Dilemma of time and the act of creation

[STT]

Because to even try and begin to understand this “dilemma” (how time could possibly be a part of creation when the “act of creation” itself requires time), the causation and effect need to be defined.

So do you want to define cause and effect? We know what they are.

God’s will is the cause, creation is the effect. The effect of creation follows the cause of God’s will.

Do you agree that you are having two thing here?: God’s will (cause) and creation (effect).

God’s will is unchanging, therefore there is no change, and therefore there is no time outside of creation.

I bring up God because this is not a physics forum, but a Philosophy forum on a Catholic Apologetics forum

As Catholics, our explanation for anything ultimately leads back to God, who has decided to leave several things a mystery to us. The concepts of eternity, time, creation, and an uncreated Creator are all in the realm of mystery, and we as an internet community will never be able to fully explain, prove, or disprove these concepts.

This is all good. Could we please we focus on cause and effect?

 

[AveOTheotokos]

So do you want to define cause and effect? We know what they are.

Do you agree that you are having two thing here?: God’s will (cause) and creation (effect).

This is all good. Could we please we focus on cause and effect?

Yes, we can focus on cause and effect.

Time, as a part of creation, is an effect of the cause that is God’s eternal will.

Because this cause is non-changing, no time existed or elapsed between the willing of creation and the creation of creation. The will is, and creation is because of it.

There is not a time that God’s will was that there be creation, and creation had not been. Creation was willed, ergo creation was.

 

[Richca]

Any act has a before and after therefore you need time in order perform it, otherwise the act is ambiguous. How could God perform the act of creation knowing that any act is subjected to time and time is an element of universe?

God is pure act and he is eternal; he is not subject to time. God’s operations of intellect and will are also eternal. God’s act of creation proceeds from his intellect and will but the acts of God’s intellect and will are eternal acts as he is eternal. Creation is not a change in God because God willed from all eternity by one act of his will to create the universe of creatures but by that same will act he did not will that the universe should be eternal but that it should have a beginning.

 

[John_Martin]

JMJ
Material Creation is not In Act, except to God, the LORD.
Instead it is, as a whole, in potential moving materially toward completion, and upon completion it will vanish in a puff of smoke, dust, ashes. And individual material things already individually experience this - mountains are eroded, a plant grows and when grown simply withers and dries and is thrown into the fire, and a human upon conception grows to maturity, and immediately begins to decay, and eventually dies and is cremated or buried.

Nothing material can claim, “I am,” as God is ‘I AM’, unless God were to redeem it from this fact of material temporality, to redeem it from the appetite to become complete materially and from the decay of death following that completion.
This redemption is found in God being the God of Abraham, who believed God as his God. And this was accounted to Abraham as righteousness, accounted to Abraham that he already had poured his life back into God in love of God (which is the meaning of justice and righteousness to God - what is owed to God is love, in likeness to the love with which God loves, and that means one’s whole being is given into the other - God reckoned that Abraham did this by believing him). Suddenly in the world was the knowing of relationship with God, in that covenant, “I am your God ‘I AM’” and Abraham saying what Mary would later say with her whole life, "Behold, ‘I am’ the servant of ‘I AM’ ".

A servant has the being and life of the Master, a son the life and being of the Father. It was by servants of a Master that blood was brushed on the lintels and doorposts and the lamb’s flesh eaten that night in Egypt. And that Angel passed by the houses where it saw that death had already visited when it saw the blood.

Whenever we rebelled, under Moses or Joshua, or the Prophets, we left off the relationship of being, where we were the People of God, and went into seeking our being via satisfaction of appetites of body or will. We turned to the non-Act of creation, from the Act of being in relationship to God.

Yet the Prophets prophesied of the One who would turn our hearts to see and desire to be the Children of God, love the relationship, and with a whole heart say, "Behold, ‘I am’ the servant of ‘I AM’ "
There was then the sacrifice where the lamb we consume is the very One who loved his Father, pouring his whole being back to his Father, and giving to us his Flesh and Blood to eat and drink. And in Justice of Love, this Father pours his whole being into the Son he loves, and his Son rises to live, to be, - even his body and blood which we consumed, his soul and divinity united again to his body and blood.

We are the People of our God, relationship of being (the being of relationship), which does not die when our individual bodies die. We are in Act, while our mortal bodies as they are, are not in act.

 

[Wesrock]

We shouldn’t think of cause and effect as always being accidentally ordered. An example of accidental ordering is that a boy throws a brick and the window breaks. They are separated events.

However, we can also think of it as essentially ordered. The window is breaking because the brick is pushing through it. The train car is moving because the engine is pulling.

 

[Wesrock]

I don’t understand why you are switching to God. All I am asking is to let focus on act of creation. The act of creation is an act. It is a cause and an effect. Effect always follows cause. Therefore we have a change on something when there is no time (no changes is allowed).

God never changed from not acting to acting. He has always been acting.

 

[lmelahn]

Do you believe in cause and effect? There are two things one following another.

That is a common misconception . (It dates back as far back as Hume, or even Descartes.)

Cause and effect (in the most proper sense) are always simultaneous.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . Cause and effect (in the most proper sense) are always simultaneous.

Examining the properties of some is the smallest “particles” in nature, such as photons and electrons, specifically how they can behave like the particles, which we conceive them to be, or as waves, when they pass through slits, would support your statement. What happens is that when we try to p(name removed by moderator)oint through which slit the little rascal passes, it behaves like a particle, the tiniest of balls. If we don’t, what we see is an interference pattern, like waves passing through each other. What makes this most remarkable is that it doesn’t matter whether we try to detect its path before or after it passes through the slit; it is the process of detection, the setup of the equipment by a rational mind that determines what occurs - before and after is of no consequence.

 

[AveOTheotokos]

Examining the properties of some is the smallest “particles” in nature, such as photons and electrons, specifically how they can behave like the particles, which we conceive them to be, or as waves, when they pass through slits, would support your statement. What happens is that when we try to p(name removed by moderator)oint through which slit the little rascal passes, it behaves like a particle, the tiniest of balls. If we don’t, what we see is an interference pattern, like waves passing through each other. What makes this most remarkable is that it doesn’t matter whether we try to detect its path before or after it passes through the slit; it is the process of detection, the setup of the equipment by a rational mind that determines what occurs - before and after is of no consequence.

Double Slit Experiment

 

[STT]

Yes, we can focus on cause and effect.

Time, as a part of creation, is an effect of the cause that is God’s eternal will.

Because this cause is non-changing, no time existed or elapsed between the willing of creation and the creation of creation. The will is, and creation is because of it.

There is not a time that God’s will was that there be creation, and creation had not been. Creation was willed, ergo creation was.

Yes, time is a part of creation but you need it to have any sequence of cause (God’s will) and effect (creation).

 

[STT]

God is pure act and he is eternal; he is not subject to time. God’s operations of intellect and will are also eternal. God’s act of creation proceeds from his intellect and will but the acts of God’s intellect and will are eternal acts as he is eternal. Creation is not a change in God because God willed from all eternity by one act of his will to create the universe of creatures but by that same will act he did not will that the universe should be eternal but that it should have a beginning.

We are not arguing about God but act of creation and time. Any act has two parts: cause and effect one always follows another. You need time to ensure the right sequence of cause and effect which does not exist in the case of act of creation since time is a part of creation.

 

[STT]

God never changed from not acting to acting. He has always been acting.

That I know. We are talking about sequence of cause and effect.

 

[Aloysium]

We are not arguing about God but act of creation and time. Any act has two parts: cause and effect one always follows another. You need time to ensure the right sequence of cause and effect which does not exist in the case of act of creation since time is a part of creation.

Double Slit Experiment

popularmechanics.com/science/a22280/double-slit-experiment-even-weirder/

A group of scientists tried a variation on the double slit experiment, called the delayed choice experiment. The scientists placed a special crystal at each slit. The crystal splits any incoming photons into a pair of identical photons. One photon from this pair should go on to create the standard interference pattern, while the other travels to a detector. Perhaps with this setup, physicists might successfully find a way to observe the logic-defying behavior of photons.

But it still doesn’t work. And here’s the really weird part: It doesn’t work regardless of when that detection happens. Even if the second photon is detected after the first photon hits the screen, it still ruins the interference pattern. This means that observing a photon can change events that have already happened.

 

[AveOTheotokos]

Yes, time is a part of creation but you need it to have any sequence of cause (God’s will) and effect (creation).

That I know. We are talking about sequence of cause and effect.

There is no sequence. Cause happens simultaneously with the effect.

 

[STT]

That is a common misconception . (It dates back as far back as Hume, or even Descartes.)

Cause and effect (in the most proper sense) are always simultaneous.

That is logically impossible to fill an continuous interval of time by a set of cause and effect. This means that your chain of cause and effect never spread.

 

[STT]

There is no sequence. Cause happens simultaneously with the effect.

Please read post #96.

 

[Aloysium]

That is logically impossible to fill an continuous interval of time by a set of cause and effect. This means that your chain of cause and effect never spread.

As they relate to events in time and space, cause and effect are artifacts, created by the mind.
Objects have a trajectory that is influenced in the moment, let’s say a satellite by the earth’s gravitational field (the bending of time-space, or whatever one may call it).
It is we who separate one interval from the other and say that whatever happened first caused the second to happen.
Simple physical events are determined by the complex pattern of material interactions that are involved.
From the beginning to the end, they are determined unless influenced by some agency that can cause them to do otherwise.
We manipulate independent variables which produce an effect, the dependent variable, based on their properties.
The cause has to be outside time-space, in which things do what they have been created and are maintained to do.
There has to be a god, a primary transcendent cause, in other words,
It has been revealed that He is God.

 

[STT]

As they relate to events in time and space, cause and effect are artifacts, created by the mind.
Objects have a trajectory that is influenced in the moment, let’s say a satellite by the earth’s gravitational field (the bending of time-space, or whatever one may call it).
It is we who separate one interval from the other and say that whatever happened first caused the second to happen.
Simple physical events are determined by the complex pattern of material interactions that are involved.
From the beginning to the end, they are determined unless influenced by some agency that can cause them to do otherwise.
We manipulate independent variables which produce an effect, the dependent variable, based on their properties.
The cause has to be outside time-space, in which things do what they have been created and are maintained to do.
There has to be a god, a primary transcendent cause, in other words,
It has been revealed that He is God.

What I am trying to say is that cause and effect is a sequence that one element follows another. The time interval between cause and effect is infinity small but cause and effect cannot be simultaneous. A simultaneous chain of cause and effect cannot spread.

 

[Aloysium]

What I am trying to say is that cause and effect is a sequence that one element follows another. The time interval between cause and effect is infinity small but cause and effect cannot be simultaneous. A simultaneous chain of cause and effect cannot spread.

I think the responders understand that, but disagree.

 

[AveOTheotokos]

What I am trying to say is that cause and effect is a sequence that one element follows another. The time interval between cause and effect is infinity small but cause and effect cannot be simultaneous. A simultaneous chain of cause and effect cannot spread.

You are misunderstanding cause and effect.

a direct cause does not occur before an effect. It occurs during the causing of the effect.

When a rock is thrown through a window and breaks it, the throwing of the rock is NOT the direct cause of the window breaking. It is an indirect cause.

The window breaks because the rock occupies the same space as the window at the same time as the window. As the rock moves through that space, the window moves out of that space at the same time.

The direct cause of any effect happens simultaneously as the effect. Indirect causes, or necessary initiating precursor causes may occur before the direct cause, but they are not the true direct cause of the effect.

God’s willing of creation happened simultaneously to creation happening. Creation happening and time existed because of creation beginning.