FROM V.V. RAMAN, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AND HUMANITIES AT THE ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: There are at least three aspects of time: experiential, conceptual, and physical. Experiential time may drift ever so slowly (often for the young, who are impatient for adulthood) or flee all too fast (especially as one approaches the precipitous terminal cliff at an advanced age). Experiential time is perhaps the most insubstantial element in human consciousness. It is with us all through our waking hours, apparently drifting silently and ceaselessly in the external world as well as within the very core of our being.
Conceptual time is like an imaginary straight line that can extended to infinity in either direction, taking us to realms way beyond the bracket whose bounds cosmologists proclaim as the big bang and heat-death. It has no beginning and no end, just an imaginary stretch the mind constructs.
Then there is the steady flow of physical time in a given frame of reference, the sort that is measured by physicists and chronometers, taking advantage of periodic changes, either at the lunar and stellar levels or at the microcosmic domain of atomic transitions. Physical time, as per current cosmology, had its birth with the big bang and was nonexistent prior to this ignition of the physical world.
Theologians have argued about whether God created time. The simple answer could be, “Of course God did, for did not God create everything?” Or, “Certainly not, since there was no God prior to thinking man.” In other words, the two simple answers depend on whether a person is a theist or an atheist. The Svetasvatara Upanishad describes God as the "architect of time": kâlakâro. For Pythagoras, time was the soul of the world.
What is relevant to recognize is that experiential time plays a role when we are bored or having fun, conceptual time comes into the fore when we are logically analyzing the nature of time, and physical time matters when we are doing serious physics or cosmology.
Shakespeare once described time as both our parent and our grave. Indeed, each one of us tastes a slice of time, and when the lights go off in conscious life, we drop out of the steady stream in which we seem to be drifting. It is conscious life that perceives the presence of the stream. When we are thrown into the invisible stream of physical time, it turns into experiential time, a portion of a stream that continues indefinitely. What we do during that interval is what really matters.
V.V. Raman appears with Brian Leftow, the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, Ernan McMullin, William Lane Craig, and Robert Russell in "Did God Create Time?" the 24th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series, hosted and created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The series airs Thursdays on the PBS HD network and many other PBS stations. Every Friday, participants will share their views on the previous day's episode.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Did God Create Time?
Posted by Heather Wax at 10:17 AM
Labels: Closer to Truth
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St. Augustine asked what is time, and finding it difficult to answer started to wonder whether time is not a distentio mentis, that is, a product of the human mind itself. Emmanuel Kant was more forceful in showing it to be the form of our inner sense, so that it is the human mind that puts temporal order into the world as we know and percieve it. That is the way God created us. Physical time, in that case, is a product of the human mind as much as the objects we see, and therefore science, as knowledge of the world as it is in itself, is impossible. Would the author care to define what he means by physical time?
"Science, as knowledge of the world as it is in itself, is impossible."
That is a well-known argument against science and objectivity.
1. The point is, there is no other kind of consistent, coherent, rational understanding of perceived reality available to the human brain that has been as successful in its explanatory efforts or as proved to be as fruitful its applications knowledge thus acquired.
2. What science does is to surmise the best it can how the world would/could be without the presence of the human mind in it.
It is that surmised world that one calls objective reality.
3. "Would the author care to define what he means by physical time?"
In that world there was time before the emergence of Man on the planet, and there will be time after all of us (including all our descendents) have disappeared from this earth.
It is that time I can physical time: it is independent of you and me and is measured by chronometers which can continue to tick away even when and where no humans exist.
Conceptual time and experiential time arise when we come into physical time as conscious entities.
There are experienced meditators that would say conceptual time is a byproduct of thought. Thoughts most often consist of mental visualizations or verbalizations in the form of either prior experience or fantasies of future events. Most non-meditators have little or no experience of non-thinking and thus can only arrive at what they believe to be truth through a process of conceptualization (thoughts in the form of generalizations involving prior experience). Those meditators would say that living in the present, at least in the conceptual sense, transcends time. For obvious reasons, they would also say that this is an actualization, not a belief.
It is interesting that the latest recipient of the Templeton Prize seems to have a very Kantian outlook with regards to modern science. That is to say, science can never penetrate ultimate reality, that world of things in themsleves, but must content itself with describing their appearances. Dr. D'Espagnat has an operationalist view of quantum thoery, that "quantum physics predicts what will be observed under certain circumstances"; modern science would seem to be the ability to predict specific measurements of appearances when certain conditions are met in the future. That effectively means trying to bring the future into the present, so again the question of time becomes an anomaly.
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