Creation in Backwards Time

[masterjedi747]

I imagine that more people would believe in God if they lived in a world like that. How else could they explain these amazing co-incidences?

For what it’s worth: (1) I think the arguments for believing in God are just as necessary, if not tremendously improved, when the universe behaves in a fundamentally rational manner, according to natural causes. (2) Even in this universe you’re considering, I would fully expect there to be a very large and influential group of atheists who invoked the irrational appearance of the universe as a *huge *argument against it having been created by a God… much less a wise, loving, and intelligent God. Not to mention that if they discovered the inevitability of Newtonian physics (necessary for your assumption) and the “Big Un-Bang” towards which the universe was headed, they would only have *more *ammunition in their pockets to argue for both the purposeless devolution of nature and the futility of the universe’s existence. I think it would be far, far worse in the long run, actually… by effectively destroying nature, you lose so much of what’s critical to natural philosophy and natural science that it’s not even funny.

In fact, we could be traveling backwards in time and not even know it - at each instant, we remember the times to the left of us on the timeline, and don’t know about times to the right of us on the timeline. Just because my clock says its 4:31pm right now, and I remember 4:30 and feel like I experienced 4:30 just a minute ago, I don’t know that for sure. Maybe God just let me pop into 4:31 for a second to edit this message, then he’s sending me back to 7:00am yesterday to turn off my alarm clock.

Alright… just how seriously are you considering this? Because I get this impression that you’re rapidly losing touch with reality here, immersing yourself in an imaginary world of Divine-deception theories that has absolutely no rational foundation in the world around you. I mean, I can go ahead and imagine that our Earth is actually located in the Unknown Regions of the Star Wars galaxy… but I don’t *actually *believe that’s true. The lack of good reasons to think that it is true, coupled with the abundance of good reasons to think that it’s not true, convinces me that I ought not to *seriously *entertain such an idea, however disappointed I might be as a result. p)

The search for truth *must *be firmly grounded in observed reality, and not just abandoned to the wild fringes of the imagination. Like modern scientists, you *have *to proceed by building up proofs based upon real evidence, rather than just collecting a pile of maybe-possible hypotheses and shrugging your shoulders. And also like modern scientists, you have to recognize that sense knowledge is *absolutely *fundamental: if you can’t trust that what you see under a microscope or experience in your everyday life is accurate, then scientific investigation is unable to proceed, and natural science (not to mention natural philosophy) becomes impossible.

So at the very best, even if it *were *determined that “reverse time” was a real physical possibility (which I’m not about to accept), you would still, in the end, have no reasonable choice but to realize that that is not, in fact, the sort of universe that we live in… no more than we believe that the rest of our galaxy is populated by Force-sensitive warriors wielding lightsabers, or that there are unicorns living at the center of the Earth. Imagining something to be true, even if it’s not a general impossibility, is simply not sufficient grounds for *seriously *advocating the particular reality of the imagined scenario… exponentially less so when it is so blatantly opposed to our actual experience of the universe.

Perhaps time doesn’t proceed… instead time is like a line (lets call it a timeline) with observers at different points on the line. Some observers go in one direction, some in the other. Much like we move through the other dimensions, and can see the points in space that are closest to us.

I’m not sure how much I can argue against this specifically, since I have not yet studied the Aristotelian/Thomistic consideration of the nature of time (this will happen next semester, though)… but again, I urge you to not get carried away in entertaining the possibility of purely-imaginary and realistically-unfounded scenarios. It’s just not the right way to proceed, and is statistically far more likely to end up leading you into error than anything else.

 

[Newbot]

Masterjedi747: Let me know if this is any more convincing – though I’d love to hear objections too .

Perhaps time doesn’t proceed… instead time is like a line (lets call it a timeline) with observers at different points on the line. Some observers go in one direction, some in the other. Much like we move through the other dimensions, and can see the points in space that are closest to us.

The idea of time as a line is useful as an analogy, yet I am not sure how far it can be taken. A magnitude (or ‘greatness’) seems characterized by having part outside of part; and a line is a magnitude of one dimension. Although it has part outside of part, yet (because it is continuous) these parts can have a common boundary (e.g. in the line ABC, the parts AB and BC share point B, which bounds them): and this allows for the possibility of order. Put briefly, we note that in a line there is ‘before’ and ‘after’ because its parts are distinct and ordered. Time too has a before and after (2:00PM is before 3:00PM) and extension of some kind (one hour, say), and so it is useful and natural to use a line as a visual aid to imagining it. But it also seems to differ in various ways: for while the line exists in its entirety all at once, time exists only successively: the past has passed away, the future has not yet come, and neither are actually existing now.

This makes sense if (to preach Aristotle once again ) time is a measure of motion. For we can quantify motion in various ways (what we call momentum seems to be a primary way, as Aristotle says) but every measurement reduces down to some measurement of length or distance. Hence if I am walking across the room and someone asks his friend, “How much has Newbot moved?” his friend would find out by measuring the floor from where I started to where I happened to be (i.e. measure a magnitude). If I wanted to compare the speeds of X and Y, I would mark their positions simultaneously, wait till they had moved some more, and mark their positions again, and measure the distance each had traveled.

Put another way, why is there before an after in motion? Because every motion has that through which (‘space’ or the intervening length in this case) and that towards which, and by measuring that through which with respect to the origin and end – i.e. the length so far progressed – one can say that this part is before that part. But time too (here I have some difficulty) seems meaningless except with reference to motion. If all things were to stop it is hard to see what it would mean to say time has passed. When I say, “It has been an hour,” it is only because I’ve been noticing something move (if only my own thoughts or heartbeat) such that I see it has moved far enough or often enough. Indeed, taking this a step farther, time not only has reference to motion, but is itself a kind of measure of motion, in particular of the before and after of it.

If I were any good I’d be able to explain why this is so, but instead I’ll use an example. When I say, “An hour has passed,” what precisely am I conveying? I mean that I have noted a certain regular motion (say, to make it easy, the motion of the sun) and have taken a number of moments or ‘nows’ (say one for each 10 degrees; and of course I need not do it myself, a device like a sundial, with marks to indicate equal numbers of degrees, would work as well), and comparing this count and the motion I chose to certain universal standards (which again refer to such things as the motion of the sun or the motion of light, etc.) determine that the entire time interval is what is called an hour. (Forgive me for writing something so confusing; I’m not clear enough myself to write clearly.)

The important point of all this is that motion is extended and continuous because of magnitude, and time because of motion. But if so, then even if the rules according to which motions occurred were reversed, it would not change the intrinsic before and after of time or motion, since this is grounded in the magnitude traversed and that towards which the motion is proceeding. So that we could say, “All things are behaving just as they shouldn’t;” but we could not say, “Things/time/observers are moving backwards,” except meaning that things move in the opposite way we think they ought. To take an example, the bullet which jumps from the ground to bring the animal alive does not have the ground as its end of motion but its origin; hence that part of the motion where it is further from the ground is after that part where it is closer; and the same of the time.

I know it is more commonly thought that space and time exist separately, apart from any matter, like a background grid. Matter has place and time not intrinsically, but with reference to absolute and separate space and time. Space, in this view, is like a kind of length that is not the length of anything, but by which all other things are said to have length, and time a flowing or motion not the motion of anything, but according to which all things move. Hence it is quite easy to imagine that such and such a body is at place X and time Y, then, not at time Z1 after Y, but at time Z-1 before Y, having changed in the opposite way things usually do. The same might be said of some observer. If space and time were absolute and separate in this way, one might be able to conceive it, but philosophically (if you read real philosophers, that is, not me – I know I’ve not explained it well) it is hard to hold. Relativity adds other difficulties too .

I might summarize all my rambling in the following way: what do time and motion actually mean? And how (grounded on our experience) do we know?

Hope this is not wholly obfuscatious.

Newbot

 

[masterjedi747]

Masterjedi747: Let me know if this is any more convincing – though I’d love to hear objections too.

Hope this is not wholly obfuscatious.

To be honest, there are definitely a bunch of little things that come to mind here and there, almost entirely with regard to expansions that might be ideally incorporated into your last paragraph… but I definitely don’t have it all very clearly sorted out in my mind right now, and I don’t think it’s terribly relevant to the overall discussion anyway. Don’t have any particular and/or pressing objections, though.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Premise 1:
The laws of physics can work in either direction in time - given perfect knowledge of the present condition of the universe, physics can predict future events as well as it can say what past events were. For example, the laws of gravity that determine the orbits of the planets let us predict where they will be in the future, and where they were in the past.

Premise 2:
God is outside of time, so all points of time are equally present to Him. The direction of time as moving from past to present to future that we see, is arbitrary to God. God can see future then the past then the future again.

Conclusion:
Therefore, the point of “creation” where God set the “initial conditions” of the universe need not have been at the earliest time. It could have been at the most future time, or any other time in between. The laws of physics God created could determine the whole sequence of time from start to end given an initial condition at any point in time.

Is this correct? If it’s true, we could say that “creation” occurred at any point in time, even in the future.

i phrase it like this, G-d views time as a singularity, for Him all of creation, for all of its existence, is an eternal moment of “now”

to Him every event occurs/occured/is occuring simultaneously.

 

[Neil_Anthony]

Alright… just how seriously are you considering this? Because I get this impression that you’re rapidly losing touch with reality here, immersing yourself in an imaginary world of Divine-deception theories that has absolutely no rational foundation in the world around you. I mean, I can go ahead and imagine that our Earth is actually located in the Unknown Regions of the Star Wars galaxy… but I don’t *actually *believe that’s true. The lack of good reasons to think that it is true, coupled with the abundance of good reasons to think that it’s not true, convinces me that I ought not to *seriously *entertain such an idea, however disappointed I might be as a result. p)

The search for truth *must *be firmly grounded in observed reality, and not just abandoned to the wild fringes of the imagination. Like modern scientists, you *have *to proceed by building up proofs based upon real evidence, rather than just collecting a pile of maybe-possible hypotheses and shrugging your shoulders. And also like modern scientists, you have to recognize that sense knowledge is *absolutely *fundamental: if you can’t trust that what you see under a microscope or experience in your everyday life is accurate, then scientific investigation is unable to proceed, and natural science (not to mention natural philosophy) becomes impossible.

But isn’t this based on observed reality? It’s all based on the theory of relativity, that time and space are relative and not absolute. Time is just a 4th dimension, and an objects motion is just a line on a graph with time on one axis and one spacial dimenion on the other axis. Time runs at different rates for different observers depending on their velocity. I’m just trying to make philosophy catch up to the scientific observations.

So at the very best, even if it *were *determined that “reverse time” was a real physical possibility (which I’m not about to accept), you would still, in the end, have no reasonable choice but to realize that that is not, in fact, the sort of universe that we live in… no more than we believe that the rest of our galaxy is populated by Force-sensitive warriors wielding lightsabers, or that there are unicorns living at the center of the Earth. Imagining something to be true, even if it’s not a general impossibility, is simply not sufficient grounds for *seriously *advocating the particular reality of the imagined scenario… exponentially less so when it is so blatantly opposed to our actual experience of the universe.

Our experience of the universe is that our brains memories of times that are to the left of us on the timeline and we have expectations for times that are to the right of us on the timeline. If science has told us anything, its that things are not what they appear to be. Solid matter is not solid, time is not absolute, and standing still means you’re travelling at a high rate of speed. So why shy away from more fully understanding the implications of relativity?

About causality: If we experienced backwards time (and I never meant to suggest that we could experience it, especially since our memories will always be full of events that lie to the left of us on the timeline), we would just learn to accept that the causes of present events lied in “our future”.

I’m not sure how much I can argue against this specifically, since I have not yet studied the Aristotelian/Thomistic consideration of the nature of time (this will happen next semester, though)… but again, I urge you to not get carried away in entertaining the possibility of purely-imaginary and realistically-unfounded scenarios. It’s just not the right way to proceed, and is statistically far more likely to end up leading you into error than anything else.

Well, I don’t apply these ideas in my day to day life, but I think they’re helpful when meditating on God and creation and eternity.

 

[Neil_Anthony]

Originally Posted by Neil_Anthony
Well, they were saying in the other thread that God “directly” caused the first point in time, then indirectly caused the other points in time by creating physical laws and letting the physical laws do all the work.

Then yeah, that’s definitely not quite going to cut it, for the reasons given before.

Well please go straiten them out; I tried but they wouldn;'t listen. The thread is here:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=347102

 

[masterjedi747]

But isn’t this based on observed reality?

General and Special Relativity… yes. But “reverse time”… no, I don’t really think it is.

I also stumbled across this, which might not be perfect, but is interesting: Arrow of Time (Wikipedia)
One particular passage that jumped out at me: “According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, quantum evolution is governed by the Schrödinger equation, which is time-symmetric, and by wave function collapse, which is time irreversible.”

It’s all based on the theory of relativity, that time and space are relative and not absolute.

So why shy away from more fully understanding the implications of relativity?

I think you might be working with a somewhat flawed understanding of relativity… (?)

Time runs at different rates for different observers depending on their velocity.

Yes… but there are definitely still certain limits here; relativity doesn’t allow you to manipulate everything. Time will slow down for an object as it approaches the speed of light, but it doesn’t speed up faster than normal as the object approaches rest (or equable motion). And it doesn’t give you any way to “reverse” time for anyone else… the best you can (or can’t) do is to effectively freeze time for the outside world as you travel at the speed of light.

Time is just a 4th dimension, and an objects motion is just a line on a graph with time on one axis and one spacial dimension on the other axis.

Time and space definitely appear to be linked… but they’re still two different kinds of things. So to speak of time simply a as “fourth dimension”, without qualification, can be somewhat misleading… it’s far better to keep them in separate categories, as physicists do when they refer to 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time. Because some mathematicians might also go on to speak about a 4th spatial dimension… in which case time would become the 5th “dimension” on the list, and so on, if they decide to speak of even more spatial dimensions. Even though it’s easy to ignore the distinction, “dimensions” of time should not just be tossed into the same bag as space “dimensions”, as if they were truly not two distinctly different kinds of things.

I’m just trying to make philosophy catch up to the scientific observations.

I guess in this case I’d be arguing that there isn’t much “catching up” that needs to be done, really.

If science has told us anything, its that things are not what they appear to be.

In several exceptional cases, yes… but on the whole, it would be a mistake to take that too far. Just because science has overturned some simple assumptions that we made about the world, that alone is not sufficient reason to just start doubting everything that we experience out of hand… much less the simple assumptions that our scientific investigations of the world are fundamentally based on.

About causality: If we experienced backwards time, we would just learn to accept that the causes of present events lied in “our future”.

I think it’s just absurd to actually entertain the idea than an effect could possibly be prior to its cause. shrugs

(and I never meant to suggest that we could experience it, especially since our memories will always be full of events that lie to the left of us on the timeline)

…just seems to me like another indication that there is something fundamentally wrong with this scenario.