My brain is about to explode! How can something always have existed?

  • Thread starter Thread starter catholic1seeks
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
A lot of people seem to think or to believe that God is just like us … only smarter.

Not true.

God is INFINITE.

And we are … hard to accept … very tiny and insignificant.
 
Aloysium said:
This is a pretty good analogy imho.
God might be thought of as the the reality of mind that produces the idea of numbers, from which each individual number or finite collection is derived. It can can spin out as many as it wants forever because it is not in the set.

If that doesn’t work, how about:
You exist “now”; you always have and will since you cannot exist then. About your existence then, it can only be imagined or remembered from where you are now.
Consider that all existence does so in its now.
God’s eternal nature includes all nows. He is everywhere and in everything, smaller than anything and larger than the whole thing.
We make choices and as a result exist as a past, present and future, the past being what we have done and therefore closed to change.
Creation as it is known to God exists whole.

Something like that.

It actually makes it more mind boggling and amazing.
Click to expand...
One of the difficult things for me to imagine is how all of time can be present to God all at once. The problem is time can be divided up infinitely. How does one traverse an actual infinite number of time points? To see this, I recently read that Parmindes denied the reality of change. He argued change requires something to come into existence from nothing, which is impossible. He denied local motion by saying that in order to get from A to B you would first have to get to a half point C. But, before C you would have to get to it’s half point D. And before D you would have to get to E, etc, ad infinity. Parmindes argued you would have to traverse an infinite amount of distances to get to B, and thus it would be impossible, and thus local motion is impossible.

However, this is obviously not correct. While distance can be divided up infinitely, one doesn’t actually travel an infinite distance to get to B. If they did they would never arrive. Nonetheless, saying God sees all of time at once is like saying God traverses all distances at once which becomes like Parmindes objection since all distances can be divided up infinitely and so with all times.

Nonetheless, it may not be necessary to divide up time any more than one needs to divide up distance when travelling from A to B. God may simply see time in a kind of analog way like one watches a continuous stream of images in a movie, except that for God all the images occur simultaneously, but still in order. When watching a movie one is not experiencing an infinite number of points of time. Even the movie itself has a finite frame rate. Perhaps time itself has a maximum ‘frame rate’. We could not possibly experience for instance 1 thousanth of a second. The speed of light has a speed limit and nothing can travel faster according to Einstein. This could be a basis for such a natural maximum frame rate of time itself.

Perhaps from our perspective we see God traversing a possible infinite time points to get from time point A to B. But, from God’s perspective he may just traverse from A to B. To us time may seem infinite. But to God it may seem finite, being able to grasp all at once.
 
Monte_RCMS said:
A lot of people seem to think or to believe that God is just like us … only smarter.

Not true.

God is INFINITE.

And we are … hard to accept … very tiny and insignificant.
Click to expand...
Which makes it even more amazing that God would love us enough to become one of us and to die for us.
 
Think of the void from dr who… that would be a place to start. Lol.
 
GEddie said:
Our minds have limitations, and this is one of them. We cannot imagine eternity any more than we can draw the four-dimensional cube.

Get used to it. 🙂

ICXC NIKA
Click to expand...
I disagree, we all have dofferent mental limitations. It takes time, but this comprhension is for me the strongest arguement for God, I just don’t know how to word my general understanding of it.

I evem answered my own greatest mystery:

If God can do anything, then can God make a rock that God can’t move?

That will hurt the brain, but there is an answer o.O
 
catholic1seeks said:
Either the Universe or some physical reality or someTHING has always existed, or God has always existed.

Whether you are atheist or theist, at the end of the day, something (or some being, like God) must have always existed.
Click to expand...
God is not some thing…not some thing in creation.

God IS.

Being.

God.

and yes outside of time.

Is not illogical - but is Logos.
Your frame of reference simply is limited by your experience with things. With creatures. With time.

It is good your brain is about to explode!

Let us take off our shoes and adore the Lord in Awe and wonder and joy.

Especially in the joy of the Risen one Who gives us true life - a real life that is not to end but to be with He who IS.
 
catholic1seeks said:
Either the Universe or some physical reality or someTHING has always existed, or God has always existed.

Whether you are atheist or theist, at the end of the day, something (or some being, like God) must have always existed. Infinite in the past.

WHAT?!

THAT’s mind-boggling.
How are we to understand this reality?

I understand that theists say that God is outside of time (he is “eternal” in the technical sense). Yet, God cannot have failed to exist. So whatever one means by eternal, God has always existed.

This is so troubling for me! It’s not shaking my faith or anything like that. It’s a simple fact that anyone can reach: some aspect of existence, whether God or something else, must have always existed. How can we even think of that? You can never reach a beginning if this aspect is infinite past or enteral. It just IS and always has been.

But always has been means there is literally no beginning whatsoever. You keep reaching back. Say you add on another “year” into the past. No beginning. Add another year into the past - no beginning yet. Keep going backwards, and you never reach a beginning. How??

So whether you are atheist or theist, Christian or not… How does this even make sense?!? It must be true… But it’s so… Illogical!
Click to expand...
Just wondering about this is the gift God gave to mankind. If we did not think about such things we would be just an other animal procreating, eating, sleeping and dying - oblivious to the wonder of life.
 
Perhaps, time is something like a cone rather than an infinite line, with God being a fixed point at the start of the cone. God would be a fixed immovable point not subject to time, where there is no time, but from which all time is derived. As we move along the cone we see time begin to enlarge continuously around the boundary. Rather than God existing for infinite time, God is a fixed point from which time itself, indeed everything, is derived. So we don’t have to see God as existing for an infinite number of time points along the timeline before the Creation of the universe. Rather all time points are traced back to this fixed point. Indeed there is no before the fixed point. The fixed point exists through all points of time and defines the cone itself.
 
Your question cannot be answered by man. Only when we leave this world will the truth of such things be known.
 
Kurisu35712 said:
I’ve been lurking all over the forums, to be honest. I just haven’t found quite as many threads to post on lately. I’ll get a post typed out and then realize it doesn’t contribute enough to bother posting it. 😃
Click to expand...
lol I could fill a book with the posts I delete :rolleyes:
 
catholic1seeks said:
Either the Universe or some physical reality or someTHING has always existed, or God has always existed.

Whether you are atheist or theist, at the end of the day, something (or some being, like God) must have always existed. Infinite in the past.

WHAT?!

THAT’s mind-boggling.
How are we to understand this reality?

I understand that theists say that God is outside of time (he is “eternal” in the technical sense). Yet, God cannot have failed to exist. So whatever one means by eternal, God has always existed.

This is so troubling for me! It’s not shaking my faith or anything like that. It’s a simple fact that anyone can reach: some aspect of existence, whether God or something else, must have always existed. How can we even think of that? You can never reach a beginning if this aspect is infinite past or enteral. It just IS and always has been.

But always has been means there is literally no beginning whatsoever. You keep reaching back. Say you add on another “year” into the past. No beginning. Add another year into the past - no beginning yet. Keep going backwards, and you never reach a beginning. How??

So whether you are atheist or theist, Christian or not… How does this even make sense?!? It must be true… But it’s so… Illogical!
Click to expand...
Things may sound illogical to us because our minds are finite, and God is infinite. Thankfully, we have the example of God becoming human like us to redeem us and show us His Way.
 
“When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” (Rev 8:1)

Does this mean there is time in heaven or that women will not be present until after the half hour? 😃
 
Monte_RCMS said:
A lot of people seem to think or to believe that God is just like us … only smarter.

Not true.

God is INFINITE.

And we are … hard to accept … very tiny and insignificant.
Click to expand...
We are not insignificant to God. He desires our everlasting happiness with Him.
 
fisherman_carl said:
Perhaps, time is something like a cone rather than an infinite line, with God being a fixed point at the start of the cone. God would be a fixed immovable point not subject to time, where there is no time, but from which all time is derived. As we move along the cone we see time begin to enlarge continuously around the boundary. Rather than God existing for infinite time, God is a fixed point from which time itself, indeed everything, is derived. So we don’t have to see God as existing for an infinite number of time points along the timeline before the Creation of the universe. Rather all time points are traced back to this fixed point. Indeed there is no before the fixed point. The fixed point exists through all points of time and defines the cone itself.
Click to expand...
That’s neat!
 
Tomdstone said:
How do you know that time is continuous and not granular with some sort of minimum planck length?
Click to expand...
Tom,
Every now and then I find someone in this forum with a profound observation. Here is something I submitted in a thread entitled “A paradox about timeless God who sustains creation” dated 10/17/15 that applies to your observation

*One of the reasons we have trouble imagining time is that we believe it to be a smooth, continuous, flow. It ain’t! It is incremental, meaning it jumps along in little bits and our minds create the continuity. When the mind grasps the incremental nature of time the relationship of time to change becomes easier to understand. What it means is that the nature of motion as we think of it is wrong, there is no motion only incrementation, just as there is no flowing motion of your cursor on your computer screen. What is happening is a sequential activation of pixels in the direction that you move your cursor.We see it as smooth motion, but it isn’t!!

Zeno proved that: “if space is continuous there can be no motion and if there is motion space is not continuous”. And here is where we run into the nature of infinity and I am going to bed.*

I believe that if the time between incrementations is about 10^(-43) sec. and if space is also granular (discrete) and average distance between “spatial granulations” is about 10^(-35) meters ( the Planck length) then we see why the speed of light is constant.

A granular, incrementing universe explains a lot more about what we observe.

Yppop
 
Tomdstone said:
How do you know that time is continuous and not granular with some sort of minimum planck length?
Click to expand...
I don’t. That is why I suggested a ‘frame rate’ of time that was limited by the speed of light.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top