god's existence begins. All experiences, moments and reactions occur simultaneously, successively and infinitely.

Now, in regards to time, can we gather the same “timelessness” of time? A bit of an oxymoron I know, but is there an element of time that transcends the same limitations that the concept of god's timelessness does? Can time transcend time?One night, after looking up some source material for man's anthropological roots, I ran across an entire web page dedicated to the theory that “God is Time”². Much to my surprise, it was not run by a raving lunatic wearing a foil helmet, but instead the curator was Dr. Andrew Gustin a very intelligent lad who, after a brief correspondence agreed to allow me to use some of his musings on the topic and to whom I was more than happy to lend whatever assistance I could toward the developing of his angle on the philosophy. More than finding him, I was shocked to see that there were more than the two of us. In fact, there are many. There are many people who are collectively yet independently, arriving at the same conclusion and we are doing so relatively at the same time. This is an important phenomena that has wonderful implications and we will revisit this later as well and it is this phenomena that Dr. Gustin mainly concerns himself with these days.

The reason I share my meeting Dr. Gustin is to give credit for the following logical progression that is essential in the acceptance of the principle of infinite Time, and just like the establishing of god's timelessness, is rudimentary for the building of the rest of Time's 'god-like' attributes. Although Dr. Gustin's motives for his site and theory of God is Time are slightly different than mine, good amount of what he is expressing is in synchronicity with my analogy. The following is an excerpt from the chapter of his web site. The chapter, aptly named, “God or Infinity”:

If one is to contemplate the beginning of the universe, one soon realizes the options that are present. One of two possibilities exist - Either the universe was created, or the universe has always existed(...)

However, if we assume that there is no creator, or 'God', we must assume that the universe has always been here. The universe cannot just come into existence without being created, so we are forced to rely on the concept of infinite time. We know that time will most likely continue to infinity in the future (although the universe eventually won't even remotely resemble what it is today)...so it makes sense that time could go to infinity in the past. Instead of the universe being created the some 14 billion years ago when the "big bang" happened, what if this event was just another chapter in the infinite history of the universe? We cannot tell what happened before this expansion, so assuming that the "big bang" was the beginning is just as viable as assuming that it wasn't.

Thus, one has to subscribe to either believe in a God (as in a creator), or believe in infinite time. This isn't to say that one cannot believe in both a God and infinite time, but it is to say that one cannot believe in neither. To do so is to ignore the most fundamental question of how the universe that we live in got here. Someone who describes themselves as an atheist that doesn't believe in infinity has built themselves into a paradox. Personally, I view myself as an atheist, and therefore am forced to accept the concept of infinity. There is simply no other way. This concept itself should not be hard to allow, however. It shows up innumerable times in mathematics, programming, cosmology, and various other fields. And while mathematics was discovered, it is one of the most perfect and useful discoveries ever. The laws of mathematics can never be broken. One plus one is always two. And there is no limit to how many times you can add one more - because numbers are infinite.

If you are one of the aforementioned atheists that does not believe in infinite time, I regretfully have to inform you that this book has not much else to offer you. Sorry to have taken you this far for nothing, but this is your stop. Joking aside, this is the foundational assumption as we progress with the next part of the thought and instead of stepping on the good Doctor's toes, I will resist the urge to rephrase his words, because I feel they need no such assistance.

Those who are in agreement with men like Stephen Hawking, might want to look away for this next bit. Hawking often says, that what happened before the Big-Bang (in reference often to time's beginning) is both unknowable and irrelevant. Sure, from an empirical and scientific stance, of course I agree. But from a philosophical one, I could not disagree anymore than I do. I think in the area of postulation and philosophizing on the nature of time that it is of the utmost importance to not only consider time in terms of how it acts and reacts within the confines of this current universe at this time, but also how it acts and reacts outside of this universe and before this time-line. If it did or could exist beyond this, would it change any fundamental mathematics that we use to account and predict the universe? Of course not. Or maybe it would change everything. To say so with any real degree of certainty is mildly put, foolhardy. I think it the rather large underestimation of both our need to know what lies just beyond reach and our ability comprehend those things, if we begin to consider what we know as even slightly certain. Sometimes, I think that regrettably, scientifically minded men have a tendency to lose sight of the fact that philosophy has always been the infant form of all science. Even astronomy was philosophy at one point. Newton named his ground breaking work, 'The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'.

Although the math of theories like special relativity and string theory are persuasive and moving, we must always keep in mind they are only theories and each based on their own suppositions some potentially right, some potentially wrong. So, I ask you to suspend for a moment this concept that time is a one-trick-pony and instead postulate that perhaps there is more then one facet to this thing we measure and call time. With the definition set out previously, consider that maybe time might not be limited in scope at all. I have often been told that the limitations imposed on the universe are perhaps not the physical ones but instead the those perpetrated by mathematics. But what is time, physicality or math? It is only my opinion, but I believe it to be both. When the universe is in motion, time is a physically measurable effect on every single particle and force in the universe. When the universe is in singularity, I think time is then relegated only to its' mathematical 'potential'. In singularity it is a kinetic equation allowing for the singularity to expand. Whereas, in stasis or chill it is a 'finished' equation in that, it has the 'answer' completed and exists as a 'satisfied equation'.

Continuing forward, I ask you to make an initial assumption with me that time is “timeless” in the way that we are unable to measure its' true extent and that it is infinitely present in the “past” and infinitely present in the “future” and that, as previously stated, it is the chronological progression which, whether forward, backward or simultaneously, allows for the present condition of the universe and that it is the property of the 4^th dimension that allows us to relate to the first three dimensions and is that which stands in the way of our experiencing any dimensions that may exist beyond the 4^th. Just as this is an important trait of god, essentially being the foundation for the rest of his traits both 'structural' and 'personal', it is also a prerequisite for the rest of the traits of Time and just as Dr. Gustin says, “assuming that the "big bang" was the beginning is just as viable as assuming that it wasn't”.

Chapter Seven

The Omnipresence of God and Time

With the infinite nature of both God and Time understood to be our fundamental structural trait, I feel we can, with better focus, move on to the other structural traits perceived to be aspects of what we consider to be 'God'. It also gives us a better frame of reference for identifying that perhaps, these following traits exist just under the surface in our perception of Time. Maybe they fly just low enough that we've failed to identify them and passed them on to our imagination to create for us a being that has the traits as a part of his essence instead. Just like the line of reasoning used to assure ourselves the fuel being put in our vehicle is truly fuel and not water, perhaps our line of reasoning with the time/god conundrum is also not present in our minds, but this time instead of serendipitously arriving at the proper conclusion and “fuelling our vehicle with gas”, maybe we have falsely identified one or both of these things and we are none the wiser to our mistake. In this chapter, we will discuss the potential for Time being omnipresent.

I have to ponder god existing everywhere, that he is omnipresent, and how, if at all, that trait can be applied to time. First, let's discuss how we apply it to our idea of god. There are many an overtly advantageous reason for having a god that is everywhere simultaneously. Beyond that fact that it credits him the unfathomable power of ultimate espionage over enemies and evil, it also makes him able to commune individually with everyone of his people simultaneously. This one trait helps solidify the personal nature of this god, allowing him to interact with all people both “good” and “bad” and control the events of the entire cosmos all at the same time. As previously stated, the position one holds on the timelessness of god has dramatic impact on the way in which one views the rest of god's attributes. It must be first, that god is outside of time, so that he maybe able to operate in an omnipresent way. It is only because of his all-at-once perspective that he is able to have, what appears to us, as a presence at all moments and all locations of all moments.

Turning our attention back to time, with the idea of its' infinite nature firmly in our minds, let us ponder its' omnipresence, as well. I think we have all seen artistic renderings of what reality look like according to string theorists from several dimensions out, yes? The multiverse appearing as blobs and loops and drops of water. Each universe slightly different. Each organized in a strange and fantastical way leaving this one as a unique rarity and able to support the conditions for life and our silly little discussion here. There is also the consideration of Divergent Universes, that only serves to amplify by extension, the vastness of time. But consider, the existence of time in each hypothetical universe. Although, elements of this universe might not exist in others (elements like gravity and light) I am hard pressed to believe that time doesn't exist, in one form or another, in all of them. Many a universe expands and contracts, in and out from it's singularity in a cyclical function of “Big Band” and “Big Crunch” or some “Chill”. Based on what we laid down about time in the last chapter, is it much of a stretch to say that time may/must exist in all of them in at least one form or another? Could it be that time is the one constant component of every universe that exists (growing, collapsing or standing still)? If it the universe in question does time exist as a potential equation, an existing one, or one that is solved?

If I can ponder time in the terms of a relativist, I might be permitted to put forth that time is distance if you are outside of the fourth dimension. If I could, I would like to take it a step further. Here, where we are, space and time are interwoven, hence the nomenclature, “the fabric of space-time”. Subsequently, we experience time in a linear fashion on this “wave” as Einstein calls it, and we really only see it... or more aptly feel it, this one way. But if you were standing on shore you would experience the 'wave' in a whole new light. Our universe and it's course through time, become more of a sausage shape.

Another way of thinking about this is to imagine how the picture of a light source (say the screen of your cell phone) turns out if it is being jiggled and spun about in front of a camera that is taking a picture at a slow shutter speed. The single point of light now appearing snake-like, wiggling it's way around the frame in a very “3D” shape (albeit in a 2D format, the photo itself). It is literally a picture of that light's journey through space and time. Now imagine a camera set out in space following your life span as you move about your day to day. Its' shutter stays open for the first few years of your life as you barely leave the side of your parents. It follows you as you travel across the continent or over seas. The shutter stays open for seventy years as you move around this planet, a planet that is whizzing around the sun and as that sun drifts through space. Soon a very “4D” shape begins to form and you don't look at all like you think you do. You look more and more like a weird worm that has tentacles and protuberances jutting out here and there. By the time the shutter closes and you cease to be, instead of arms, legs and a head you have hoops, loops and tubes and by and large look very much not human. Welcome to life out side of linear time.

Our time to a being outside of it is a mile. In fact, remnants of the idea that time is distance date back to ancient Phoenicia and can still be found in Arab culture today. Ask them a simple question of distance from one city to the next and they will invariably give it to you in hours and minutes. In all actuality we all do it from time to time don't we? When you're trying to talk someone in to dropping you off somewhere and you say, “C'mon! It's only 5 minutes down the road!” Not mention the way we measure coordinates on our planet in degrees, minutes and seconds harkens to this very concept. Time is not only a chronological bench- mark here in the 4^th but also a benchmark of distance in subsequent hypothetical dimensions, allowing for it to be not only the way in which we experience our tellurian existence, but also the means by which other hypothetical beings relegate measurements of location in their existence in dimensions outside of ours. I am reminded of a Hindu poem about time:

All things happen according to the dictates of Time;

Both good and bad depend on Time;

Prosperity and poverty likewise depend on Time;

Time is the determinant of all things;

There is none who is not subject to Time

In this entire world...

I digress. Ultimately, all we can really know is the universe we are currently occupying and only to the degree which our frames allow. And in this universe, not a thing happens without chronology. We can see that time is indeed a natural “deity”, in that no matter which way we are going in linear time, it is time that “controls” our course, and the inevitability of our demise.

Just the idea alone that we cannot experience our universe without time would perpend to be adequate cause to consider Time as God, no? Which would of course, be the mental birth place of god's such Chronos. Although it is a word or concept coined by man, it is that force that without which we would very much find it extraordinarily difficult to experience the rest of our surroundings. Quite frankly, we wouldn't exist at all. So time almost takes the role of the “creator” as well. We are the sediment of Time.

Time must exist ubiquitously in our universe or it wouldn't (and we wouldn't) exist at all. Unlike gravity, and light and other forces that are tied to a specific body, time is, and by virtue of its' role, time must exist in all places at all times. If it were not to exist in a certain point or at a certain place there would be (what I can only postulate upon) major unravelling consequences. If space-time is a fabric then Time's absence would potentially be like pulling that silly thread at the end of your sleeve that you thought would just snap off but instead, ended with the shirt's entire hem being let out. Even in the hypothetical theory of black-holes time is not destroyed. In fact, of all the universal dimensional elements that enter the hole it is only time that remains intact in its flow from the depths of the singularity to the rest of surrounding space. I'll grant the distortion of time from the depths to the outer fringes of the cone but it is still an ability that not even our current scientific benchmark (light) can boast, in that, although light can not make it out of a black hole, time can not be taken completely in.

Is it a possibility that what exists everywhere simultaneously must by inherent nature have always existed everywhere simultaneously, further reinforcing the infinity of time? Time, being infinitely present in the “past” and infinitely present in the “future” and that, as previously stated, is the chronological progression which, whether forward, backward or simultaneously, allows for the present condition of the universe and that it is the property of the 4^th dimension that allows us to relate to the first three dimensions and that which stands in the way of our experiencing any dimensions that may exist beyond the 4^th, must do so in an omnipresent way by existing in every corner and in every anomaly of this and any other potential universe whether it be kinetic, in motion or in a satisfied capacity.

Chapter Eight

The Omniscience of God and Time

In the past chapter we discussed in a round about way, the possibility of time being the “gold standard”, of sorts for any possible Multiverse by it potentially being omnipresent. Since the days of Einstein, we have had the criterion of speed-of-light limitations placed on things with mass as being the unbreakable rule of physics. But some astounding research at the CERN laboratories is starting to unravel a few inconsistencies with this illusion of c (the speed of light). MORE.

Personally, I think that it is treading on dangerous ground if ever we assume we have found anything to be a certain in this universe. We should know better by now. It is by mistaking principle for absolute that many decent ideas are turned into religious credo and the dogma of megalomaniacs. Recently, a NASA scientist had his tenure ended for espousing his belief in Intelligent Design. I mention this only because the scientific world often sees itself less biased and dogmatic then it often is in practice. We need to be ever vigilant that we do not do, in the name of science, what has been done in the name of god for so many centuries. Which is why I rather like establishing time as a constant. It is precisely due to its' discrepant and variable nature that I favour it for being that element of all that exists; that it is the agglomerate and conjunctive force, the “stitch in time”, if you will. It is a variable invariable. Oxymora are our friends and most of that is pontification spiked with humour. In this chapter, we will hang our legs over the proverbial edge as we consider that time may also be in many ways considered omnipotent.

Often, but not always (i.e. Greek mythology), god knows all. he is omniscient. Again, this attribute of god is directly linked to his infinite nature, in such a way as it is only possible for him to know everything because he has seen everything in an all-at-once reference frame and that is only possible because he is infinite. Thus, giving him the ultimate clarity to make decisions based on the final (potential and actual) outcomes of any particular equation. What good is living god if he can't exercise his infinite attributes within infinite knowledge? For a god to be all powerful he's gotta know what he's doing.

Time too, could be considered all-knowing within the context of it being infinite and omnipresent. Consider the journey of the radio wave (actually being a form of light wave). There exists in the deepest reaches of outer space to this very day, the first ever broadcast sounds of mankind bouncing and pinging of the planets and stars. However diminished and lessened they become on their journey, they still exist. Have they become immeasurable and just part of the ambient “noise” of the universe? Yes. But they still exist. These parts of the past still exist somewhere and always will for as long as this universe remains, perhaps longer.

One of my personal favourite bands, the “Foo-Fighters” (a reference of course to the brave and mildly insane pilots of the world war who fought against the ), were playing a show in New Zeland at the concert grounds on 2012. It was during and only during there performance that seismic detectors in the surrouning area picked up mild earthquake activity registering point on the Richter scale. Upon hearing the news, I distinctly remember remarking to my wife that they just sealed the deal of their music living on forever. Algorithmic patterns trapped in the vibrating crust of the earth and subsequently being broadcast into space via the largest transmitter ever used (the planet earth) was but a joke, but one still has to wonder just what sort of feather to the pottery they may have unwittingly utilized.

There are many theories on cyclical time that would mean that time past is still happening and that time future already has and that time present is both in the past and the future simultaneously. Einstein said once that, “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once”. But he also said that our view of time is merely a, “very persistent” illusion. So, if I may hypothesize again from a Relativistic point of view, something I have often thought about is whether or not the simultaneous existence of all three tenses of time would allow for different energies, frequencies, or wavelengths to “bleed” into another time frame. Perhaps, this being the origin of premonition and prediction. Perhaps an explanation for the siting of “ghosts”. Perhaps the message our boys in the Foo-Fighters sent last has always existed in the earth and always will. Did the earth “know” about them before they even set foot on it?

If a camera is pointed deep enough into space we can take a picture of the universe how it existed millions if years ago. We are literally taking a picture of the past. Research. Although, at best, only a gross outline giving us merely an outline of the edge of the universe, it still makes us wonder, “Am I able to look at the past because in a sense, it still exists?”

Hence, I arrive at my postulation that Time “knows” all. I am speaking collectively and comprehensively of its' accumulated “knowledge” across the eons from it's infinite existence in this universe and beyond, of course. Think of time as a cosmic library. The library doesn't really “know” it “knows” all of the information contained in the books it houses. Understanding our conceptualization of Time in its' totality, relies heavily, just as the case is with God, upon our fundamental supposition. If we can consider Time, in the terms we have defined it thus far, to be infinite we can also consider it be a great deal of other things as well.

Perhaps there stands a possibility of the cosmos becoming cognitive. If so, what would the infinite, omnipresent expanse of the web of time serve for such a sentient universe? Has Time already served a purpose for this, or some other hypothetical, universe? Is our universe the creation of another universe or the greater cosmos as a whole? We only know our past and the things we've learned because we learned them in time. Yes, the retention of those thing is in the cellular matter of our brains but time, and its' chronology, was the conduit of our learning. Is it possible that the Macroverse is a giant skull and Time, in it's various functions and manifestations works as a similar conduit for the cognitive abilities of a sentient universe?. Then stands the possibility that not only would time figuratively know all, but literally as well. There really is no way of us knowing with any real certainty the nascent state of the universe, but there is a great deal on postulation done on the subject regardless.

As we all know, the brain works on electrical impulses. With new research showing that perhaps the cosmos does too, we have to reevaluate just how quickly we dismiss the possibility of a “Brain-iverse” (this of course being the comic name I have given a sentient universe). Research the “electric universe”

Let's conclude this chapter's set of speculations by adding them to the established definition of time as done in the previous chapter, by saying that Time, being infinitely present in the “past”, infinitely present in the “future”, the chronological progression which, whether forward, backward or simultaneously, allows for the present condition of the universe and that it is the property of the 4^th dimension that allows us to relate to the first three dimensions, that which stands in the way of our experiencing any dimensions that may exist beyond the 4^th and that it must do so in an omnipresent way by existing in every corner and in every anomaly of this and any other potential universe whether it be kinetic, in motion or in a satisfied capacity, as a result there stands the possibility that it is a universal conduit for the comprehension, accumulation, and realization of infinite knowledge.

Time is infinite, omnipresent, and omniscient and these are all traits that are what we are calling the 'structural attributes'. But what's all that with out the muscle to back it up? In the next chapter we will be considering the final structural trait by talking about the all-powerful nature of God and Time.

Chapter Nine

The Omnipotence of God and Time

Only a God who knows all, lasts for infinity past to infinity future and is in all places at all times can expect to be an all-powerful one. Here again we see the heavy dependance the other attributes ascribed to God have on His timelessness. Omnipotence implies timelessness. What good is being all-powerful if you're going to die tomorrow and you're not able to stop that from happening? Not very all-powerful. To be considered all powerful you, would think that you must be able exercise at least a moderate control over time. And in terms of what we as humans can do with time, timelessness might as well imply omnipotence as well. If you've been around forever and you always will, I can almost guarantee that freakish longevity is not the only trick you've got up your sleeve. The final trait in the 'structural attributes that I want to cover before we move on is this idea of omnipotence.

Ask any engineer which of the elements poses predominant hazard for the greatest number of structures and machines and I think you'll find the answer pretty much consistent; water. But water needs time to do its' work. Unless of course, you ascribes to the Diluvian Mythology in which a flood can carve the Grand Canyon in a day or two. Not to mention, not causing all the slat water fish to go extinct. Or maybe they did go extinct and recouped their numbers through adaptation (but certainly not micro-evolution) until they regained their ascendance of the seas inside two thousand years or so.

Sarcasm aside, for many years I carried with me a river stone given to me as a gift, that could fit in the palm of my hand, with room to spare. It's edges were round and it was sort of an odd oval shape and quite flat, perhaps only three-quarters of an inch thick. Drilled, almost exactly in the centre of the stone, was a neat little hole that passed straight through the entirety of the stone's thickness on a slight bias. When it was first given to me as a boy, I recall wondering aloud to the gift giver, how this fate could have befallen this stone seeing that there were no tool marks, no scrapes from sand paper or file, absolutely no sign of a man's manipulation on the pebble. She answered my enquiry as I simultaneously solved my puzzlement again, out-loud. “Water”, we answered in unison. At some point this small rock got trapped in the bed of a river or creek perhaps conveniently positioned at the edge or bottom of a spill-way where for years a focused jet of water passed over and pummelled the stone until it bore a tidy little hole, no more than the width of a pencil, straight through.

As intimidating and destructive as water can be it would be nothing if it weren't for time. It and any other force wouldn't have much of a bite if time didn't allow. In much the same way, that nature always wins (the force of water on this planet, specifically) against constructs of stone and earth (natural or man made), time wins against the universe itself. It erodes everything in its' way with it's almost ineluctably acidic quality. But that's a “glass-is-half-full” approach to this subject, though. In the same sense time allows for wondrous and spectacular acts of conception, construction and organization to take place as well.

Dr. Andrew Gustin has his P.h.D. in geology and it is his observations of his field of study and how he applies what he learns to help us understand the rest of the universe that is perhaps one of the best formed ideas that would aid in understanding time's omnipotence. Ask andrew for a qoute.

It's hard for man to stand at the base of a mountain, having not been witness to the time and forces which built it and conclude that it arrived at it's current state with out a maker. Likewise, we stand at the foot of the unfathomable mountain of the human's structure, both physical and intellectual, and point to it as though it proves there is a maker. But what we do in the process is ignore that in nature, structure and pattern are easily produced by seemingly chaotic means. There are several beaches on this planet that have their pebbles arranged when starting nearest the water line, from smallest to largest and it almost looks as though they have been purposely placed in such a manner. The truly magnificent abilities of nature to operate is not in it's ability to organize and structure using pattern and system. The truly awe inspiring acts of nature are those that are created and structured upon asymmetry. When nature can hold it's self together with nothing more than chaos we stand in true amazement and awe.

Current estimates on the age of our universe put it at roughly fourteen billion years old. Our planet alone is four billion. No wonder there are people who worship the planet as a god. For the first couple billion years of our universe's existence there was little else but swirling gas and dust. For all intents and purposes reality was made up of not much more than time and debris. Although matter and antimatter, energy and dark energy, light and gravity were all making the physical connections during this early embryonic state, it was time that had arguably established it's cadence, whatever that pace may have been, allowing the development of the cosmos to commence. Irrespective of the neg-entropic effect and the entropy our current thermodynamic systems are undergoing, we see that Time is indeed that force which “giveth and taketh away”.

After our universe grows cold at the “end of time”, Time will continue forward whilst everything else stands still, even if it is for a mere fraction of a second. Even then, I have to wonder, can we really say time has ended just because it is in retreat? Does a yo-yo cease to be a yo-yo on its' return to the palm from which it was thrown? Whether our universe returns to singularity, chills, or if in fact some other radical unanticipated transformation betides, it goes with out saying that none of these occurrences could happen upon our unsuspecting cosmos if were not for the very real effect of time.

Time's final 'srtuctural' attribute is close tied to its' omnipresence, as I presented in chapter

Chapter Ten

The Holy Righteousness, Loving Justice

and Other Traits of God and Time

I would like to, in the intrest of actually ending this book someday, help us save some time in the department of explaining and corrolating the 'personality traits' of time by covering as many of them in the following chapter as we can. In the previous chapters we discussed the structural traits of God and Time upon which all rested on the first trait identified, and that was infinity. Next, to properly understand the more anthropormorphic traits of God and Time we can use the previous 'structral attributes' as our lattice or trellice, allowing us to 'hang' this following traits up in a way that is understandable and identifiable to us as individuals.

We have to consider the way that God 'works' in the lives of His people. Often mentioned by religious types is that He doesn't work in our time line but in His. So, if something we feel an immediate need for goes unmet for longer than we'd hoped or goes unmet forever, than this is just Him working in 'mysterious ways. I have always found this to be a fascinating idea. The mysterious ways are often described like this, if you prayer is answered immediately, that's of course God saying, 'yes', right away. If your prayer takes sometime to be answered He is saying, 'wait'. And if your prayer is never answered He is saying, 'no'.

There are two distinct things here that interest me in regards to this idea. First, it is interesting and most obvious to point out that God needs time to work in the lives of man. In an way God relies on time and has to, be cause we as man are stuck in it.

Secondly, and most intriguing for me is that “answered prayer” really just relies on laws of probability and averages. If what you are asking for is likely to have a more immediate resolution, 'God's answer' will come sooner for you as opposed to asking for an answer to more unlikely and improbable intervention by divinity then you will most likely have to 'wait'. The more unlikely improbable the answer you are looking for is, the greater the chance that it will never arrive.

For instance, If I ask to find a good parking space at the department store later when running errands, I may get exactly what I'm asking for because it is a realistic and more immediately answered request. One that take only moderate patience on my part to see come to fruition. The circumstances around my parking lot request, though the request is rather trifling, are still important to consider when making the 'prayer'. For instance, if today was the last shopping day before Christmas, I might not get that 'yes' answer I would get on an average Wednesday at eleven in the morning. In a short while I will know whether or not He has said yes or no.

If my request to God was for Him to show me how to provide for my family and myself after retirement, considering for me it is still a minimum of thirty years away, I might not get that 'answer' for years to come. There are many social, political, personal, and economical factors at play here and the 'answer' might change dramatically from year to year. It might not be until a few years before my expected retirement that I would know with any real certainty whether or not my efforts have been sufficient towards reaching my personal goals. Therefore, I can say God told me to wait, and if things don't work out, I can say He eventually told me 'no'.

The more likely a certain out come is when we are asking, the more likely we are to get a 'yes'. Let's, for arguments sake, make one more example. Let's say you are really wanting to go on a church organized mission trip to Chile but you simply do not have all the necessary funds to pay the bill. Every night and even all day it becomes a consuming passion of your mind to think and dwell on the desire to go on the trip. In you day to day and at Sunday meeting you begin to mention to people your desire to go on this trip and that you feel it is “God's will” that you go. The day before you are supposed to get your monies in to set you place on the trip you are remarkable short of the financial goal need to make that place a surety. Then, just as you are about to turn in for the night the phone rings. It's your minister calling to inform you that God has answered your prayers and an unknown member of the congregation has written you a check for the amount you need, and you are no going on that trip to Chile. But a few weeks later you are on your way to the airport when you vehicle gets a flat and due to some communication issues and a terrible cab driver you miss your flight and are unable to join the trip and are ultimately unable to go. Furthermore, the money that was not yours that was put towards the trip in nonrefundable so not only have you lost the opportunity that you had your heart set on, the anonymous donor just threw out a large sum of money, and new privately feels as though some compensation is owed him.

In this instance, all three 'answers' to prayers have been given. First a 'wait', then a 'yes' and then finally a 'no'. This is too me, silly. What I see when I look at this is...life. But that's me and I am just looking at probabilities and averages.

(metaphoric)At this point we have covered all of the “omni” attributes of God and seen their correlation with Time and how an appropriate view of God's (or Time's) infinite nature effectively acts as a lens with which we view the other characteristics we've discussed. These elements that we've discussed thus far are, more-or-less the “make-up” of God and aren't really indicative of what kind of God we're dealing with here. He could be all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present, infinite and all together quite maleficent. So, it with this that we are moving out of the realm God and Time's “powers” and into their personality. I know that it's more than a stretch assigning a personality to Time, but that's not going to stop me from trying. Soon, we will be contemplating the cause behind the psychology of anthropomorphizing, as well as creating and keeping gods and how that it relates to our perception of Time, but for now I will start with some of the effect.

But just as God's power has it's governing element in timelessness, so also should the personality elements of God have a an attribute that governs His actions and reactions. So, what is God's governing attribute? Is it His love? Perhaps. Many argue it to be such with, “God is love”. But then we juxtapose that idea next to all the pain that this life is full of and things don't add up. In fact, it plants the seed of doubt in minds about whether God is truly omnipotent or not. I mean, if His governing attribute is love then wouldn't use His unmatched and unfathomable power to end the suffering of his children in this life and in eternity?

Many theological trains of thought centre around the justice or righteousness of God. Now, I will not argue that a just and righteous God are not important, but I can not say (as far as the God of the Bible goes) that justice is His governing attribute. What governs His righteousness? On what authority does He decide, this I will reward and that I will punish. What makes Him (or us) so certain that he is acting in the best interest of true righteousness and that it isn't some how skewed?

So, in agreement with the description of many a scripture, I have to assign God's holiness as His governance. The doctrine of Sanctification is based on the theology that no sin can stand in the presence of a holy and sinless God. All those who are not sanctified while they have the chance are sent to Sheol, a place devoid of the presence of God, where they stay “forever”. It wasn't until the Babylonian captivity and a heavy Hellenisitc influence that the idea of the Lake of Fire was born, but that is outside of my point here. I think, that if we do not have first and foremost a holy God in our minds, then many of the things that He says and does look a little off and largely unjust.

Now how is it that we relate this to Time? Well, I would really like to say that I have found some way to relate holiness to something that not only isn't alive but also incorporeal, but I can't not draw such an analogy effectively outside of saying that, since Time is not actually a being, it is therefore incapable of fault and thus making it sinless. However, if we step back and look at the unbiased nature of time, I feel we can see a connection. “Time waits for no man”. It passes its' judgement on us all. Eventually, it weighs its' even and deliberate conviction on every one and every thing in its' path. It is “not a respecter of persons”. There seems to be a certain level of “justice” behind time and in that, it is fair and metaphorically righteous. We have this way that we refer to a lot of the personality traits of Time, which again I will delve into deeper in the next chapter. An interesting one to me has always been how we say that Time has or hasn't been “kind” to someone or something. It's a funny idea when you really stop to think about it, isn't it?

Time's trinity. past=son present=father future=holy spirit

One way I wish I could make Time line up with theology is to show how it is possible to view time as being forgiving and loving. Although, I suppose I could point to the idea that we often get second chances at things and opportunities to make things better after we have done someone or something wrong. “Time willing”, we get the chance to supplicate our transgressions and make something out of ourselves after many of us waste so much of our youthful energy on frivolous and adolescent carnality. Those of us who choose not to wake up soon enough and continue to waste the good graces of Time, often find ourselves having not been dealt so kind with by time. But if we take our second chances and make the most of them, in time we are reward with satisfying things like happy homes, closer and more meaningful relationships, peace and security in our endeavours.

Ultimately, the real analogy brakes down here and the argument tends favour becoming inauspicious, but all is not lost. The biggest reason for the disposal difference is due to the last line I will be drawing between the two and that is what I touched on at the on-set of this article; the personal nature of God and Time. I briefly noted how the writer(s) of the Pentateuch incorporated this ideal into the theology of YHVH ever so wisely.

Chapter Eleven

The Personalization of God and Time

The previous chapters were a discussion on both the 'structural' and 'personality' traits of God and Time and an identification of their heavy dependance on metaphoric language. In this chapter, we will connect a loose string from very early in the paper and that would be the personalizing tendency that man has in regards to how he perceives or constructs his interpretation and relationship with both God and Time. This idea has been placed last and revisited, because I feel that it is not a trait of God and Time as much as it is a trait of the men beneath God and Time and we need to frame our discussion with the understanding that it is all ultimately, our experience that gives either one of these two constituents any real meaning. As we spoke about the 'structural' traits, we identified infinity as being the fundamental when referring to such traits and when referring to the 'personality' traits, we pointed out holiness (lack of bias) as the fundamental trait in that category. But if we could step back from all of the metaphoric traits that we give to God and Time and look at it as clearly as possible, we might begin to notice what has been hitherto stated as being the truly unmistakeable quality shared between God and Time (personalization), might even be the quality shared with many more levels of our existence. All of the aforementioned traits are all, in their entirety a subjective response to concept and formed individually based on experience in both reality and in one's own mind.

It is paramount to an effective religion to have a God which is personal and identifiable. After all, who would really give reverence (or cash) to God who goes largely without contact with His creation. Deism was the religion of choice for many of the founding fathers of the U.S. constitution. Being that they had come from a country being crushed by kings too closely tied to the dogmatic teachings of churches that were in and out of vogue, they favoured this theology for its' affinity toward promoting the separation of church and state. If God did not involve Himself in the affairs of man then there would be no place for Him to get too involved in the affairs of Congress. Personally, I think it should have stayed that way. But Christianity is persistent. The God of theocracy is a stubbornly revisited construct. For very personal motivations people tend to see God through a looking-glass of their own design.

Interestingly, in a current study by a team led by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago, while a volunteer (asked to contemplate their own personal beliefs, then their view on the intentions and attributes of their God and then finally the beliefs of an “average American”) was thinking about their own beliefs and their God, the same area of the brain lit up. But when they were asked to think about the beliefs of someone else, an entirely different area of the brain became active. We infer from this of course, that man tends not to seek the truly object definition of God but instead traces his concept of Him over top of preconceived belief. Mr. Epley writes, "Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs".

In addition the researchers also constructed careful question based experiments that proved to provide very compelling evidence to suggest that people often use their personal beliefs on controversial topics and ideological identifications as a way to assume what God thinks and wants. In one experiment the team asked participants to express their views on thing like abortion and capitol punishment. Then they asked them what God thought of those same topics; then the “average American” and finally well-known public figures. Not surprisingly, in the category of assumptive morality, they most close held the values and “opinions” that they had attributed to God.

Then the team asked the volunteers to prepare speeches and debates where they were asked to take an opposing position from there own on some of the same “heavy” topics. What is strikingly outstanding is that they were more apt to change the way that they felt God weighed in on those topics then they were to change the way they assumed other people felt. This show a clear predilection to subjectively form our opinion of God based on what we personally think about the tougher choices and concepts we encounter in this life. These findings can be found in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Similarly, all of us relate to Time in a very individual way. We all consider the time we have on this earth as our very own possession, like it is a form of property. This is our biological time and because of this sense of ownership over it we us verbalisms like, “save/waste” or “spend time”, “employ, use, fill, occupy” or “take time”. In this respect alone, time stands out as different from the other divisions of our lives. We don't really refer to gravity, or magnetism, in such a personal and sovereign way. Gravity and the other elements of existence do not seem to sit so personally. We might say that someone is the “light of your life” but that is a bit of a different metaphor. And what can be said about the linguistic metaphor, “killing time”?

In the next chapter I will present that there maybe strong ties in the brain, due most likely, to our anthropological development, that are perhaps responsible for not only giving us the notion that a God exists, but also providing us with “insights” as to what it is that God wants and thinks. Why is it man feels he needs gods in the first place? What is it about our consciousness that feels it is and always has been an almost ecumenical imperative to hold a belief in a god or many gods? As with any other point in the development of any particular trait in any particular species, it is (to say the least) difficult to determine exactly when it was that a certain predisposition began to be seen and strongly recognizable. I do not think it a stretch to assume the same of the intangible traits as well, such as our daydreams of imaginary creatures like fairies and unicorns...and gods.

On 5 Mar 2009 Deepak Ranade, a consulting neurosurgeon wrote in the Times of India that, “A researcher revealed that when a person was subjected to pain stimulus before and after being shown the picture of a deity he had faith in, his tolerance to pain was significantly better than it was before seeing the picture. So was the increase in tolerance the result of conditioning?” He goes on to say that it is reasonable to infer that even if one believed a part of nature to be a deity one should theoretically feel the same relief. He goes further to speculate that no matter what the deity of choice is, that perhaps the final locus for God is the same physical location in the brain. Implying that, “theoretically, if this God centre were to be stimulated, one could experience calm, bliss, even ecstasy. Would this imply that all spiritually advanced souls have, over a period of time, been able to devise an intrinsic mechanism to stimulate the God centre?”

This of course is the founding supposition behind the attempt localize and verify the epicentre of “realization”. Scary to most religious types because it relegates there personal relationship and realization of their God to mere neurochemical reaction. He goes on to say, “Meditation could be just a process that converts all eccentric thought processes into a concentric pattern with the God centre as the epicentre. All thoughts pertaining to mundane activities may be eccentric in nature. These eccentric patterns would be a deterrent to stimulating the God centre”. In conclusion he writes the following:

“Happiness is most often cause-based, a consequence of perceptive modalities giving a positive feedback via established neuronal circuits. Familiarity, sensory gratification, and above all a very tangible cause-effect relationship permeates this sense of joy. But, if happiness could be devoid of a cause, it may explain the detachment that most masters talk about. Happiness would then be independent of a cause and also stimulation of specific neural paths. It could become the background electrochemical activity, where any external object is not recognized as a separate entity and analyzed and assigned relative values of joy or pain. This Advaita or Oneness could be identified as the baseline firing of zeta neurons in a specified locus in the non-dominant hemisphere. It would create a perception shift. It could also deconstruct the "i" entity as having a discrete identity; the equivalent of dissolution of ego. There would be no subjective element to any sensory stimulus. Which is why many masters seem to revert to a child-like innocence. (note to self: “die to the old.” “the self must die for Christ to live in you.” “suffer the little children for they know God.”) Maybe, then godhood would be a neurochemical alteration in the milieu of the neuronal networks , resulting in a perceptive variance. And spiritual progress could be monitored by an imaging modality.”

Of course, this is but one approach on developing a working theory for the causalities of the “God perception” in man. In actuality, there have been very thorough studies done that prove the opposite of Deepak's claim. As I proposed in the previous chapter, I have absolutely no reason to doubt that man evolved his incorporeal traits in a vacuum whilst he developed his physical and practical traits. I believe the same to be true of man's social cognition and abstract reasoning. In fact, as I stated prior, I feel that the ideas and notions of God and Time co-developed in unison with each other and with the physical “hardware” (the brain) making any particular behaviour, expression or cognitive process completely reliant on other functions and sub-functions of the brain making it completely impractical and improbable to associate any said expression with any one part of the brain. More clearly, we developed the use of complex groupings of different areas of our brains in conjunction with each other to determine reception, perception, reaction, and response to the abstract notion of God at the same time that our brains developed those functions in relation to our fellow man.

One study carried out by five specialists (from establishments like the Clinical Research Branch of the National Institute on Ageing (NIA), the Institutes of Health (NIH) in Baltimore, Maryland, the Cognitive Neuroscience Section from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland) measured voxel-based morphometry in response to principal components of religiosity by factor analysis of the survey items and associated them with regional cortical volumes. Without getting too bogged down in the technical lexicon, the study (in conjunction with a previous, and just as substantiated, study) showed that the four areas that the brain uses to compute a God realization and relationship (R middle temporal cortex, L precuneus, L orbitofrontal cortex and the R precuneus) are associated with cortical volume differences and are the same areas, used in a similar fashion, that are key in cognitive social processing. The conclusion that the group came to, works in concert with a previous study where they looked at functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to find the immediate causes of religious drive in the brain. The authors write this about the experiment, “By differentially engaging these networks, individuals construct religious belief representations, which are subsequently adopted or rejected based upon cognitive-emotional interactions within the anterior insulae.” They went on to propose this, “In this study, we hypothesized that religiosity is tied to neuroanatomical variability and tested this idea by determining whether components of religiosity were predicted by variability in regional cortical volume measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).” And the findings substantially supported this hypothesis.

Interesting to note that there was no response to childhood religious upbringing, potentially suggesting that although religious rearing might have a role in how other parts of our thought processes work in adulthood, at some point we choose (based on regional cortical volume predispositions, of course) in what capacity we want to believe when it comes to issues of a personal relationship with or fear of God, as well as in determining to what degree and in what combination, we choose to quantify His “intentions and emotional disposition”.

For many years, a vast majority of professionals across a varied array of fields considered religiosity and God-centred thinking to be a learned behaviour and based on the upbringing of one's childhood. I mean, it is rational. But does it hold water? Do you believe what you do when you are forty is due to what you were taught when you were four? Dawkins ascribes the eagerness which children attach themselves to the religious teachings of their parents to an evolutionary fail-safe. Obedience equals survival. But surely, when you are old enough you can make your own informed choices. I was raised to believe and not believe in a whole host of things based on a set of doctrines that are for the most part, antiquated in regards to what I believe today. For instance, while a resident under my father's roof, I wasn't permitted to listen to rock n' roll. I mean altogether nothing remotely close to sounding like a rock song. The way that pop musicians were demonized was, to say the least, befuddling. Great lengths were gone to in an effort to make them, their lifestyles, their craft appear as cheap and tawdry, as base and talentless, as foolish and vial and vain as possible. Today, I am a writer of pop-rock music and I enjoy it as a fulfilling exorcise and part of a balanced lifestyle. Now, for many years I struggled due to my strict upbringing with acceptance of my innate gift for writing catchy rock ballads and for years it held back both my art and the healing that my heart so desperately need. After battling for years with conflicting emotions regarding just this one part of what makes me who I am, I've come to peace with it, in synchronized congruity, and with the other co-existing emotional and psychologically conditioned cognitive habits. I am not who I was.

One thing the researchers made a point of mentioning in this article is that these findings highlight the unifying theme of “love thy neighbour” (that many religious teachings found their principles on) and that it has a clear neurological causality behind it. Even Jesus taught that the second most important commandment after loving God is loving your fellow man [Matthew 22:38-39]. What I find interesting is that a secular group of scientific minds can see deeper, at times, into the ball of yarn that is religion, than some professed devout Christians ever will.

I must point out again that these findings all point to why God is such a personal experience person to person, even within the same doctrinal denomination. The functions of our brain in social cognition and it's functions in relating personally to God along with the logically fallacious thinking I touched on at the outset of the book, are all carried out in the areas of the brain that are quite asymmetrical. With examples like “Yakovlevian torque” the brain seems, on a macroscopic level, to be a hemispherical mirror. But when you study it closely you see that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, not only are the archictecture and types of neurotransmitters differecnt but also the receptor subtypes as well. Further still, although some of these differences in distribution are commonalities across humans and some even the species, they can also be markedly different from person to person resulting in individualized thought processes and consequently, an individualized God. A saying comes to mind; “You're only as good as the tools you're given” but then again so does another, “A bad craftsmen always blames his tools”.

Because the nature of both God and Time are ultimately personally experienced the two ideas are ultimately relative. Yes, even though each has certain “absolute” governing attributes, they are both experienced personally and relatively once you pass a certain point in logic. There are numerous examples in scripture of the writers staking claim on God, stating that God was “our God” and the “God of our fathers”. They are efficaciously filling the innate need mankind has come to know for a divine supplier of perceived physical and spiritual needs in a very personal and intimate way. But because the experiences are measured specifically person to person is that enough to say that neither God or Time exist in any real way? Or does the commonality in experience and agreement in conceptualizations point to something more or less “real” that lies beneath these surface perceptions which can be considered the cause of the person to person experiential data? And in my zeal to at least, purpose, time to be factual am I somehow doing the same for God? If so, what does that tell us about the uncertainty, when down to brass tacks, of both?

If they are both instinctual beliefs of the human mind, as a general rule, then we must ask ourselves is either of them at odds with any other of our instinctual beliefs? Reread the quote from Bertrand Russell that started this paper. Then, let's move forward to the next chapter where we will trace this trait of mankind to the ancient past and into our genetic animal history, where we will hope to make sense of a few more 'what's', 'when's' and 'why's'.

Chapter Twelve

How to Create a God and Give Him a Job

At this point, we have not only looked at just how similar God and Time are to each other in both realistic (structural) and metaphorical (personality) terms, but now we have, in the last chapter, addressed the biggest corollary between the two and that is the personal nature of them both, or at least, the nature of man to hyper-personalize them. Before we move on to discuss to what degree Time has become a god to modern man in the next chapter, let us pause, at least briefly, to consider the root of the previously mention personalization and then keep that root in mind when we get up to speed on man's current slavery to Time.

As the pre-Homo sapien sapien (pre-anatomically modern man) began conquering the elements around him it became quickly apparent that one element to his existence was very much out of his control. He could swim under water. He could channel it and divert it and move it around. He could smash stone and carve it and make of it tools and weapons. He could control fire and put it on the end of torches and burn down anything he wished with it. He could track and sort the heavens, he could breed and control the beasts but the one thing that he could not contemplate even a remote chance of dominating was time.

As you all know, we are all part of the genus 'Homo' which is Latin for 'human', potentially sharing Nakalipithecus and Ouranopithecus found in Keny and Greece respectively with the great apes and chimps, of the modern globe. Until 2010 the earliest species found that could be classified as Homo was Homo habilis which lived from about 2.4 to 1.4 million years ago. By then our genetic lineage had already figured out the making and using tools of stone and animal bone. It had the morphology to suggest that it most likely lived in trees for the most part, as opposed to walking about on two legs. Thus, it has been proposed that it be moved to an even earlier genus, Australopithecus[37]. Two million years ago, before we were even human, we had figured out how to make tools!

If we move down to Africa, Asia, and Europe our precocious little 'handy man' as he is known, Homo habilis, had developed a larger brain and started making even more complicated tools by about 1.5 million years ago. We can see here a nice transition in the time-line from habilis to what anthropologist would classify as Homo erectus. He is also able to now stand up right completely, due of the change of location of the entrance of the spine into the brain and the locking knee. It is important to note many scientists agree that this guy probably conquered using fire to cook it's food. After about 300,000 years ago there are at least five or six really nice transitional species and sub-species that bring us satisfactorily up to speed with or most recent cousins[42,43].

Fast forward only 50,000 thousand years (or 250,000 years ago) and anatomically modern man is living simultaneously along with one of it's cousins Neanderthal man or Homo sapiens neanderthalis, a consanguineous cousin of modern man, who most likely shared the common ancestor from half a million years prior[50]. But recent DNA sequencing has show that nearly all non-African Homo sapiens sapiens share at least 1% to 4% of it's genes with Homo sapiens neanderthalis, which coincides with the theory of the modern man's migration out of Africa[54]. Neanderthal was very much like man with the exception of a prominent brow and language. He could clearly breed with man, but the genes/bones were just not developed enough for him to communicate in a way that would be considered true language[3]. However, that is no reason to think that he could not communicate ideas, emotions, and pass down complex learned social and survival behaviours, like using stone and fire as tools. It certainly has to stand that much, much earlier the measurement of heliocentric time had begun. At some point in the past of our shared ancestors surely one of our relatives looked beyond its' instinctual sense of the seasons and began to track the days in a more meaningful way than warm and cold, wet and dry, hungry and full.

My point in saying all this is to verify that fact that the development of man to his present state has been gradual and calibrated. There is no reason to assume that man developed all of his skills, techniques, ideals, and convictions only once he had made the transition to Homo sapien. In actuality it is absurd based on findings like the “Oldawon stone tools” from Ethiopia which date to about 2.5 million years ago, a time long before the first “Homo” species even arrived. Which would credit the making of the tools to Paranthropus[83]. Because they lived alongside of the first Homo species the waters here are still muddy, yet it brings into focus the gradual progression of not only the physical traits of modern man but the mental ones as well. Which begs one to wonder when did man really start to ponder time outside of his own biology and how soon after or before that time did he begin to ponder the existence of god? Sure there is a very mysterious “Great Leap Forward” in the mental and cultural development of modern man starting at a bout 50,000 years ago or so, but I see no reason to relegate all “higher thoughts” to man at this stage of development. Personally, I generally feel as though a broader realization of the scope of time came first and subsequently the need for a being not bound by time to be created. These deeper ideas percolated for at least 200,000 years before they spawned cultural developments including burying their dead and painting on cave walls (An attempt to increase the odds of killing the depicted beast in the hunts of the following days. i.e. A prayer in picture form). Although, I often find myself under the influence of the idea that these concepts of God and Time, much like many other parts of mans evolution, developed symbiotically; cross pollinating one another and influencing each other until such a point that they became so entwined that the perceived attributes of both began to mirror one another, I still think that in the formative years of pre-human evolution the mushy little brain could not conceive the scope of time and so, hardwired into the very genetic make up, was laid the ground work for the ability to conceive the concept of “god”. Natural selection gave us our ability to think up a being and a personal relationship with this being and put him in control of the things which we are not. Whether you subscribe to the “Out-of-Africa” model or the “Complete Replacement” (Multiregional Evolution hypothesis) model, I see it as biology's way of framing a concept that was far to large for the early organic to comprehend a little bit at a time through mundane micro-evolutionary adaptations brought about, most likely, by the need for changes in cognitive sociology. Just how much of the concept of time did our little ancestors understand and when did they understand it? What other parts of their anatomy, psychology and sociology were being developed at that same time? All important questions that will remain unanswerable for a long time. I think it is safe to say however, that by the time of migrations the “God/Time” ground work had already been mapped out long before in the brain.

At some point in man's development we awoke from our slumber to a thump in the night and instead of asking, “what was that” we asked, “who was that”. When dogs and other animals get frightened or even curious about a noise or shadow, they aren't asking themselves who is behind them, only what. But we, we are the exception to the rest of the animal kingdom. Mysticism comes natural to us for what ever the mental chemistry and grey matter hardware causation.

This is for far too many people, a strange and almost sci-fi explanation that reduces mankind to being the slave of a bunch of chemicals. It is a scary thought for many, for what ever their reasons may be, that we could just run through the streets as libertines blaming our primitive debauchery on bad brain juice or conditioning, effectively absolving us of any condemnation. It isn't enough for some to merely assume that because we can conceive of a higher morality that it makes us obliged to follow a higher morality. No, we must have an imaginary “Father” forcing us to do so under penalty of eternal hell-fire. No matter, the rest of us can still move forward with our meliorism or the more theosophic teachings to aid our ontological pursuits and I will attempt to regain a shred more neutrality as I attempt to wrap this paper up.

An interesting rabbit trail to follow is determining why it is we call God and Time “father”. For that matter why is it that we call the earth, “mother”? Psychology and recent imagining studies have show that when we are thinking about tangible things we are often using the lskdjfls part of our brain which is responsible for lskdj and sldkjf. Thus making it an instinctual thought process to associate God and Time with male personae. Where as the slsdkjf part of the brain responsible and best associated with sldjf is where research has found that we think about tangible physical things like the earth making it a logical progression to identify our trucks as being a “Betsy”.

When did we wake up to our impermanence? When did it dawn on us and stir our fear into the creation of deities? Which of our biological ancestors first felt the stinging realization of his temporal existence? We may never know the answers and the answers may not even give us any real advantage if we do know them one day. All we need focus on is what state we are in now. As Dr. Newberg from the University of Pennsylvania said, "If, some day, a study came up that showed that religion is false - or true - if the science is done right and the data is clear, then I'm comfortable with going in that direction. I believe it may be possible some day. But until then, we can't forbid ourselves from thinking about things just because we can't design an experiment to prove them."

Again, I am in no way trying to prove that God is a delusion and should be relegated as such, necessarily. I do not think any one has the kind of authority to emphatically state that merely because God exists in the mind that He can not exist anywhere else. Nor should I argue that if He exists in “heaven” that He can not therefore “exists” substantiated in neuroanatomical constructional functionality. I'm not Bishop Berkeley, here! As I have already stated, the empirical affirmation of an immortal being by a mortal one is a fallacy in the logical process and can not be done under the physical/psychological limitations of said mortal being. As far as logical, 'knowable' thinking goes, there is no way of knowing that what has been identified by spiritual gurus as 'God' isn't in fact just a longer lived and one more powerful than us. We really can't tell the difference, with reason. But science is able to show us those who would be more or less likely to make such an assumption.

Like Dr. Newberg and many others, the fight between religion and science doesn't interest me in the slightest. I think that if religious scientists stop trying to use findings to ironclad their faith and secular ones stop using the same findings to solidify their agnosticism, we might actually get somewhere in the true name of discovery, understanding and enlightenment. I'm not here to duke it out over the exact non-meaning of time or how my analogy may fail if we use a different version of God. The reason I don't concern myself with that bickering over scientific and religious semantics is because it is a fruitless endeavour that usually has an affect opposite from the intended mission of each field respectively. I can make these limited comparisons because I am allowed to do such in the world of philosophy as long as I do so as honestly as I am able.

Chapter Thirteen

Worshipping Time as God

If science is not equipped to prove or disprove the existence of God, can we say with any real certainty that it should be able to catalogue and identify something so incorporeal and intangible as Time? Even if it can be proven not to exist in the physical realm of the universe, is that still enough to say it does not exist? In other words, is a figment less real to the mind of man? The effects of a placebo are evident and in many cases powerful. So can ideas like this whether “real” or not be just as real as anything knowable through our senses? There are scientific professionals who refuse to rule out the likelihood of a creator of the universe. But there is, as we know, no real criteria for someone to hold on to that inkling. So I have to ask, on what criteria do we dismiss time, all together? Time seems to be just as intangible, incorporeal, immeasurable, and non-temporal as common conceptions held on God. So what makes any of us so sure it's not there? If you think that there maybe a creator or God somewhere out there, then you are in good company. You along with many top professionals in the arts and sciences all feel that there has to be a designer to all of this. If you feel that way you, ought not be ashamed either or made to look foolish by those who don't believe. Nor should you pass any moral judgement on those sceptics to your position. As long as we keep things in perspective, having a leaning one way or another on topics that are, so far, beyond the realm of science, isn't necessarily wrong. But let's assume for conclusion's sake, that time does not exist in the universe in any real sense. For the purpose of this argument let's say it is all in our heads. I have to ask; have we personified Time into existence? Have we breathed enough of the breath of life into it that is alive regardless? Are we the creators and authors of time? Just as God spoke this world into existence in the stories of creation, have we too spoken into life an entity? Have we created a metaphor too powerful to keep from blinding us from truth, knowledge, reality?

“ 2 a being considered worthy of worship. 3 a person or thing intensely admired and respected.”

If I may indulge myself and redefine god as this: A supernatural entity that is perceived to be the answer to or cause of a perceived natural deficiency, whether physical or spiritual. If the supernatural entity is perceived to be the answer to the need then submission is rendered. If the entity is perceived to be the cause then defiance is likely.

Is God time? Perhaps a better question is; is time god? Insert the word “Time” into the above definition in place of 'supernatural entity' and we begin to see how this fast paced, multi-tasking society modern man lives in today is taking the last step towards making a God out of Time. The human race runs around everyday, a slave of time. Preoccupying every moment with an attention to the clock. The human can not help himself but to plan the next moment and micromanage every second. It seems every other year or so this university or the next comes out with a study outlining the detrimental effects that the current multitasking, time-obsessive society is having on both the physical and mental health of the species as a whole but yet, the behaviour continues regardless. The race continues to worship the clock, keeping it ever in the forefront of their collective minds.

In my opinion, due to adaptive entwining with how we create our perception of God/gods, we have been tricked by our brains and so, present day society has come to worship Time as the God of gods. The billions of dollars pumped into the cosmetic industry and the countless life forms “sacrificed” at its' alter as “test subjects” or from whom is hoped to glean some useful chemical compound, all point towards the worship or defiance of Time. The millions and millions of dollars spent on cosmetic surgery; the never ending quest for longevity; the struggle to produce construction materials that can “stand the test of time”; the wars raged nation against nation for the sake of a certain value placed in “the long run”; the fascination with the past and the future (any point in time but the “now”); the billions spent probing the depths of our universe to find “the beginning”; the relentless way the human scours the planet looking for clues to its' biological, ideological and physiological roots; the consumer based society constructed to help put a band-aide on the painful realization that none of this can ease the burning of the all-consuming preoccupation with Time and its' march forward; all of these things direct evidence of humanity's submission and/or defiance to the god of Time.

God may be time. That's still a web of a mystery. But I think I can safely say that Time is God. Now the question is; what are we going to do about it? How do we free ourselves from the clutches of an imaginary beast? Maybe we start with just watching time go by. Before you catch you must observe. And we've only been at that for 100,000 years or so. We still have more watching to do. Patience, in spite of our limited lifespans, is indeed key.

It's all a matter of time.

What is science really, but a orderly collection of likely opinion?

1Schneider, Hans Julius (1997): “Metaphorically created objects: ‘real’ or ‘only

linguistic’?”, in: Debatin, Bernhard/Jackson, Timothy R./Steuer, Daniel

(eds.): Metaphor and Rational Discourse

1Robert Francis Harper (1901). Assyrian and Babylonian literature. D. Appleton and company.

1 "Names Of God". JewishEncyclopedia.com. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=52&letter=N#164.

1 Baines, John (1991). "Egyptian Myth and Discourse: Myth, Gods, and the Early Written and Iconographic Record". Journal Near Eastern Studies

2Tobin, Vincent Arieh (1989). Theological Principles of Egyptian Religion. P. Lang

1 Pinch, Geraldine (2004). Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press

2 Hornung, Erik (1982) [1971]. Conceptions of God in Egypt: The One and the Many. Translated by John Baines. Cornell University Press

3Van der Toorn, Karel (1996). Family religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel. Brill

1Stump, Eleonore and Norman Kretzmann. (1981). “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy Reprinted in The Concept of God, edited by Thomas V. Morris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987

1 Leftow, Brian. (1991). Time and Eternity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

God is Time

Tuesday, 25 September 2012

The 4th Draft Of, "God Is Time"