Is God time? God is perfection. God is omnipotent. God is omniscient. God could build the universe in seven days. Did God create time or is God Time? What if God was like a giant pacemaker; all the beatings of each heart, all the changes of nature, and all the changes in humanity, governed by a God with infinite pacemaker capabilities? Everything that is going to happen is already known. Each act in the universe already scripted in God’s timepiece. All events pre-determined. Some people would call this determinism and say it has no place in the freewill that God gave humans. Other philosophers would disagree and say that determinism and free-will can coexist. (See Bea Best: “A Case for Freewill and Determinism,” http://www.benbest.com/philo/freewill.html)
If God was time, it would explain many things that we never seem to understand. Accidents and random events that do not make sense in the short term might make more sense when understood on a cosmic level. Perhaps we could understand why justice seems to occur very slowly but nevertheless inevitably. God does not forget, there is just a time and place for everything. If we could look at God’s schedule we would be able to foretell all that is to come and perhaps comprehend why things unfold as they do. If God was time, we would not have to worry about the lateness or earliness of anything, nor would we worry that the world was going in the wrong direction or the wrong political parties were in control. According to God Time, things would happen for the best in the long-term.
We puny humans cannot understand time on a cosmic infinite scale. We are constantly left wondering as to the complexity and strangeness of the universe. Even our own lives and actions constantly surprise and befuddle us. Why do we act like we do, why do others act like they do? Most of the universe is like a giant jigsaw puzzle that we just can not figure out. All of our theories and hypotheses and scientific findings cannot account for this infinite puzzle that seems to strangely unfold before our eyes. It is like a play with most of the action happening unseen off stage. We never know what will happen next or why it will happen. We are just content to say “its time to go.”
Do you think God is time? Can you understand what you are about or why you were put on this earth? Do you think you serve a larger cause or are you just a random event in time?
"If God was time, we would not have to worry about the lateness or earliness of anything, nor would we worry that the world was going in the wrong direction or the wrong political parties were in control. According to God Time, things would happen for the best in the long-term."
ReplyDeleteIf God was time, our worrying, our desires to change things we consider deficient would all be part of the temporal process. You are right that taking a God's eye view of things weakens our propensity to worry and to look for ways to "fix" things.
I'm guessing that your (reasonable) premise is that God is good. If God is the temporal process itself, then nothing really bad can happen (or else God would include really bad things, which would contradict the premise that God is good). The problem of evil bedevils religious believers, and the most frequently used move to overcome the problem is to deny that anything really is evil. It is just our failure to understanding about how some circumstance could be good, or part of the good, or necessary for the good that leads us to believe (falsely on this account) that anything is wrong.
I fluctuate about religious belief, but when I'm in that mood, I am drawn to the view that it's all good, that even seemingly terrible things have their necessary place in the whole, which overall is good. When I pass to the non-religious pole, I find the "it's all good" attitude both insipid and disgusting (since it denies the awfulness of what some people suffer). Plus, if nothing needs improving, then it would be wrong to try to do so. Non-believers criticize what they see as fatalism and complacency, and seem justified in their own eyes.
I am in my agnostic stage Bruce, so I am not sure about whether or not God is good or evil or even exists. If I die, I might find out or I might just be dust and nothing more. Not sure if there is a reason for existence or if it just not wheels in the head. Rememer Stirner? My father used to say heaven and hell were on earth and you decided which one you wanted to live in. I think he was right.
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