I am not entirely sure what it means to say God is eternal. — Bartricks

I don't think anyone knows, to be honest. I'm guessing it refers to an entity that is unaffected by time?

This reminds me of the comparison with a magician that performs some trick in front of an audience like, say, sawing someone in two. The audience know it's just a trick, but they don't know how the magician does it and it looks very real. In contrast, the magician knows what he is doing and remains unaffected by the whole thing.

Something similar may occur in the case of time. If God creates time, then he must be aware of this and he remains unaffected by it, though he may see it as an "optical illusion" that affects others.

But from the others' perspective time is real and it affects them profoundly in many respects.

Changeless = Time doesn't exist. — TheMadFool

But that's false, as I argued in the OP. If time exists, then an event will change in its temporal properties. So change cannot require time, but is instead something time requires.

If, as I have argued, God created time, then it is God who changes his temporal sensations about an event and, in so doing, brings it about that the event goes from being future, to being present, to being past.

God being omniscient is the opposite of us being limited in knowledge. — SpaceDweller

I don't see this. Being 'omniscient' means being in possession of all knowledge - that is, to have beliefs in the truth of all justified true propositions. We - most of us - are in possession of some justified true beliefs. So we are not unknowing, we just do not have all knowledge.

If we are limited in knowledge (compare to God's knowledge) we can conclude the knowledge of God is unlimited or infinite. — SpaceDweller

I do not see how that follows. Consider: God is all powerful. Thus, he can do anything. And that means that, if he so chooses, he could furnish us with everything he knows.

I do not understand what 'infinite' knowledge means - there is not an actual infinity of known propositions. At any one time, there will be a finite amount. God beliefs in all of them - indeed, it is due to him that they qualify as knowledge in the first place - but the point is that God's knowledge is not 'infinite' in any meaningful sense of that term.

My point here is I see no problem with assigning infinite property to God compared to finite one. (God is not God if limited) — SpaceDweller

I see a big problem, namely that it conflicts with what God himself tells us (via our reason), which is that there are no actual infinities in reality. Note, if God had infinite knowledge, then he could become ignorant of half of what he believes and would still have infinite knowledge - which seems incoherent. That is, our reason tells us that this is not so.

God and time are therefore infinite in every aspect, however obvious is, while God is omnipotent this does not apply to time. — SpaceDweller

And this just ignores the arguments I gave that appear to demonstrate the precise opposite.

Time is not infinite. What does that mean? That there is an actual infinity of past events? That makes no sense - for half infinity is still infinity.

Time has a beginning. A believer in God is duty bound to believe this on pain of rational incoherence. God is all powerful by definition. And that alone tells us, if we just reflect on it for a moment, that God created time. And thus time had a beginning.

But we can go in the other direction as well: if time did not have a beginning, then one would have to posit an actual infinity of past events. But again, there can be no actual infinity of anything and to suppose otherwise is to affirm absurdities. Thus, as there are no actual infinities in reality, there is not an infinity of past events. If there is a finite number of past events, then time had a beginning.

So, reflection on God reveals time had a beginning; and reflection on time reveals time had a beginning.

No, it is not clear what it means. There's a big debate about it. One could interpret it to mean that God exists 'outside' of time - and that this is what existing 'eternally' means. Or one could interpret to mean that God exists in time and at all times. That's a temporalist understanding of the term. And nothing stops one mixing both - indeed, that is what I am doing. Nothing makes God exist in time, for God could have chosen not to create time, in which case he would have existed and time would not. Thus, the idea of God existing outside of time is a perfectly coherent one.
But time exists, for God thinks. And so God is in time, but does not have to be.

One can create something and then be in it. If I knit a jersey, I created the jersey. And if I then envelope myself in it, I am in what I created.

So, God is in time, for God created time and his creating it placed himself in it, for about his own thoughts he is either having the past sensation, the future sensation, or neither (in which case his own thoughts are either past, future, or present respectively). But God does not have to be in time.

It's quite simple. It means they have existed forever. — GraveItty

:up:

In law school, a professor tried to describe the relationship between states/Indian tribes and the Federal Government. In typical legal fashion, he used the phrase "quasi-sovereignty." I asked if that was anything like limited infinity. I got a raised eyebrow.

Anyway, I can't think of an equivalent for quasi-eternity. There is no beginning and there is no end.

What the F do I care about a debate going on? — GraveItty

Oh, I am sure you don't care. It's just that I don't care that you don't care. I just care to point out that what you said was false and ignorant. There is a big debate about the nature of eternity. And I know about it and have read some of the literature on it - though no doubt not as much as I should - and you have not.

Anyway, I can't think of an equivalent for quasi-eternity. There is no beginning and there is no end. — James Riley

Nonsense. Time has a beginning - see OP for details.

Some things have no beginning, for some things exist with aseity. Unless this were so, we would have to posit infinite events, and there are no actual infinities. Thus, some things exist without ever having begun to exist. And of course, there is also no beginning to your talent for philosophy.

But time has a beginning.

And everything can end, even though nothing has to. For God exists and is all powerful and thus can end anything and everything whenever he wants.

The OP contains two arguments. You have addressed neither.

Why are you so sure I don't know what I am talking about?

I take it you've read McTaggart? Maybe you'd like to say something about McTaggart's view, as I know you're keen to teach me things.

I addressed the first, and showed you the failure in your reasoning. When you tried to defend your failure, you demonstrated that you could not distinguish between something, nothing, and time. You also said God was all powerful but subordinate to God's creation (time). That's just fundamentally stupid. If you want that, you have to redefine God to something similar to my definition.

I was going to address your second argument, which I actually found more intriguing, with only one correction I would make: Instead of bottom up, the same result could be achieved top down. That top down angle tracks, somewhat, with my own notion that we are the Universe experiencing itself.

But in the end, I decided to not pursue that with you because you acted like an obstinate, petulant little child who refused to admit he was wrong on the issue of time/something and then, later, nothing.

Anyway, the record, above, speaks for itself. So again, I cede the floor.

But Peu, what about McTaggart? The A series and the B series and the C series - don't you want to tell me about them? Peu? I think I know what I am talking about when it comes to time, but you think I don't and so I am eager to hear what you know about it and to be put right in my thinking. So, Peu, what do you think about McTaggart's famous article? You know, the one everyone begins by reading when they start engaging with the philosophy of time - the one called the Unreality of Time? It's a good read, isn't it?

Changeless = Time doesn't exist.
— TheMadFool

But that's false, as I argued in the OP. If time exists, then an event will change in its temporal properties. So change cannot require time, but is instead something time requires.

If, as I have argued, God created time, then it is God who changes his temporal sensations about an event and, in so doing, brings it about that the event goes from being future, to being present, to being past. — Bartricks

I believe there's something wrong here. Time is usually not regarded as a property of an object just as spatial location is not. So, "an event will change in its temporal properties" doesn't make sense. Consider an object A in location L1 at time T1. It moves to point L2 and arrives there at time T2. Do you say A has acquired new properties L2 and T2?

It's interesting nonetheless to think of time and space as a property. Change would need a new definition and change would always occur because time is always flowing.

What's the standard definition of change? An object X changes if at one time it is something and at another time it is something else. As you can see, change uses time as kind of a backdrop, a frame of reference as it were. Basically, what happens, if anything does happen, to an object as time passes by. Notice here that time isn't treated as a property of objects.

What do you suppose God creating time means? What does it look like?

What do you suppose God creating time means? What does it look like? — TheMadFool

My second argument tells you: time is made of sensations and their absence. That is, pastness is a sensation, as is futurity, whereas presentness is the absence of either.

God creates time, then, by creating in himself those sensations about things. And in so doing, time is thereby created, for now all things God is thinking of will either be ones about which he is having the past sensation (and thereby they will be past), or the future sensation (and thereby they will be future) or neither (and thereby they will be present).

Re properties: temporal properties are properties, it's just they're not intrinsic properties. The same is true of spatial properties. My location is a property of my body. It is not an intrinsic property of my body, for my body would be the same body in a different location. But nevertheless, it is a property of my body that it is in the location that it is in. And temporal properties are the same, I think.

The claim that time 'flows' is a metaphor and, I think, a misleading one, as it invites us to think of time as a kind of liquid. Yet if my arguments are correct, that is quite the wrong way to conceive of time. Time is relevantly analogous to, say, pain or love. We might talk of the ebb and flow of pain or love, but we mean by this the manner in which they become more or less intense. That is how things are with time too. An event becomes more past, not by 'flowing' further down the river of time, but by the sensation of pastness becoming more intense in God.

Re properties: temporal properties are properties, it's just they're not intrinsic properties. The same is true of spatial properties. My location is a property of my body. It is not an intrinsic property of my body, for my body would be the same body in a different location. But nevertheless, it is a property of my body that it is in the location that it is in. And temporal properties are the same, I think — Bartricks

If time is a property, define changeless.

The claim that time 'flows' is a metaphor and, I think, a misleading one, as it invites us to think of time as a kind of liquid. Yet if my arguments are correct, that is quite the wrong way to conceive of time. Time is relevantly analogous to, say, pain or love. We might talk of the ebb and flow of pain or love, but we mean by this the manner in which they become more or less intense. That is how things are with time too. An event becomes more past, not by 'flowing' further down the river of time, but by the sensation of pastness becoming more intense in God. — Bartricks

Ok. What's the ticking of a clock if time doesn't flow?

My second argument tells you: time is made of sensations and their absence. — Bartricks

And there you are wrong. Time is just a coordinate on an apparently 4d-d curved spacetime. It can be associated a number, called the coordinate time. The proper time (eigentime, the own time, which is the one we measure usually in our rather spatially fixed positions, and which in a gravity field loves slower than in flat spacetime, which seems locally to be the case if we fall in a gravity field), is a value that is independent of coordinates values, and it's the time that is measured when you are not moving in the space, I.e, when the spatial coordinates are constant. So in a sense it is coordinate dependent. You make the spatial part of the metric, explicable in all kinds of coordinates, vanish, and the result is the Lorenz-invariant proper time, meaning just that it's the same in any coordinate system. No matter how fast you go, or where you find yourself, the proper time is always the same. If you are at rest in a gravity field, then the proper time you measure (I.e, the time between two points on your time-like path) goes slower than if you would make such a measurement in outer space because the timeliness metric component is different for you then (in flat spacetime, that component is just 1, or -1, or sometimes even I, if we set c=1). For a spacelike path, followed by light, there is no associated eigentime, as the projection of that path onto the time-axis is zero. So there can be no measuremt of two times. So there is no eigentime of light, which is reasonable as there is no restframe in which light doesn't move. I can remember having a hard time (there you go!) imagining this. On a rocket through space.

This unstoppable character of light, lies at the bottom of SR (and GR, for that matter, which is nothing more than accelerated SR). In a sense you could say that interaction by light is instantaneous, as there is no time passage for light. So in a sense, all thing happen at the same time. Luckily there is space to prevent this.

Note that I use entropic time as the ingredient of this vision. A value can be assigned to it, it's entropic time quantified.

So in this light, can time (so not our subjective experience of it) be assigned to God? It depends. If he is part of this universe, then obviously yes. If they are outside of it? Maybe. It could be that there is a higher dimensional realm, of which our universe is an intersection. While time out there continues, the time at the big bang could have been fluctuating, giving rise to the big bang at their time-like command. Let the be a philosophy forum!

First, the argument from God. God is all powerful by definition. From this we can conclude that God created time. Why? Because if time exists, then one is subject to it. And so if God did not create time, then God would be subject to something he did not create, which is incompatible with being omnipotent. So, given that God would be subject to time if time exists, something which would be incompatible with his omnipotence were he not to have himself created time, God created time. — Bartricks

This makes sense to me. However, we have strung together some symbols here viz. God created time but what does that look like? When I say Rapheal created The School of Athens (painting), I can picture him working with a paintbrush on a canvas, palette nearby, etc. I can't seem to do that with the statement God created time. I have nothing I can turn to in my experience as to how such an act of creation would look like. It doesn't seem to refer to anything I know of and this is probably true for others as well.

Nonetheless, I have no issue at all with the logic of your argument.

About your second argument. It seems as though you're claming that true/actual time in terms of past and future are also real sensations and being thus, it requires a being whose sensations they are and that being is God. Thus, God exists.

How do you prove that time (past, present, and future) is a sensation? Oh! I see because the past is memory and the future is "anticipatory" or, in my book, imagination) - very mental in nature.

But then if all mental creatures, including God, were to somehow perish, time would cease to exist but then that means you're trying to say time is simply up here (TheMadFool points to his temple), in our heads, it's imaginary. Where do you want to go with this?

God is all powerful — Bartricks

Omnipotence: Can do anything.

So, sorry posters to this thread, no use saying Bartricks is an idiot if by that you mean Bartricks'theory is riddled with contradictions. Bartricks is rejecting the law of noncontradiction from the get-go.

Bartricks'theory is riddled with contradictions. — TheMadFool

Indeed, that's what renders it unassailable. Pointing out any further contradictions is beside the point. As I understand him, he thinks LNC is true, but only contingently so. Hence he can accept contradictions when they suit his purposes, but reject them where they do not suit him.

I do not reject the law of non contradiction. I think it is true. I just don't think it has to be. But I am as sure of its actual truth as anyone. That's why I don't contradict myself - I am, if i do say so myself, the law's most diligent follower on this forum by far. Of course, I don't have to be - I am able to contradict myself whenever I want. But I don't. I am like God in that respect.
But back to time....

I do not follow you. First, I did not argue that the past (I will focus on that temporal property) is in our minds. I explicitly denied that thesis. It has nothing to be said for it and is evidently false.
But we are aware of time via sensations. There is a sensation of the past, then. That is, pastness feels a way.
In order for that to be the case, the past itself would be a sensation, else our sensations of pastness would not be able to tell us about it.
That, combined with the facts the past is unitary and that sensations are always the sensations of a mind, entails that the past is made of a single mind's sensations of pastness.
And this means that of course we can imagine the past being created. It's really no different, in terms of an imaginative exercise than,say, imagining being in pain.

I don't accept any contradictions. Thinking a contradiction 'can' be true is not equivelent to thinking it is actually true. How do you ever figure out what to do? You must just hang around waiting for yourself to do stuff, like a kind of zombie. For were you ever to consider what actions you 'could' do, you would think you were actually doing them. When you look at a menu in a restaurant, do you think "blimey, I just ordered an awful lot of food"? I assume so. That is, to you the menu is just a description of everything you have ordered, not a list of things you could order. Must be incredibly confusing being you, and mind bending for those around you.

God is a mind. And time consists of the properties of pastness, presentness and futurity. If time does not exist, then God's mind would not have any of those properties. But if time does exist, then God's mind will either exist in the present, or in the past, or in the future, or some combination. Thus, if time exists, God will be subject to time.

You asked me to define change. That is a task for another day (it's a kind of thought). My point in the op was that change is more fundamental than time. For time exists when an event goes from - that is, changes - from being future or present to being past. Or changes from being past to being more so, etc.

So, one has not successfully analysed change if one says that change involves something having a property at one time that it lacks at another. For then one has invoked a change to explain a change, which gets us no closer to understanding change.

This - this conflation of time and change - is at the heart of McTaggart's confused reasoning about the matter. Or so I would argue. But Pue and others who know so much more about the nature of time will surely correct me on that.

I don't accept any contradictions. Thinking a contradiction 'can' be true is not equivelent to thinking it is actually true. — Bartricks

If I recall correctly, you think that the Law of Contradiction is true. However, the Law of Contradiction states that:

it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be — Aristotle

So if you think contradictions can be true, then you are thereby denying the LNC, because to assert that a contradiction can be true, is the same as to assert that it is not impossible for something to both be and not be, at the same time (and in the same sense), which is the negation of the LNC.

In fact, this shows that it is impossible to accept the LNC contingently rather than necessarily, because to say that the LNC may be false in the future is to say that it is possible that it is possible for something to both be and not be, at the same time and in the same sense.

In modal logic we would have: ◇◇C → ◇C (If C is possibly possible, then C is possible). [Axiom 4 corollary].

This can also be seen by the definition of possibility in modal logic:

¬□ ¬C ≡ ◇C

I think that if a proposition is true, then it is not also false.

So, just remove 'impossible' from Aristotle's description (well,you know, rewrite it without it - so rewrite it as, say, no thing that is, is also not, or whatever).

That's what I affirm: no true proposition is also false.

If you don't want to call that the law of non contradiction, that's fine. What's in a word? The point is that I think no true proposition is also false.

I don't understand the squiggles and squoggles (but Banno loves them - makes him feel clever).

I don't think there are any necessary truths. Truths, yes. But no necessary truths. I don't think necessity is a thing. However, I still think no true proposition is also false. It's just I don't think adding 'necessarily' to 'true' does anything, then. It's just a kind of underlining. So, 'necessary' functions expressively, not descriptively. That's how we tend to use the language of necessity in every day life. 'You must' means 'do it!'

The statement to prove: "If time existed, God would be subject to it"

A premise in the proof:

But if time does exist, then God's mind will either exist in the present, or in the past, or in the future, or some combination. — Bartricks

Shortened to: "If time exists, God would be subject to it"

In philosophical circles that's called begging the question. You probably don't think it's begging the question and will accuse me of not knowing what I'm talking about. But that's just the dunning kruger effect.

Also you want to be really careful here:

God's mind — Bartricks

God IS a mind according to you (he isn't, I'm just going by what you say). Remember one of your brilliant arguments for why the mind is different from a body is that we can say "I have a body". You make a point of making fun of any materialists by lines such as: "I have a car I am not my car". You wouldn't want someone to start saying "God has a mind, God is not his mind" right?

Once more: if time exists, then an existent mind is either past, present or future. Those exhaust the possibilities. (And a plausible analysis of time would need to show how they do so - as mine does - not deny that they do).

You don't know what a circular argument is. Like most of the bozos on this forum, you mistake validity for circularity.

I have never argued that minds are not bodies because we can say 'I have a body'. Quote me. Remember what Russell said: "never trust a stupid man's report of what a clever man has said".

I think there are no true contradictions. Why do you people have such difficulty grasping this? I will reject as false any contradictory proposition.

Once more: if time exists, then an existent mind is either past, present or future. Those exhaust the possibilities. — Bartricks

This was not the original formulation. If your intent was to say this, what you actually said was way off the mark.

So, where's your proof that if time exists all minds are either past, present or future?

I have never argued that minds are not bodies because we can say 'I have a body'. — Bartricks

Fair enough. For once you're right.

I think there are no true contradictions. — Bartricks

But you think there could be.

From this we can conclude that God created time. Why? Because if time exists, then one is subject to it. And so if God did not create time, then God would be subject to something he did not create, which is incompatible with being omnipotent. — Bartricks

Or God could've made it so that she paradoxically did not create time, while still remaining omnipotent (since you think contradictions are possible). And furthermore she could've made it so that our reason would lead to the above conclusion. What makes you think that she didn't do that combination instead of what you're saying here? What if your God was a deceiver?

They. Exhaust. The. Possibilities. If you think time exists, but that some minds exist that are neither present, past or future then it's you who has some explaining to do.

And yes, I think it is possible - metaphysically possible - for there to be true contradictions. But I believe there are none. If a proposition is true, it is not also false.

And to the last bit, yes, she could do all that. But as a philosopher I am interested in what is actually the case, which one finds out by listening to what reason actually says, not what reason could say (the latter being anything at all). Understand yet?