God cannot decide
Lets assume that there is a God and He created the universe. Lets assume that God could decide about the act of creation. This requires decision before act. This is however problematic since God is in state of timeless where there is no before and after (this is true since time is part of creation). This means that we have to give up either the decision or the act of creation. We exist hence we cannot give up the act of creation so we are left with the option that God cannot decide.
Comments (58)
Either that or he does not exist. X-)
We cannot possibly comprehend anything outside of the limitations of our own perception. If something were to be "outside" of time or the universe, we could not understand it or say anything about it whatsoever. This is not to say that it's not possible, only that trying to apply our own universal laws and constraints to it is nonsensical. To talk of an entity outside of time being unable to decide isn't logical because the concept of decision itself is a product of the universe we live in and how it operates. Even thinking of God having a mind doesn't make sense if He is outside of time. It seems to me, if you believe in a creator God who is separate from the universe, you cannot say a single thing about what He is like. If you want to be able to say anything about God, any of His characteristics, He must be part of our universe. But that would mean He did not create our universe. The only other option is something like Spinoza's God, which is the universe. Everything that exists, mind and matter, is an extension of God, a part of Him, like cells in a body. I recommend reading his Ethics if this sounds interesting to you, or at the very least finding a good summary of it online.
"God is in state of timeless where there is no before and after (this is true since time is part of creation)."
Does God not have a before and after? It seems to me he must have a sequence of events. On what basis would God be denied such a reality? Assuming God existed before creation, then time must have existed before creation. I would propose that time is the one understanding that he could not create, but rather ran concurrent throughout the eternity of his existence. For those who say he is all knowing, time is the one item beyond his all-powerfulness. The only power he could have over it is the power of suicide. He could permanently kill himself and thereby destroy that time which is limited to his existence. But any time existing beyond his existence (i.e. time he allowed beyond his existence) would be unaffected.
It doesn't matter how many assumption we have. Assumptions must however be coherent.
You are either timeless or temporal. There is no other option. Timeless means that you are not subject to time. What do you mean with "God transcends time"?
Yeah. God as a person does not exist.
I think we can understand timeless.
There cannot be any sequence in a timeless state since the state becomes ill-defined. In this case God is decided and undecided in a timeless point.
I don't understand you. Can we agree that God is timeless?
Yes.
Doesn't that mean that He could not do consecutive tasks, like decision and act?
Hence, anything that partakes in the world, interacts, is active, cannot be “outside space/time”.
The closest that comes to mind would be something like “abstract objects” (assuming reification).
[quote=Abstract Objects, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]An object is abstract (if and) only if it is causally inefficacious.[/quote]
In terms of causation, the 2[sup]nd[/sup] bullet above only goes as far as: atemporal implies cannot be an effect in part or whole.
Obviously there cannot be anything that “transcends existence”, and “transcends spacetime” seemingly converges on that.
Why do you think this? Don't just make a claim, provide your reasoning.
I don't think it makes sense for us to be able to understand something that we have zero experience of. Our brains aren't capable of comprehending a lack of time, just like they aren't capable of understanding infinity.
Think of one instant. It is just a point. There is no before and after in it.
The very definition of the term "instant" is "a precise moment of time". How is "a moment of time" the same as "no time"? It clearly isn't.
This doesn't seem right to me. Time is really a measurement of change, isn't it? Without any change, time would essentially be standing still.
I think time can measure how long something stays the same too. Imagine the entire universe perished into nothingness, in some sort of reverse big bang. Then at some point, a new big bang occurred, out of which something emerged from nothingness. Surely, time could be said to be passing between those two events, even though nothing existed for a certain duration (i.e. non-changing nothingness existed for 2 years)?
I don't think it could. Time can only measure how long something stays the same if there are other things changing. Time is really relational.
Exactly.
To be clear, though, I'm not trying to say that my assertions are objectively true, only that they are what I believe the case is. This issue isn't settled, as far as I am aware. I remember learning about it in college, so unless there has been a big breakthrough recently I'll assume what I learned it still true. You and I are essentially representing the two schools of thought on this, and there have been various arguments for each side throughout the centuries.
Here's a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry about it:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#RedPlaResTim
The relevant sections is "Reductionism and Platonism with Respect to Time"
Basically, if what I'm saying is the case, then this scenario you described where one universe died and another was born would have no time in between, they would be immediately successive events.
The reason I tend to believe the Reductionism argument (aside from the simple fact that it makes the most sense to me, logically) is because of what I know about Einstein's relativity and his joining of space and time into "spacetime". Space and time are a single "thing" essentially, inseparable and interdependent. But I definitely don't claim to be an expert, this is all just based on my own study and the things I learned in a few relativity and metaphysics classes back in college.
I know what you mean. Trying to understand why there is anything rather than nothing is the ultimate mindfuck.
Here’s an application of relativity showing how time and space are connected, just in case you hadn’t come across this. I copied and pasted this from a website.
“Because an observer on the ground sees the satellites in motion relative to them, Special Relativity predicts that we should see their clocks ticking more slowly (see the Special Relativity lecture). Special Relativity predicts that the on-board atomic clocks on the satellites should fall behind clocks on the ground by about 7 microseconds per day because of the slower ticking rate due to the time dilation effect of their relative motion [2].
Further, the satellites are in orbits high above the Earth, where the curvature of spacetime due to the Earth's mass is less than it is at the Earth's surface. A prediction of General Relativity is that clocks closer to a massive object will seem to tick more slowly than those located further away (see the Black Holes lecture). As such, when viewed from the surface of the Earth, the clocks on the satellites appear to be ticking faster than identical clocks on the ground. A calculation using General Relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by 45 microseconds per day.
The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time.”
It doesn’t really make sense to me how time could exist if there’s no space since they are in a sense the same thing. But humans still have a long way to go to understanding the universe.
Some people call timeless state as eternal now. The present.
You're talking about mysticism. We're supposed to be talking about science and philosophy. "Eternal now" isn't a logical term; its not meant to be taken literally. It's meaningless in the context of science and philosophy.
I completely agree. I remember when I first learned about relativity, it absolutely blew my mind. But that itself is a perfect example of how careful we need to be about things we think we know or understand. Before learning about relativity, nobody would think that things worked in such a way based only on their perception and experience of the world. And yet it has been well-documented and firmly established. The nature of reality is such a mystery, and I find it so wonderful and exciting.
It seems to me that this may be true when trying to measure time. To me, it still makes sense to say some sort of unmeasured absolute time passes at the same rate for all things all of the time. To illustrate, consider two human beings born at the same time in the same location. One travels to a far away place in space, and returns 20 years later (local time). Even if their watches measured a different amount of time, they have still existed for the same amount of absolute time.
"...the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy..."
"If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time.”
Hmm. This seems quite odd to me. The British during the early years of the second world war using quite obsolete radar technology were able to get a very accurate position on their bombers flying over Germany on night raids without using the clocks on the bombers. The only clocks that were needed were the clocks at the ground stations back in England. That was over 75 years ago. Today. much of the world is not covered by GPS, due to a lack of ground stations. This GPS clock claim is repeated over and over by thousands of people, but original sources are very few. There are as far as I can tell about an equal number of people in the field who challenge this claim, but rarely ever referenced. I wonder if popularity gets in the way of actual information transmission. Technologically speaking, there is no reason that necessitates a clock on any GPS satellite.
Whose absolute time? If the brother is gone 100 years, rather than 20 and returns to earth, the brother on earth grew old and died. While the brother on the trip may only be older by a few years if that. He will then go on live many more years. The question I have is if he traveled at near light speed as measured back on earth, then for him, in his spacetime reference, he would have been traveling much faster than the speed of light. That is an impossibility according to the proponents of this theory.
I'm not an expert at this, but this is from what I've read from interest. Time is relative. An absolute time doesn't make sense to me. We could use Earth time as a reference to measure other time just to have a standard, but we have to remember that our Earth time is affected by the curvature of space and the speed that we are traveling in space. I don't see how time could pass without space, since spacetime is one thing. This stuff is very complicated though, and we can only speculate what it would be like. We still don't have an equation to explain the universe, and probably have a long way to go if we ever get there.
I can't really speak to much about this because I don't know it very well. The reason relativity has to be applied to GPS is because the satellites are very very high up where it matters. Did the radar technology involve something that high up? If it was only as high as a plane, it might be negligible.
"There cannot be any sequence in a timeless state since the state becomes ill-defined. In this case God is decided and undecided in a timeless point."
Agree. But I thought my meaning was quite clear. I'm questioning the entire notion of a timeless state. Furthermore, even a spaceless thought has time occurring concurrently. While a time can be can be created, altered and destroyed, time itself is beyond all of the aforementioned possibilities.
We are talking about philosophy of religion with God as one of its item using logic. Do you think that God can defy logic?
I see.
Quoting curiosity in action
I have an argument which shows time cannot be created. You can find it here.
What do you mean with above time?
Quoting Lone Wolf
Doing consecutive tasks and acts require time.
Of course. Logic is something we created to help us explain and understand the world, and it is a very good tool, but why would God be bound by something we created? Logic doesn't even apply to the entire physical world. Quantum mechanics has shown us that something can essentially be both true and false at the same time.
So what is the domain of philosophy of religion? Could God make 1+1=3?
We're doing philosophy of religion right now. Philosophy of religion is just a philosophical examination of religious concepts.
Quoting bahman
If the God we are referring to is omnipotent, then yes. If God is all-powerful, he can restructure reality in any way he wants to. That's what omnipotent means.
God is not restrained by time; as he existed before time, exists in time, and will exist apart from time. He is in no manner restrained by the existence of time.
Quoting bahman
Does a potter need to be a pot to make pots? No, rather he is above his pots and uses them as he pleases, just as God created time and uses it as he pleases. A potter is not restrained by his pots, as God is not restrained by his creation.
What is the point of defining religious concepts when there is no logic behind it? 1+G=whatever.
Either you're misunderstanding me, or I'm misunderstanding you, or both. What you asked has nothing to do with what I said, as far as I can tell.
I think I understand you and didn't understand me. 1+God could be whatever if we strive on illogic.
What does 1+God mean?
I didn't say anything about us "striving on illogic". I said an omnipotent being is not bound by logic. That's just true by definition. Something that is all-powerful cannot be constrained by anything.
It could mean anything. if 1+1=3 is possible then 1+God=whatever is also possible.
Quoting JustSomeGuy
You accept illogic is possible, 1+1=3?
I'm sorry but you just aren't making any sense to me.
I'll say it one more time:
If God is omnipotent, then he is not constrained by logic.
We are not omnipotent. Asking if something is "possible" needs qualifiers. Possible in what situation? If you're asking me if 1+1=3 is possible in the world we live in currently, the answer is no. But God does not live in the world we live in, and so God is not bound by the laws of nature. God makes the laws of nature. So, if God is omnipotent, he could change the laws of nature to make 1+1=3, if he wanted to. It would be within his power.
Isn't 1+1=3 illogical?
Alright, you clearly aren't understanding the things I'm saying. Is English your first language, or no? I feel like there's a language barrier, but I could be wrong.
Yes, English is my second language and I am physicist. Where do you think I lack understanding?
You've asked me the same questions multiple times after I already answered. I'm not trying to insult your intelligence at all, the fact that you do seem to be intelligent is why I assumed there must be a language barrier causing our misunderstandings.
You asked me:
Quoting bahman
After I had just said:
Quoting JustSomeGuy
Quoting JustSomeGuy
I feel like that explanation answers your question. Yes, 1+1=3 is illogical. But if God is omnipotent then he is not bound by logic, so if he wanted to he could very well make 1+1=3.
Great. All I wanted to hear was that 1+1=3 is illogical. I will open a thread to know the opinion of others on this issue.