On Creation and Time

It is often claimed that God created the world and then sustains it. The notion of the world here then can only be a world conceived of as an aggregate of laws and orders, given in the beginning of time, according to which the future should unfold. But what does it mean?

God knows. He is omniscience. If God created the world and sustains it, then He sustains it in such a way that the future is determined by His omniscience; but what's the difference between knowing the future and creating the future once and for all, for God? He creates ex nihilo, not by devising a blueprint, wielding tools to structure pre-given matter, like a demiurge, but by simply knowing how the future should be. Without Him creating the future, there should not be a future to be known. Hence, claiming that He created and sustains the world is a truism, since the future is already created.

But is it really true that His knowing something is the same as His creating something? Is it impossible that He knows something that is false, or rather, He knows that it is true that a proposition is false? God makes no inference: He doesn't need to. It is by virtue of His knowing something to be true, that something is true, not the other way around. Even if His knowing is structured by the comprehension of a creature of His in an inference discourse, His logic internalized to time should not be classical: tertium non datur doesn't hold here, since \(P\) is not either true or false, prior to His determining being true or false, or His determining \(P\) being true; false then simply means that a corresponding fact is not created and hence nonexistent, rather than implying the existence of something that which is not.

Then it might rightly be argued that, since God knows the future, the future is already there. The universe is then conceived to be a block universe, with a determined future, as in the classical picture of Einstein and Laplace. But what does it mean that the future is determined? What is future? And if the future is determined, determined by what? By laws and orders, but laws and orders formulated in whose language?

God is not in spacetime. This is a vague statement since the ontological status of spacetime is not at all clear, but semantically this, roughly, can mean that spacetime talks can always be decoupled from God, and should be decoupled from God if the subject is God Himself without considering His economy. If laws and orders according to which an entity called future unfolds are formualted in a language proper to God, God must be in time, but He is not in spacetime, even the very notion of future is meaningless to Him. The notion of future is only meaningful to His creatures, the sentient beings in time. God is omniscience, if there is something that needs to be known, then He knows; or rather by virtue of His knowing something that there is something that needs to be known. But is future something that needs to be known, if there is no sentient creature in the created world that recognizes a stuff, a thing, an entity, called "future" or even "time"? Certainly no. He created and creates the future from the point of view of His creatures, since His creations "demand" or "urges" the creation of future; by simply knowing, comprehending, the future, without any calculation or inference making, He answers: He creates and is creating. It doesn't mean that since God creates something that are only properly meaningful to His creatures that are in time He must also be in time. A thought might emerge in a created being that can be expressed by the sentence "\(P\) is false", and the thought itself should in turn be a creation of God, doesn't mean a non-being is created. It is neither true that since God hasn't created the future, God doesn't know the future: there is nothing to be known. If God refuses to create the future, then there won't be a future, even if His creatures can talk about it.

Then what to make of the apocalypse that is revealed, if future is not there? The future conceived as a whole by human imagination might not be there, but certain aspects of the end of time might readily be created. God doesn't need to obey the time-ordering of event sequences, and after all future is a vague idea that tends to globalizes time in space and synchronize all events to be occurring in an instant-slice.

Is it legitimate to say that His creatures "demand" the future to be created? It seems that by claiming this creatures are endowed with certain sort of agency. By this it is not meant that His creatures willfully, literally demand, a future, but an agency that renders the concept of future possible is needed so that future needs to really unfold. The agency of a sentient being must also be a creation of God. Agency is embodied by self-consciousness. Although the precise meaning of self-consciousness isn't clear, it can be argued that self-consciousness is given to the conscious being as it is in itself: self-consciousness is that which is given to the self-conscious being and nothing more. The way God knows - and hence creates - the self-consciousness of a sentient being is identical to how it is given to the sentient being; the sentient beings are partaking in God. Hence if God is free, the sentient being is free. But this doesn't render the demand of future to be made by God Himself: He knows and will to know, but the need for the future itself is in the created being. As observed in time, it might seem that God is immanent, so we shall say that the immanent God of A. N. Whitehead and C. G. Jung isn't metaphysically irreconcilable with the transcendent God.

Now, if future is created for His creatures, it is certainly not proper to say that creatures are entities in time. Time is rather generated by entities, by their participation in the process of creation, that comprehend, maybe, change, which is measured by the idea of time. But how should the idea of change be conceived of, without first presupposing time? But thermodynamics reveals something deeper about time: instead of conceiving time as a background or an extension that measures motion and the vague notion of 'change', let us rather say that time is the measure of irreversibility, which is the essence of bona fide change. It might be said that periodic motions are not changes, but illusions of change for those outside of the "time crystal" that embodies periodicity. Motion is possible without time qua irreversibility. Change is also possible if the change is apprehended by an observer internal to the "time-crystal". Then we might postulate that time is generated by breaking the periodicity of some time-crystals. The commutation relation \([A,B] = ik\) generates a torus, the embodiment and symbol of periodicity, if \(k\) is rational; if \(k\) is irrational, which might be generated by a free choice sequence given by an agent, the generated algebra is no longer something that embodies periodicity. The upshot is that in quantum mechanics commutation relations are relations that beget dynamics: the evolution of \(A\) in the direction of \(B\), not necessarily in time since \(B\) need not be the Hamiltonian, is given by \([A,B]\). These, along with the connection between Cauchy sequences that generates reals with retrocausality and measurement-event sequences, are subject to further research and speculation.

Addendum Thoughts on Time. Expanding on the reason for adopting a constructive notion of Time from a purely mathematico-metaphysical perspective.

2023-07-03