Where Is Eternity?
Session Notes

  1. Where Is Eternity?
  2. Notions of Time & Eternity
    1. Classical Notions (Paul Davies; About Time; chapter 1)
      1. Reality is vested in a realm transcending time
        • Eternity (European)
        • Pure & Perfect Forms (Plato)
        • Moksha (Hindi)
        • Nirvana (Buddhist)
        • Dream Time (Australian Aborigines)
        • Land Beyond Time
      2. Time is an illusion or a shadow of reality or a prison
      3. Is God inor out of Time? Process or being? Temporal or Eternal?
      4. Augustine: God is "supreme above time because it is never-ending present."
      5. God is eternal perceiving all time at once
      6. Eternity and temporality at odds: one or the other, not both
    2. Paul Davies; The Mind of God; p 34ff
      1. Looking for the absolutely constant
      2. Plato: perfect forms; our space-time is a shadow and an illusion (being over becoming)
      3. Aristotle: world is a living organism, embryo developing toward a definite goal (becoming over being)
      4. Augustine:
        • time is a part of creation
        • God outside of time
        • But Christ, God incarnate, was in time
      5. Aguinas:
        • God inhabits world of Plato's forms
        • but is Christ in time?
    3. Mystical Experience
      1. Time seems to stop: timelessness
      2. Infinite space: fullness of existence: clarity
      3. simultaneously past, present, future
      4. Yearn to escape time:
        • Land Beyond Time
        • Garden of Eden/Paradise
        • Avalon
        • Narnia
        • A Galaxy Far, Far, Away
    4. Eternal Life (from Harper's Bible Dictionary)
      • life uninterrupted by death
      • no afterlife in ancient Israel
      • afterlife = eternal life, came after exile to Babylon: Persian; s. Dan 12:1-2
        => Resurrection to eternal life (re-enforced by Christians)
      • eternal life = immortality (Adam before the Fall)
      • eternal life = life as God (re-enforced by Christians)
    5. Eternal Return
      • cyclicity
      • periodic return to mythical time
      • regeneration and rebirth
      • see Frank Tipler; Physics of Immortality
    6. Newton's Time
      • up to 18th century time/eternity was philosophical/theological, not scientific
      • Galileo: est. time as a measureable quantity
      • clocks came about in 18th century for navigation and trade
      • Neton determined the cruciality of time in the laws of nature: "absolute time and mathematical time, [which] of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external."
      • cosmos: clockwork universe: predictable & determinable
      • time is mathematical: precise, continuous flux of time -- nnot an illusion
      • eternity irrelevant to science: theologians could still talk of eternity; even if time was not an illusion, it was still profane
  3. Einsteinian Time
    1. Time is not absolute; but relative
      We shall see how time and eternity are not at odds, but time emerges out of eternity as its child.
      science and religion merge
    2. Time Dilation
      1. time is not absolute: time passes at different rates for different conditions
      2. speed of light in a vacuum (300 km/sec) is measured the same no matter how fast you are going
      3. "nothing" can go faster than c (supposedly) in real time or slower in imaginary time
        c is a barrier
      4. if you are at test (T0) and from your perspective I am traveling .5c, then my time from your perspective passes slower at about 1.2T0.
        • twins paradox
        • my time is slower than yours, though I don't notice: light still is moving at c for me.
        • time slows around massive bodies (you accelerate)
      5. if I am moving at c (from your perspective), then T=infinity x T0. I appear to you stopped (though my time continues -- but an infinity of your time is an infinitesimal of mine)
      6. at >c, we enter the complex realm:
        • at 1.1c, T=TiT0 and order is significantly different
        • at infinite speed, T=0; I move entirely in an infinitesimal instance
      7. there is no standard of rest or stationary
        • time and space: a continuum: one thing
        • space-time event: x,y,z,t
        • mass is infinite at c; therefore, photons are massless
        • gravity is the result of space-time being curved by massive bodies
        • space is curved; a straight path in 4-D space-time is curved in 3-D space
    3. Relativity of Simultaneity
    4. The Significance of Light
      • light is the limiting factor and barrier
      • you can be effected only be events within your "light cone"
        • events that are reachable
        • therefore <c
      • God said "let there be light"
      • Jesus is the Light of the World
      • Light is the bearer of eternity and timelessness
    5. Space-Time is not infinite
      • has a definite beginning (Big Bang)
      • and will prbably end
      • space-time is expanding
      • so what's outside of space-time? eternity
    6. Big Bang
      • singularity
      • infinite density and curvature
      • mathematics breaks down at and "before" Big Bang
      • time began at the Big Bang
      • God spoke the Word: Let there be light
      • A black hole is much like the singularity of the Big Bang
  4. Quantum Mechanics
  5. What is outside space-time?
  6. The Implicate Order As Eternity
    the Holographic Universe; Michael Talbott
    1. David Bohm & Karl Pribram
    2. implicate order (enfolded)
      • holographic film created by the interference patters of a laser beam colliding with another laser beam bouncing off an object
      • any piece of the holographic film reproduces object
      • therefore, an object exists throughout the film
    3. explicate (unfolded) order
      • a laser light shining on holographic film reproduces object in 3-d
      • an electron is explicated from the implicate order
    4. holo movement
      • constant flux of unfolding and enfolding, p46ff
    5. non-locality
      • subquantum level => implicate order
      • every piece contains the whole; the whole contains every piece distributively
      • seamless holographic fabric
      • continuum is not just space-time, but everything
    6. implicate order => eternity: pp197ff
      • flow of time: constant series of unfoldings and enfoldings
      • past in present as implicate order
      • future as implicate in present? p205ff
      • see Neville's Flow of Time
  7. Neville; Eternity: Time's Flow
    1. past, present, future together
    2. time flows only as contained within eternity
    3. eternity: the "togetherness" of p,p,f
    4. one's present includes one's past and future
      • present experiences assume reference to past and future
      • past and future just as real as present
      • present identity is identity in eternity as well as time
    5. past in present time eternally
      • the choice of action on a past day was possible when that day was future
      • the actualized day
      • the day as past with consequences
    6. future is present eternally
      • the future day as open
      • the actualization of expectation for that day
      • the future day as past and whether actualization occurs
        present past future
        I was I had been I would had been
        I am I have been I would be
        I will be I will have been I would have been
    7. eternity then is the context for the togetherness of the temporal modes and our relation with God
    8. p,p,f in dynamic relationship with each other within eternity
  8. Sophia's womb
©1999 Rev. John A. Mills, Pastor, First Congregational Church, Closter, NJ wislit@worldnet.att.net