Part 7 Time after Time

Gentle Reader

 “What we have is a failure to communicate.” (A line from the great movie “Cool Hand Luke”. We don’t listen to one another , we are to busy forming our next thoughts in response to what we are not listening to you saying. No wonder we don’t have the time.Dakota Indians on the other hand (spoken like a true Libra) have this kind of time perspective. The world in which they live is entirely a present one. They would agree with Augustine when he said,(11) What is now plain and clear is that neither future nor past things are in existence and that it is not correct to say there are three periods of time: past, present, and future. Perhaps it would be proper to say there are three periods of time: the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future.

In short, only the present has any reality. A few years ago a full-blooded Dakota Indian girl with a Ph.D. wrote to a friend and said, "You see, we Indians live in eternity."(12) She explained that the Dakota Indian was not striving to get somewhere in this world, or the next; he was already there.

Time, events, and space relationships

What is said of time is thought about space also. The Australian aborigines have no difficulty at certain times of the year in believing they can be in two different places at once, an idea that to us seems clearly impossible. Two branches of a family with a shared totem will ceremonially eat this totem animal once a year to re-unite themselves with their ancestral roots. Though the two branches may be hundreds of miles apart and have each captured a specimen of their totem animal and slaughtered it, they will both believe

they have captured and eaten the very same animal, not simply the same species of animal, but the same particular animal. There is no contradiction to this in their mind. Both they and the animal can be in two different places at the same time.

 It reminds one of the statement made by the Lord (John 3:13(13)) in which He speaks of Himself as actually being "in heaven," though also on earth. And in keeping with this elimination of distinction between the two worlds, the same Lord could speak of Himself as existing at this very moment "before Abraham was" (John 8:58).(14) It is impossible by our logic to reconcile such conceptions of space and time but this is only because we are culturally bound to a view which is only partially correct.

11. Augustine, Confessions, Bk.XI.xx.26. 

12. Miss Deloria to R. Clyde McCone, "Evolutionary Time: A Moral Issue" in A Symposium on Creation, Henry

Morris et al., Grand Rapids, Baker, 1968, p.144. 

13. "No man has yet ascended up into heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven". John 3:13. 

14. "Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am." John 8:58.

 The native sense of space is not like that of an enormous box with the top and bottom missing and the sides knocked out, within which discrete things are separately positioned apart from one another: and their sense of time is not that of a river flowing by, a river which is in existence before it reaches us and continues on after it has passed us. The native creates both his own space and his own time by his own experience.

Evans-Pritchard, who for many years studied and lived with a Nilotic black people called the Nuer, had to

develop a different time sense in order to enter into their way of thinking. They do not keep time with their

clocks, their clocks keep time with them. As he put it:(15)

The daily tasks of the kraal are the points of reference for each day, and for longer periods than a day the points are the phases of other recurrent activity such as weeding or the seasonal

movement of men and their herds. The passage of time is the succession of activities and their relations to one another. All sorts of interesting conclusions follow.

Time has not the same value at one season of the year that it has at another. Since the Nuer have, properly speaking, no abstract of time reckoning they do not think of time as something

actual which passes, which can be wasted, can"be saved, and so forth; and they do not have to co-ordinate their activities with an abstract passage of time, because their point of reference is the activities themselves.Thus, in a certain month one makes the first fishing dams and forms the first cattle camps, and since one is doing these things it must be that month or thereabouts. One does not make fishing dams because it is November; it is November because one is making fishing dams.

[Emphasis mine].

Intervals between events are not reckoned as short or long passages of intervening time. What intervals of time there are, are "measured" by the importance of the events that bracket the interval. And as for an event itself, if it is very important it takes up a lot of time regardless of what the clock may happen to say.

Even the order in which events are remembered and reported will be the order of their importance, not necessarily the order of their historical sequence.

Time reflected in social codes

A culture's particular sense of time can have some remarkable repercussions on their methods of handling

15. Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Social Anthropology, London, Cohen & West, 1951, p.103.

social problems. If the past is of no consequence for the present, a crime or a misdemeanor done long ago has no present significance from a legal standpoint. It no longer counts. Suppose in a South African gold mine a native employee is late and is docked so much "time" as a penalty. If the penalty is not imposed at once, it will strike him as a gross injustice to penalize him at the end of the week. It requires a basic re-orientation of time sense for such an employee, freshly introduced into a clock conscious world, to accept a delayed penalty as just.

It is not without parallel in our own culture, as C. S. Lewis commented:(16)

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speakers, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact orto the guilt of the sin. The guilt is not washed out by time but by repentance and the blood ofChrist.

How much time must elapse until an event which has moral implications becomes an event without moral implications? Can guilt be cancelled at all by the mere passage of time?

Admittedly as an accommodation to the fact that we are time bound because we are space bound, it seems that the mere passage of time must be allowed to have some bearing in the matter; and so we have the Statute of Limitations as a necessary accommodation. Our time is limited and will run out so that, as we have less and less of it remaining to us in this life, it becomes in a sense increasingly worth more and more

to us. Experience shows that to delay the penalty unduly may impose an unfair hardship because what at thetime might have been a just imposition becomes, as our time begins to run out, less and less just, simply because what time remains to us becomes increasingly more valuable. It is a kind of progressive inflation.

Thus a man earning a high salary could be reasonably expected to pay a penalty that at the time represented ten percent of his current income. But if the same penalty is imposed upon him ten years later when he has retired and his current income is not a quarter of what it then was, the burden of the samepenalty becomes unbearable. It is commonly agreed as unjust to impose a penalty after many years have elapsed which change the circumstances. It is true that the same delay in some cases may place the guilty

party in a much better position to pay so that the penalty is reduced in its effect. However, the prime object of the system is really intended to protect the injured party, but limitations are imposed in an effort to balance injustice to either party. As Paton and Derham have noted:(17) "It is unsettling to allow no time limitto legal claims. . . . The small percentage of cases in which there may be injustice is outweighed by the legal interests in establishing security."

Such considerations are relevant only while we remain within the present space-time framework. In terms of the justice of God in the light of eternity in which the present does not recede into the past, such limitations surely do not apply. Here the time factor becomes irrelevant, for guilt is present not past. In so far as heaven belongs to a timeless order of things, time lapse is not going to be relevant in determining the measure of guilt or of innocence.

The Christian: two worlds — two times

When a man becomes a child of God he is placed in a position of living in two different worlds. He cannot yet escape the world of time and space, and in his horizontal man-to-man relationships he must accept the consequences of the framework within which his social life is lived. But in so far as he has been translated into the Kingdom of God's dear Son and has become a citizen of eternity, to this extent in his man-to-God vertical relationships he lives within a different framework. There is a sense in which his life becomes timeless, the new man ceases to grow old even though hopefully he may mature. There is a sense in which

he lives in heaven even though he does not altogether escape the bonds of the material world. The community of the saints is a society of people who share together this dual sense of time, and it is important that we should not isolate ourselves from this new society, for membership here is everlasting: we are only passing through this world. The Lord prayed for us, not that we might be taken out of it but kept while we are in it (John 17:15).(18)

Is there only a subjective sense of time?

In summary it can be said that any culture which places a major emphasis on the accumulation of things will tend to be pre-occupied with the value of time. It will cut up time, parcel it out, reify it as quantifiable, give it a measurable existence in its own right which it probably does not in fact possess.

 Our culture has done thispre-eminently. Many other cultures do it scarcely at all. Thus we have to recognize that a different culture with a different ethos may have a different perception of time. We also need to recognize that as Christians our sense of time has been modified, because Christian culture is different in its ethos and thus also in its perception of time.

But quite apart from "cultural" influences, we also have to recognize that it is not merely a modified sense of the passage of time (which is subjective) that has to be taken into account. It is now known that time itself does not flow past us at a constant rate even when viewed objectively. It is as though the tape that is running through the recorder from the future into the past can actually run more slowly or more quickly under certain circumstances — and perhaps even stop running altogether! This is not a subjective deceleration or acceleration, but an objective phenomenon, a phenomenon that is (as we shall see) quantitatively measurable.The implications of such a possibility are tremendous. 

 To be continued . . .

 Love, Denis 

p. s. Keep thinking and listening

16. Lewis, C. S., The Problem of Pain, New York, Macmillan, 1962, p.61

17. Paton, G. W. and David P. Derham, A Textbook of Jurisprudence, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972, p.502.

18. "I pray not that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil. . . ." John 17:15. 

 part 8 

 Gentle reader, 

 If you get through this study I’ll put you in for a degree in Philosophy! This is more like what we do when we sit around the table drinking copious amounts of coffee listening to the songs from home (Ireland, in case you have forgotten). And speaking of God and eternity and our place in it. No time for the petty things in life like “Did you she how she came dressed for church today... Well I never” (No and like my father use to say “They don’t build cars the way they use to . . . and they never did!” People talk about thinks that interest them, some talk about the failings of others, politicians and their sex life (like who really cares except gossips and those trying to raise their Television ratings) or the fact that you think you understand the news and the tax code. {Get it straight Gentle reader, unless you make MORE that $250,000 a year your not going to pay more taxes. Also your missing the bigger picture of what is happening in this country. Most claim to Christian (although I rather doubt they are willing to do this) And all that believed were together, and had all things common; (Act 2:44) or this But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. 

(1Ti 5:8) So until the American public gets a hold of what it means to sacrifice they will never get to where you are Gentle Reader...

 Now where were we? Oh yes in our study of Time...Lets look at the Acount of Time from the point of view of the Philosopher.

"Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away." This is the common-sense view. Time is a river that sweeps on whether we are waking or sleeping, living or dead. It is a stream within which events happen, as space is a box within which things exist. This seems so obvious as to be self-evident. Time is uniform in its current, precisely measurable by clocks set by the sun, and everywhere the same throughout the universe in its rate of passage. It starts to the right of our screen of consciousness, passes dead centre in front of us as NOW, and is wound up on the left, to be preserved for always. Thus we divide time into past, present, future; each of which has a reality that is unquestionable.

The passage of time is at a fixed rate, and it becomes our standard of reference for the speed with which events succeed one another. Even if events should seem to happen more slowly sometimes and with bewildering speed at others, nevertheless we "know" that such fluctuations are apparent only, and that clocks everywhere in the universe never vary except in so far as they may be (in our world) mechanically imperfect. There is a real speed at which events happen, fixed in the mind of God whose time-piece regulates everything else. We would set our clocks by His if only we had the means, and then we would be correct in our estimate of the time taken for everything that has happened since the world began, and indeed even for events occurring before the sun and moon were set in the heavens to regulate time on earth. We assume that time was kept even before the creation came into being. This again is the common-sense view.

It is perfectly true that we each have private inner clocks that reflect our own personal sense of time, and by and large our personal clocks agree quite accurately when compared with those of everyone else who shares our framework of reference. But what we now know is that this only happens so long as we all share the same segment of space and move through it at the same velocity. Anyone who happens to live in some other galaxy moving through space at a different speed with a different rate of acceleration in our supposedly expanding universe would experience a different rate of the passage of time. And this difference would not be the result of imagination: their clocks would actually confirm the difference. This is where a real problem arises. This is where the common-sense view breaks down.

As soon as we move we change the flow rate of our time. But because we and our private clocks move together, the change in rate is concealed from us. The first recognition of this real change in time rate was a philosophical one, but we can now verify it as a fact — only the change is so tiny that we require extraordinary devices to detect it. But there is little doubt that it is real. 

The particular movement we happen to be involved in through space has the effect of modifying the rate at which time flows by us. Thus this flow rate of hours or minutes or seconds proves to be relative, relative to our speed through space — or more precisely, to our change of speed through space, our acceleration or deceleration. In terms of actual experience even our grossest movements (to the moon and back by space craft, for instance) are so tiny when compared with the distances involved in traversing the span of the universe, that we cannot detect the change in the flow of time except by using special instruments of quite fantastic sensitivity. So we are unaware of any change. The changes are far far smaller than the normal inaccuracies characteristic of man-made mechanical devices.

But certain experiments which have been performed in recent years have fully confirmed what Einstein predicted, namely, that time is relative to the rate of acceleration of the clock through space. It doesn't matter how little the change is: from the philosopher's point of view the classical and common-sense picture of time as an ever flowing stream with invariant speed of current has been shattered.

'Common sense' view of time shattered

Yet the concept itself of the relativity of time goes back a very long way, far beyond Einstein, to Augustine (354—430 A.D.) in fact — and before Augustine to Philo (c. 20 B.C.—c. 42 A.D.) and his contemporaries.(2) According to the Jewish commentators in the time of our Lord, God produced ten things on the first day of creation. He produced the heavens and the earth, Tohu and Bohu, light and darkness, wind and water, the duration of the day and the duration of the night.

 The Jewish rabbis believed that the duration of the day and the duration of the night were actual creations and not merely the result of the creation of the heavens and the earth. They held specifically that "time" was created simultaneously with the world. Philo Judaeus was a Hellenized Jew who imbibed much of the spirit of Greek philosophy, and he argued strongly against an older view held by his contemporary Jewish brethren that the world had been created in time. He held that until creation, time did not exist. Time had just as much reality in its own right as the world did, though by no means independent of it. When Augustine proclaimed that God created the world with time and not in time, he may conceivably have arrived at the conclusion by the exercise of his own profound insight, but it is more probable that his wide reading had made him thoroughly acquainted with the arguments that had gone on between Philo and some of the older Jewish writers, since Philo's work, De Opificio Mundi ("Concerning the Fabrication of the World"), was quite widely known the time. Here are his actual words, as translated from the Greek of his original by F. H. Colson and G. H.Whitaker:

Then [Moses] says that "in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth," taking "the beginning" not, as some think, in a chronological sense, for time there was not before there was a world. Time began either simultaneously with the world or after it. For since time is a measured space determined by the world's movement, and since movement could not be prior to the object moving, but must of necessity arise either after it or simultaneously with it, it follows of necessity that time also is either coeval with or later born than the world. . . And since the word "beginning" is not here taken as the chronological beginning, it would seem likely that [only] the numerical order is indicated, so that "in the beginning He made" is equivalent to "He made the heaven first." [My emphasis throughout.] 

The concept itself of the relativity of time goes back a very long way, far beyond Einstein, to Augustine (354—430 A.D.) in fact — and before Augustine to Philo (c. 20 B.C.—c. 42 A.D.) and his contemporaries. According to the Jewish commentators in the time of our Lord, God produced ten things on the first day of creation. He produced the heavens and the earth, Tohu and Bohu, light and darkness, wind and water, the duration of the day and the duration of the night. The Jewish rabbis believed that the duration of the day and the duration of the night were actual creations and not merely the result of the creation of the heavens and the earth. They held specifically that "time" was created simultaneously with the world. Philo Judaeus was a Hellenized Jew who imbibed much of the spirit of Greek philosophy, and he argued strongly against an older view held by his contemporary Jewish brethren that the world had been created in time. He held that until creation, time did not exist. Time had just as much reality in its own right as the world did, though by no means independent of it.

Since Einstein was himself a Jew and undoubtedly acquainted with the literature of his forebears, it is not perhaps so surprising that such a thought as the coincidence of the creation of matter and the creation of time should have been in his mind when he formulated his special theory of relativity and made time part and parcel of the physical world.

Linear time vs. endless eternity

Now Einstein wrestled with the problem of time, with the nature of time as opposed to eternity, of time as an abstract reality. The problem arises from the fact that one cannot have a span of time. It won't stay still long enough for us to measure it. Eternity is not time stretched to infinity on either side. There is a very significant difference between eternity and some immense stretch of time, for the simple reason that no matter how long this span of time is, we can always shorten it by chopping some off. Whereas eternity remains as endless as ever no matter how much we "cut off it." At least we imagine we could do this, though in actual fact we don't know how one can reduce the length of something which has no extended existence. Only NOW exists, and it exists as a point, not a dimension. It has only location. The past is gone, and the future is not yet. We are therefore left with nothing to shorten; only with something which has no length. Ten days never exist at one time, nor even ten seconds, nor even ten millionths of a second! How then could we ever speak of reducing them? Time becomes a position in eternity, nothing more.

Thus while we do seem to reduce time by having spent some of it, we cannot ever seem to shorten eternity no matter how much we have spent of it. In the very nature of the case, eternity remains unaffected by what has already passed. The categories of time and eternity are clearly not the same. What is appropriately spoken of as shortening in the one case becomes meaningless in the other. If we have a very large number and we subtract something from it, what remains is less than it was. If we have an infinite number and subtract something from it, we still have infinity remaining. When something is forever, as much remains no matter how much has already been subtracted. Thus while we may speak of time which is passed, there is no such thing as eternity which has passed. Otherwise we would have to ask the absurd question, Is God older today than He was yesterday?

One of the earliest symbols for eternity was a circle. We walk around the circle through so many degrees of arc but we do not actually shorten the distance we yet have to journey to complete the circle. As much remains of it to walk around as ever. The circumference persists intact and unchanged. We can go on and on endlessly, like the marching column of caterpillars whose head has been induced to link up with the tail and so they journey on, each following the leader in front, until at last they starve themselves to exhaustion.

Eternity does not flow past us, for if it did some would already have been used up. The concept of an exhaustible resource can never be applied to the word eternity. Only if eternity was like a circle would it then escape this inevitable limitation: but circular movement imposes a no less undesirable limitation, namely, repetition. Some ancient philosophers viewed heaven as cyclical, but even then they saw it as ultimately having an end, as though the circling movement gradually slowed down and finally stopped.

It is not surprising that cultures which emphasize material things and reify (make a thing of) time, tend to view history as linear, as a long line of successive events with a firm beginning and a well defined ending. As we have already seen, cultures which attach more importance to the spiritual aspects of life have tended towards a view of history which has no beginnings or endings in the linear sense. Things just go on forever. Such is the Hindu view, mand so are all reincarnational views.

 Next time Gentle Reader, we will consider