Time - religion and metaphysics

Lent 2020 - Day 30

How religion sees time is interesting. I was thinking about the second verse of the traditional Polish carol Wśród nocnej ciszy while writing yesterday's post about prophesy, and in it pops the notion of time:

Ach, witaj Zbawco z dawna żądany,
Cztery tysiące lat wyglądany
Na Ciebie króle, prorocy
Czekali, a Tyś tej nocy
Nam się objawił.

"We greet ye, Saviour, desired for ages,
Looked out for for four thousand years,
For you kings and prophets
Waited, and you this night
Appeared to us."

Jesus's birth to a virgin was foretold for a period of time twice as long before his birth as the time between His birth and our age. But four thousand years - to be more accurate, four thousand and four years, was the span of time between the creation of the Earth by God and the birth of Jesus, according to Archbishop Ussher, Primate of All Ireland, in 1650. The Augustinian notion of the Six Ages of the World, which inspired Ussher, stems from II Peter 3:8 - "One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." The interpretation was taken to mean that mankind would live through six 1,000 year periods, with the seventh being eternity in heaven. Taking this literally, Ussher indicated that Jesus would come again in glory to judge the living and the dead around 2000 AD.

Pre-Enlightenment Man lived in the here and now. A lifetime was, well, a lifetime. There was no notion of bigly huge numbers; there were stars and there were planets, but these were just 'up there', rather than billions of light years away. Time passed with the seasons. A time to sow, a time to reap. And after a gruelling life of toil, a time to die, and then hopefully to rest in God's eternal home.

Science has given us a grasp of the enormity of the universe, helped by mathematical notations such as orders of magnitude. We understand time better than our forefathers, and yet... and yet.

I have written about the late Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Carlo Rovelli's (much briefer) The Order of Time. Rovelli's more recent work (30 years after Hawking) has the advantage of being easier to grasp conceptually and of benefiting from 30 additional years of theoretical physics to draw on. Both books advance our (layperson's) perception greatly.

The key lesson from Rovelli is that time goes from past to future, in one, irreversible direction only, because of entropy. Rudolf Clausius's equation for entropy change, ΔS ≥1 is, according to Rovelli, "the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future. The only one that speaks of the flowing of time." This is is significant in the age of quantum mechanics; other equations are reversible, whereas if you leave a glass of hot water in a cold room, the water will only tend to get cold. It is here we can witness the passage of time.

Time is granular; it comes in units. The shortest unit of time is Planck time (5.39 x 10^-44 second), the time it takes light to travel one Planck length (1.616 x 10^-35 metres, the shortest unit of distance in the universe) in a vacuum. Both being discrete units, there is no thing as half a Planck time or a third of a Planck length; they are absolutes.

All well and good, but how do we perceive time and why is important to religion, especially in the context of prophesy? As we age, we perceive time to accelerate. This is because our consciousness has experienced more of it when we're older; for a ten year-old, one year represents 10% of their lifetime. For a 50 year-old, one year represents but 2% of their lifetime. You are accelerating towards the end of your days, from the moment you become conscious of the passage of time as an infant.

For religions, the End of Days has to be sufficiently close at hand to be scary - this makes the social control function easier to apply. I am an optimist; I do believe there's an infinitely long-term plan for our universe. Stretch out your horizons beyond one human life-span and eternity sitting on a cloud with a harp praising God sounds a bit limited.

The past, on the other hand, is as illusory as the future. When I wake up each morning, the past (the recent past, the distant past) becomes nothing more than a tool-bag of useful experience needed to live out the rest of my life. Artefacts are on the shelf; books, photos, mementos that nudge the memory and draw out memories. But memories - those qualia memories of subjective experiences from the past - can come unbidden, or can be triggered by smells, sights, sounds, sensations or tastes.

These form the thread that link the current you - the current assemblage of atoms, molecules and proteins - the stuff that knit you - and what you once were. The notion that there's not a single atom in you that was there nine years ago (quoted by Bill Bryson) or seven years ago (quoted by Richard Swinburne) becomes significant. Rationalists would say that your long-term memory is stored somewhere within your brain. However, science has yet to pin it down, or even define 'memory' on agreed terms. Those memories from your past abide within you, despite the 'youness' of you having changed over time. So when you reach back to a memory from decades ago - an embarrassing childhood moment that can still make you cringe - and there you are - that's your soul.

This time four years ago:
Easter Everywhere, Lent reaches an end

This time eight years ago:
Sunset shots, first bike ride to work

This time ten years ago:
Poland's trains ran faster before the war

This time 11 years ago:
Winter in spring: surely this must be the last snow?

This time 12 years ago:
Surely THIS must be the last snow?