Eternalism vs. Presentism: A Battle of Time Errors

time, threats

There is a controversy between adherents of two views of time, one called eternalism and the other presentism. Eternalism claims that from the perspective of eternity, “outside of time,” the past, the present, and the future are all real. Presentism claims that only the present is real. However, both views analyze time as consisting of discrete moments.

This essay contends that both views are wrong as expressed because they both identify human thought as reality. They treat the quantification of motion, namely the mathematical variable time, as a reality rather than as the product of human cognitive action, in which we identify an independent mathematical variable and name it time.

Time, in reality, is a quality, not a quantity. Time is the condition of mutability. The reality of time as a quality in no way diminishes the utility of the human mental activity of quantifying time. However, that quantification exists only in the human mind. Time, as quantified, is notional, not ontological (of being, real). It is, of course, of the nature of material things that, in their mutability, their motions are quantifiable.

The Quantification of Time

We can and do quantify time. When we think of time, we habitually and almost exclusively think of quantified time. There is nothing wrong with this. On the contrary, the quantification of time is extremely useful to the point of being indispensable to the commercial and social details of daily life. The reality of time, i.e., mutability, is most evident as local motion, the motion of material objects relative to one another. This aspect of their mutability is ideal for quantifying that mutability as the independent mathematical variable, time.

There is extreme utility in choosing one standard, preferably a cyclic motion, to compare other movements quantitatively. The grand utility of quantifying time leads to the complacency of thinking quantified time is a reality in which we live and move and have our being (cf. Acts 17:28). Such time is a human activity, a mental comparison. “I’ll meet you in four cycles of The Standard of Motion at Duffy’s Tavern for dinner. I’ll be puttering around in my garden for three cycles of The Standard of Motion. I’ll spend one cycle of The Standard of Motion getting to Duffy’s.”

The Human Perspective of Reality

It is only through our mutability that we apprehend reality. Once our bodies cease integrated motion, we are dead. Motion is real. It’s quantification as time that’s a human mental activity. Because we measure motion as time, we attribute the reality of motion to quantified time. We live in time in the sense that we are mutable, but this is a condition of our existence. It is a quality. Time is not a reality external to us, no matter how habitually we treat it so.

In our mutability, our experience of reality is always the present. We do not experience the past or the future. Further, the present has no measurable duration. The past, present, and future are qualitative distinctions. However, when we think of the past and the future in terms of quantified time, we think of them consisting of measurable units that we can count. It is then easy to fall into the error of thinking that real time consists of discrete units. We mistake our thoughts for reality.

However, upon reflection, it should be evident that the present, which is our sole experience, has no quantitative duration.  We experience reality through the quality of mutability. In our sense organs, we receive characteristics of what is known. From these, we engender intellectual knowledge of things through abstraction, according to Aristotelean philosophy.

Our sense knowledge is successive because it is exclusionary. One cannot examine an open septic system and smell its stench, and concomitantly observe a lawn with lilac bushes in bloom and enjoy their scent. One set of sensations, of course, follows another. Our thought process is similarly composed of thoughts in sequence. We tend to impose this sequential pattern onto reality, thinking of material acts as a sequence of events within a frame of quantified time.

The Theological Importance of Eternity and Time

Eternity and time are, respectively, the conditions of immutability and mutability. Only God is immutable by nature. All creatures are mutable by nature, including the angels. Humans, because they are part material, are mutable in all of their activities. It is only through the grace of God that we have the potential to be granted after death a participation in the immutability of God in the Beatific Vision. In the Beatific Vision, our knowledge will be integral and whole, a simple apprehension of all reality through immediate knowledge of God. Speaking of those who experience the Beatific Vision, Pope Benedict XII stated:

… [These] souls have seen and see the divine essense [sic] with an intuitive vision and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature by way of object of vision; rather the divine essence immediately manifests itself to them, plainly, clearly and openly, and in this vision they enjoy the divine essence.

This knowledge is eternal. It is of all reality. It is totally unified. It is the simple experience of eternity, which has no extension and is indivisible.

The Problem and Its Solution

The problem is, we have no way of comprehending immutability from our mutable perspective. The problem is, we are mutable at the level of sensation, and our intellectual knowledge is extrinsically dependent upon sensation. The problem is, every sensation is exclusive of every other sensation so that our experience of reality is successive but as a continuum. The problem is, our intellectual reasoning is logically segmented as consecutive judgments of fact. The problem is, we are mutable at the lowest but most intense level of mutability, materiality.

We must recognize that our experience of reality is the present which is continuous but not composed of discrete segments. Nevertheless, our analysis of our experience is one of discrete segments. This is true not only of the past but of our anticipation of the future. Therefore, we must distinguish between our mutable experience of reality and our notional analysis of mutable reality.

Our Predicament of Mutability is Manifest in the Controversy of Eternalism vs. Presentism

It is apparent that Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin, in his essay “Presentism and Infinite History,” thinks of time as quantity, not a quality. When he describes time from the eternalist perspective, he states, concerning this life:

from the “eternal now” that God dwells in, all moments of time are equally real

and concerning our heavenly eternal life:

From his eternal perspective outside of time, God sees and creates all the moments of our endless future.

For Akin, time is a quantity, a number of segmented, discrete moments. He fails to recognize this segmentation as notional. For Akin, this segmentation into numerical moments is characteristic, not only of this life but characteristic of eternal life as well. For Akin, time is not the quality of mutability; it is a quantified milieu in which we live here and in eternity. It is not solely a condition of our existence on earth. We will not be free of that milieu in heaven. In the Beatific Vision, we will not share in the immutability of God.

The presentist view, which Akin critiqued in the referenced essay, also judges time as a quantity. Akin quotes the presentist William Lane Craig, who implies that time is a series of discrete durations containing events, a “series of past events of equal duration.” Similarly, when Akin describes the presentist view, he states:

… [On] the presentist view, only one moment of time exists. No past moments exist, and no future moments exist[.]

For Akin’s antagonists, time is a quantity of discrete segments, of which only the current piece is real.

Summary

There can be no moments in eternity, the state of immutability. This seems strange to us because we can only apprehend reality through mutability, through change. To us, the absence of change is death. In this life, when we associate the absence of change with immutability, we falsely imagine this as the absence of experience. Despite the limits of our imagination, immutability is the fullness of experience, not its absence.

Similarly, in this life, we experience the condition of mutability such that our imagination prompts us to posit time as really quantified, consisting of discrete moments of equal duration. In contrast, quantified time is a human activity, an idea. It is notional, not real. Time is the condition of mutability. Time is not ontologically quantified. Rather, it is notionally quantifiable. The referenced proponents of both eternalism and presentism fail to recognize this. Their analyses of notional time are superficially philosophical but unmoored from the philosophical and ontological categories of mutability and immutability.

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5 thoughts on “Eternalism vs. Presentism: A Battle of Time Errors”

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  4. Another aspect of our time illusion as opposed to the animal kingdom involves our awareness of death. It’s ironic that we know we will die but on some very real plane, don’t believe it. Whereas animals see death but don’t associate it with themselves – begging the elephants fabled memory. We can chart our longevity which makes it impossible not to take time as illusory while they associate the rising and setting as a never ending cycle.

  5. Very timely : pardon the pun. So, do you think this ethereal concept applies to all species,
    esp. those much older in the evolutionary chain who may have never, or have shed the
    sense of increments passing. We’ve been told most animals don’t retain memory events
    as we do which leads to contemplating memory events which results in checking watches
    so as not to be late.

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