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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Not so dubious and unclear that they dare not date the age of the universe as 14+ billions of years.
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dmwessel
Guest
I don’t agree as God’s love would not produce an unfriendly universe and earth.
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Brendan
Guest
As such, it could only refer to potential future acts, never to acts already accomplished, since time itself had a beginning (as seen in both physical science, theology and philosophy)
Interestingly enough, the ability to achieve an infinite point, even given enough ‘time’ is also limited by the 2nd Law of thermodynamics. Every ordered act (counting etc…) would, of necessity, create more entropy than it produces order. Eventually, a state of entropy insufficient to maint the act would be achieved, no further progress would be possible.
This is the same principle that prevents a perpetual motion machine. The universe itself could not even be such a machine, but would eventually achieve a state of extreme entropy
So you really ARE limited at both ends. To deny that time had a beginning would be to deny the Big Bang, and to deny that any act (or series of acts) could be performed for an infinite amount of time would be a denial of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
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ProVobis
Guest
Maybe we’re there now?
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ProVobis
Guest
Time would really have no meaning before the BB. That’s assuming the cosmos isn’t contracting and expanding.
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yppop
Guest
ProVobis,
More than a few times I have read, in this forum, an objection to using the phrase “before the big bang” pointing out that time did not exist until after the big bang. That is true in one sense, namely, that the time that we experience and measure is time solely associated with the change in the elements of the universe. I refer to it as cosmological time. However, those of us that base our intellectual position on the premise, God exists, must agree that what preceded the big bang had to be non-physical and it had to be spiritual, the Mind of God.
The Mind of God surely is filled with thought, and thought is a form of change, a phenomena easily recognizable to anyone with a mind. Hence thought can be identified with another form of time. I refer to it as ontological time. Ontological time is infinite, i.e., eternal. Unlike cosmological time that is discrete, ontological time is continuous.
The way I imagine the before/beyond the universe is as infinite nothingness, pure existence that can be modeled as continuous space and capable of pure and infinite thought, the Mind of God.
Continuity is infinitely greater than discreteness. Likewise, the continuity of God is infinitely greater than the universe that has been constructed from discrete space and discrete time.
Yppop
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Della
Guest
Unfriendly to whom? You mean niceness not love. True love is a awful thing (in the older sense of the word). It’s power goes way beyond niceness to include violence. We moderns live in such an antiseptic world, especially in the west, that we cannot understand the true nature of love as manifested in Christ. We’ve washed it down to mere niceness, which has brought major evils upon the world that real love never has done or would do.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Since God is pure ESSE (I AM), there is no such thing as time in God. To say there is time in God, or another kind of time in God, seems not to apply. Then it would be legitimate to ask, “How old is God?” God is not old. That would imply a starting point to the existence of God. God never did start to be. Yet from a human perspective (because we live in time and cannot fully grasp what existing outside of time would be like) it is almost impossible not to ask that question. So we answer it by saying God is not old. God is eternal. There was no “time” that God did not or will not exist.
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ProVobis
Guest
Okay, but to the point of whether physicists believe in time or no time BB, I think most look at time as simply another dimension. Certainly mass has length, width, and height or if another co-ordinate system is used, a radius and angles perhaps. Take away the mass and you have no need for co-ordinates and therefore no need for time either in that sense. But energy can be measured; if you can somehow prove there was energy prior to the BB (and I think many can), you then could measure it and time would have a meaning. Just my opinion.
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Cricket2
Guest
No,of course not. I heard that the scientific community now declares that this did not happen. I don’t remember what I was watching at the time, but it might have been on NOVA or a National Geographic program. It has been about 6 years ago.Did you dismiss it?
I studied physics for two years before changing to a degree in genetics. I was fascinated by the idea of the Big Bang. But in the end who can say what happened. I firmly believe God created all things and that none of us, even scientists, can or will ever know just how He did that. What I have found is that the more scientist try to disprove the existence of God the more they seem to prove that He does exist. That is they land up with more questions than answers, and get answers they don’t expect.
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Brendan
Guest
That is exists is an accepted physics principle, and that it is a part of space-time is also generally accepted.
The ‘dubious’ part comes in when one attempts to define exactly what space-time IS.
Time, under modern physics, in a fundamental ‘arrow’ of seeming irrevisbility.
Physics generally deals with parity (or symentry). The universe is HIGHLY symmetric, For most events, there is no arrow of time. If we ‘filmed’ a atom absorbing an incoming photon and having the electron move to higher orbital, it would make equal ‘sense’ to run the film backward and show an electron decaying to a lower orbital and releasing a photon. An independent person could not determine which event was the one ‘filmed’.
Contrast that to a film of a balloon popping. Run backwards, we could see flying bits of latex reform over a pressurized volume of air. There IS a time arrow. Balloons do pop, but pieces of latex do not fly together by themselves, meld together and pressurize air.
The primary marker of that time arrow is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, that states move from an ordered state to disordered states.
The expression of that, to a physicist, is Time. The asymmetric movement of order to disorder.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
And even answers they don’t like!
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
But to hear people like biologist Richard Dawkins, the arrow of time moves either way.
As in abiogenesis, life is created by the fortuitous flying together of those “pieces of latex” collectively called the first living organism. That is to say, states moving from a disordered state to an ordered state.
Some other biologists call this Intelligent Design.
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kbachler
Guest
It is the best theory available and a good theory, but the more we learn the more it is clear that there are also some key problems with it.
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kbachler
Guest
Big Bang has not been dismissed. What is clear is that if the theory is correct, there are more complexities to it than in the original “simple” theory.
God commanded that we love Him with all our mind. To do so if what He is and did is not understandable, would border on cruelty.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Yes, that’s true. As there are key problems with almost every theory.
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Brendan
Guest
Interestingly enough, most of the problems of the Big Bang are only problems if one is NOT an Intelligent Design proponent, such as accounting for why the universe immerged from the super-expansion in such a low entropy state and the apparent violation of the conservation of matter\energy.
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yppop
Guest
Charlemagne III
Perhaps you missed the point I made in my post that ontological time is infinite, i.e., eternal.
Doesn’t eternity imply infinite time? If so, what kind of time would eternity signify? If not ontological time then it seems to me you are stuck with the proposition that the only time God is contemporaneous with is cosmological time? And that starts to sound like pantheism.
Yppop
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Aloysium
Guest
:twocents: X 2
I think it bears repeating that science is based on Christian beliefs that creation is not God and that it is rationally organized.
We do not worship creation and can treat it as a thing that can be dissected, analyzed, and manipulated.
As rational beings, again a (self-evident?) belief, we are able to make sense of it.
The problem is that science, as it is currently practiced, is a dumbing down of knowledge, ignoring such important aspects as what something is in itself and what is its purpose.
There is a strict focus on how material things behave, and even here it is narrowed down further to what can be known empirically.
Having this approach to knowledge and understanding, it is no wonder there are people who cannot grasp even the possibility of God.
There was a statement regarding our ability to understand what existence out of time would be like. I think we exist both in and out of time so that we do have a “finite” sense of eternity.
While we are always at a certain point temporally, that point in time also exists now. Such is the case right now . . . and now . . . and . . .
In the silence of the moment, events come into and out of being and things that are, change. The clock tics, the wheel spins around the central axis that is now.
We each came into being at some point in the context of universal time, but here-and-now is where we dwell.
Our body gets old and will depart, but our existence cannot be other than now. Being attached to the transient, it is difficult to sit back and observe this. Everything that we identify with is transient, what identifies is eternal.
The moment, although finite in the sense that it does not encompass all nows, has no limits: no beginning or end to it, it just is.
Existence has a spatial manifestation: "here"ness. It too is dimensionless: smaller than anything we can imagine, it encompasses anywhere we might be in the universe.
It is our existence itself, which we do not bring into being ourselves.
It was created by God when He breathed His spirit into moulded clay. He maintains this individual beingness, reflecting His ever-present "Is"ness.
We, the Big Bang (if there was such a thing), and every moment emerge from eternity, created by the One God.
I think it bears repeating that science is based on Christian beliefs that creation is not God and that it is rationally organized.
We do not worship creation and can treat it as a thing that can be dissected, analyzed, and manipulated.
As rational beings, again a (self-evident?) belief, we are able to make sense of it.
The problem is that science, as it is currently practiced, is a dumbing down of knowledge, ignoring such important aspects as what something is in itself and what is its purpose.
There is a strict focus on how material things behave, and even here it is narrowed down further to what can be known empirically.
Having this approach to knowledge and understanding, it is no wonder there are people who cannot grasp even the possibility of God.
There was a statement regarding our ability to understand what existence out of time would be like. I think we exist both in and out of time so that we do have a “finite” sense of eternity.
While we are always at a certain point temporally, that point in time also exists now. Such is the case right now . . . and now . . . and . . .
In the silence of the moment, events come into and out of being and things that are, change. The clock tics, the wheel spins around the central axis that is now.
We each came into being at some point in the context of universal time, but here-and-now is where we dwell.
Our body gets old and will depart, but our existence cannot be other than now. Being attached to the transient, it is difficult to sit back and observe this. Everything that we identify with is transient, what identifies is eternal.
The moment, although finite in the sense that it does not encompass all nows, has no limits: no beginning or end to it, it just is.
Existence has a spatial manifestation: "here"ness. It too is dimensionless: smaller than anything we can imagine, it encompasses anywhere we might be in the universe.
It is our existence itself, which we do not bring into being ourselves.
It was created by God when He breathed His spirit into moulded clay. He maintains this individual beingness, reflecting His ever-present "Is"ness.
We, the Big Bang (if there was such a thing), and every moment emerge from eternity, created by the One God.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Since I don’t exist outside earth time (not yet anyway
) I cannot fathom infinite time.Only God is eternal and infinite. I believe that’s traditional Catholic teaching.
After I pass from this vale of tears, I will know immortality but not infinity or eternity.
I believe it is useless and vain to regard any musing on the subject as anything but useless and vain.
That would include my musings.
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