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Monday, September 03, 2018

What time is it?

There's an ongoing dispute between old-earth creationism and new-earth creationism regarding biblical chronology. Traditionally, many Christians regarded the days of Gen 1 as consecutive calendar days, although some church fathers viewed creation as instantaneous. Likewise, Jews and Christians traditionally regarded the world as a few thousand years old. 

Many Christians revised that interpretation in light of modern astronomy and geology. Atheists agree with the traditional interpretation, which they regard as evidence that the Bible is hopelessly errant. 

One problem with this debate is that it's simplistic. There are different kinds of time, different concepts of time. 

1. Physical time 

That's related to cause and effect, which has a future-oriented sequence. Physical processes instantiate physical time. 

2. Psychological time

When we dream, the dream world operates according to psychological time. The same applies to the intermediate state. 

Some Christians (e.g. Augustine, Berkeley) think time just is psychological time. I demure. 

3. Absolute chronology

Actual age, with a starting-point. Nothing prior to the starting-point. 

4. Period time

If a director makes a movie with a historical setting, like the middle ages, Victorian England, the Roaring Twenties, or the Old West, the movie set reflects period time. That dovetails with mature creation. It begins within a timeframe rather than having an absolute commencement. 

5. Ideational time

Apropos (4), a director may have a story about the Roaring Twenties, Old West, &c. The timeframe initially exists in the mind of the director. When he turns that into a movie, he transfers his mental image to the screen. Ideational time is referential in the sense that it tracks the plot of a story or narrative. 

6. Internal time

If a multiverse exists (or existed), then each universe has its own chronology. These are separate from each other. Compartmentalized. The timeframe of one universe isn't synchronized with the timeframe of another universe. If you could travel from this universe to a parallel universe, you won't enter the same timeframe you left. You might find yourself in the past or future in that parallel universe.

7. Sequential time

A novel or drama generally has a narrative sequence (although it may contain flashbacks). Time is static since it isn't real time but a literary representation of time. 

On a cyclical cosmology, there's a temporal series of universes.  

On a Reformed model of creation, creation preexists as a timeless divine idea. A master plan. God then transfers his idea to extramental reality. Ideational time becomes physical time. In that respect, Reformed metaphysics coincides with mature creation, although it doesn't entail mature creation. It begins wherever the plot began. That could be absolute chronology or period time. 

1 comment:

  1. Then there's quantum time which constitutes a generally homogeneous macro-time that we experience, but is itself a soup of radically disparate temporal frames of reference.

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