Time in heaven

[markporter]

I was just thinking, how would time work in heaven in the absence of things continuously changing (I'm thinking pre-creation)....if God were to count 3...2...1... how does that happen without stuff elapsing between them? - events immediately following each other - how is that distinguishable from them happening at the same time??

[Seasanctuary]

Simple. In Heaven nothing happens.

I suppose that eliminates the possibility of bad things happening.

[markporter]

but assuming God were to think successive thoughts...

[Sheepdog]

this is actually part of a larger issue i have with the concept of timelessness as applied to God. but that's another topic.

i don't believe that our afterlife will be timeless. i conclude this based on the fact that the Christian hope for an afterlife is a physical Resurrection-- and since our understanding of time relates to physicality somehow, it seems we can expect our eternal lives to be timely.

[markporter]

ok, well don't relate it to the afterlife specifically but to God existing on his own...

[Sheepdog]

well, i didn't mean to take this off topic. what i intended to do is to just note that there are broader implications here as well.

[Jedidiah]

I was just thinking, how would time work in heaven in the absence of things continuously changing (I'm thinking pre-creation)....if God were to count 3...2...1... how does that happen without stuff elapsing between them? - events immediately following each other - how is that distinguishable from them happening at the same time??What exactly makes you think that some equivalent of time will not be a part of pre-creation?

beeman

[markporter]

What exactly makes you think that some equivalent of time will not be a part of pre-creation?

beeman
We get all sorts of problems like an infinite regress if we propose that there was always time.

[markporter]

well, i didn't mean to take this off topic. what i intended to do is to just note that there are broader implications here as well.
ok, sure.

[Jedidiah]

We get all sorts of problems like an infinite regress if we propose that there was always time.Only if you limit God to time as we know it. Plus, an "infinite regress" is only a problem because of the sort of temporal conditions in our creation.

beeman

[Kenny]

Whoops, wrong thread! :doh: Mark I had this window open because I did get your message and I do plan to respond in the next few days, but I deleted this post because it was in the wrong place.

[Kenny]

Well, I might as well get to this now as I have a moment (I have a paper due next week so responses may be slow, unless I procrastinate too much :tongue:) …


I was just thinking, how would time work in heaven in the absence of things continuously changing (I'm thinking pre-creation)....if God were to count 3...2...1... how does that happen without stuff elapsing between them? - events immediately following each other - how is that distinguishable from them happening at the same time??

It could be that the above scenario in which God counts sequentially is logically impossible. Perhaps God's sans creation is necessarily timeless and so there could not have been any temporally successive divine acts prior to creation.

But, another possibility is that if God had counted down from three to one sequentially, then a temporal sequence would have also come to being as a result, perhaps a temporal sequence that only involves three distinct moments – one moment for each number. In that case, I think it is most plausible that such a sequence would have a linear order but no defined metric. That is, it would be a temporal sequence in which it is meaningful to speak of one event occurring before (or after) another, but there would be no meaningful way (or perhaps there would simply be no non-arbitrary way) of assigning a quantitative value to the duration between events.

[markporter]

Well, I might as well get to this now as I have a moment (I have a paper due next week so responses may be slow, unless I procrastinate too much :tongue:) …

Thanks Kenny




It could be that the above scenario in which God counts sequentially is logically impossible. Perhaps God's sans creation is necessarily timeless and so there could not have been any temporally successive divine acts prior to creation.


I'm not sure that that's an alternative I'm willing to countenance



But, another possibility is that if God had counted down from three to one sequentially, then a temporal sequence would have also come to being as a result, perhaps a temporal sequence that only involves three distinct moments – one moment for each number. In that case, I think it is most plausible that such a sequence would have a linear order but no defined metric. That is, it would be a temporal sequence in which it is meaningful to speak of one event occurring before (or after) another, but there would be no meaningful way (or perhaps there would simply be no non-arbitrary way) of assigning a quantitative value to the duration between events.

Hmmm. Interesting. That's more the kind of solution I'm looking for. As to the last bit...would there be any duration between the events? I'm not sure there would, but this comes awfully close to the three events happening simultaneously, which is something also to be avoided.

[markporter]

Hmmm. Interesting. That's more the kind of solution I'm looking for. As to the last bit...would there be any duration between the events? I'm not sure there would, but this comes awfully close to the three events happening simultaneously, which is something also to be avoided.

Actually, I think I might take that back, I think that was looking at things in the wrong way, I was looking at them as events bounding things, but perhaps it would be better to look at them as states, in which case maybe the duration thing does have more meaning.

[LadySidhe]

Well, according to some scientists, time as we have created it doesn't exist. Of course, that goes along with the infinite universes idea, but basically, it says that everything that can happen has already/is already happened.

I don't know how much I believe that, but it IS an idea. Kind of interesting to chew on, actually, once you wrap your mind around it. I'm not even going to pretend to know enough about physics to speak authoritatively on it, though.

Sidhe

[keith]

I wonder if it might help to try looking at the puzzle from another angle. Most of the discussion has been about looking backwards and trying to assess time/events in heaven before the creation of the physical universe, if I am following this correctly. From a specifically Christian viewpoint we might wish to consider what it says about heaven to consider that a) Jesus left it at some point to become incarnate here on earth and b) he ascended again into heaven with his physical body (albeit in transformed state).

IMHO this cuts through the idea of heaven as a place or state where nothing ever happens (sounds a bit too Platonist to me). It also raises the question as to whether heaven has always been able to accommodate material/physical elements (in which case there would be less of a problem with time sequence in a space/time continuum of some sort). Then again it might mean that the whole experience of the incarnation/death/resurrection of Christ has created a new state of affairs in the cosmos.

Answers on a postcard please. :smile: