ARCHIVE: Presuppositionalism - What and Why?

[Clete]

Originally posted by Balder

Hi, Clete,

Thanks for your letter, and for sharing Bob's thoughts on this as well. This issue is one that has perplexed some of the best minds of humanity, so I don't think you or I will get to the bottom of it in a few posts. Recent scientific/philosophical books on the nature of time acknowledge that time makes sense intuitively, when we don't examine it; but when we attempt to draw close and analyze it, it gets more and more baffling and contradictory seeming. Einstein had a number of insights, obviously, into space and time, but acknowledged that the "now" is a mystery, and speculated that it may even be beyond the reach of science to grasp.

I personally find the Buddhist perspective on this issue to be compelling, and perhaps you will as well when I make a bit of it clearer -- because it actually works a little better to explain God's eternity, in my opinion, than Bob's thoughts above. As you will have no doubt noticed, Bob is positing an eternal "linear" time before God created the universe, and adds a second eternity on top of that one, with the creation of our world being a kind of "dividing point" between God's two supposed eternities. But if something is infinite, can you add something to it and thereby increase it? Certainly, there are different "orders" of infinity, if you imagine different sorts of "sets" of infinite objects or numbers, but Bob doesn't indicate whether God's infinity "before" creation is of a different order than the one after, nor of course does he explain how God could have "gotten" to the point of creation if in fact an eternity preceded it.

The Buddhist answer is to look past time to its ground, which is pure presence. This perspective holds that eternity itself is the child of the Now. This may strike you up front as mumbo-jumbo, but think about this: eternity only happens now. Every moment that has ever happened, has only happened in the present. Things change, phenomena come and go, increase and diminish, but the "now" is invariant: it is always already here. "Time" is the experience of differentiation in manifestation, and it shifts according to perspective (as the theory of relativity makes clear), but all differentiation takes place in the invariant and inviolable field of Presence, or the Now (the Fourth Moment).

We may confuse the "past" with memory (which is a recollected image experienced in the present) and the future with anticipation (which is an image of an imagined future event also experienced in the present), but the "actual" past and future also only "take place" Now. Time passes now, and thus "now" is actually pre-time or atemporal: differentiations in manifestation have a delineable onset and conclusion, but the Now does not. Likewise, the "Now" should not be confused with the "specious present," that intellectual construct of the "now" which is basically a dimensionless point sandwiched between "what just happened" and "what's about to arrive."

As one student of Dzogchen puts it: "Time-space is the self-structuring of now, which is Being." This Presence is identical to what Buddhists call "true nature," buddha-nature, the essence or ground of all manifest reality. Thus, when Ecclesiastes says that God put eternity in the heart of man, this actually has a new meaning when you think that the "heart" of man lives and knows only Now, which is the source and ground of all phenomena, including all apparent "eternities."

Thus, this perspective allows for both invariance and change: the invariant Now, Absolute Presence, is the "space" in which temporal and physical change take place, and the "invariant" is at the heart of all changing things, as their presence. Buddhist traditions teach that spiritual experience will disclose both timelessness, which would be the experience of pure presence, dropping deep into presence so that manifest differentiations are no longer perceived and there is only the sense of boundless light and well-being, always already here; but also the experience of eternity, in which you are aware of the Now and the flux of manifestation simultaneously, and are aware that this has "always already" been, beyond imagining.

Peace,
Balder

Balder,

I somehow had missed this post, sorry about leaving you hanging like that.

I like what you had to say here. I agree with most of it (the last paragraph made no sense but the rest was good). It might interest you to know that Bob has said similar things concerning "now" in his Bible studies. He has made the argument that all of existence exists now. The past does not exist at all, nor does the future. The past was, the future will be but all that actually is, is now. I've made that exact argument on this site several times. The point being that your supposed Buddhist belief happens to a Christian one as well. A fitting bit of irony considering the topic of this thread.

Resting in Him,
Clete

 

[Balder]

Hi, Clete,

I actually am very aware of Catholic notions of God's "time" as eternal presence. I will quote below a passage from the Catholic Encyclopedia which will show how close the Catholic notion is to much of what I've described above. The notion of the eternal Now is not unique to Buddhism, but it is much more in the "forefront" of Buddhist teaching. Also, in Buddhist teaching, the notion is much more closely associated with personal transformation of the individual than it is in other traditions, where it remains more of an abstract speculation, true perhaps for God but far removed from us and from "this world."

Here's the quote I mentioned. Since it is long and you may not be inspired to read it all, I'll "bold" a few key sentences...

If, now, we apply to the time-line what we have been attempting in that of space, the infinite, unchangeable point which was immensity becomes eternity; not a real succession of separate acts or changes (which is known as "time"); nor even the continuous duration of a being which is changeless in its substance, however it may vary in its actions (which is what St. Thomas understands by an aevum); but an endless line of existence and action which not only is not actually interrupted, but is incapable of interruption or of the least change or movement whatsoever. And as, if one instant should pass away and another succeed, the present becoming past and the future present, there is necessarily a change or movement of instants; so, if we are not to be irreverent in our concept of God, but to represent Him as best we can, we must try to conceive Him as excluding all, even the least, change or succession; and his duration, consequently, as being without even a possible past or future, but a never beginning and a never-ending, absolutely unchangeable "now." This is how eternity is presented in Catholic philosophy and theology. The notion is of special interest in helping us to realize, however, faintly, the relations of God to created things, especially with regard to His foreknowledge. In Him there is no before or after, and therefore no foreknowledge, objectively; the distinction which we are wont to draw between His knowledge of intelligence or science or prescience and His knowledge of vision is merely our way of representing things, natural enough to us, but not by any means objective or real in Him. There is no real objective difference between His intelligence and His vision, not between either of these and the Divine substance in which there is no possibility of difference or change. That infinitely perfect substantial intelligence, immense as it is eternal, and withal existing entire and immutable as an indivisible point in space and as an indivisible instant in time, is coextensive, in the sense of being intimately present, with the space-extension and the time-succession of all creatures; not beside them, nor parallel with them, nor before or after them; but present in and with them, sustaining them, co-operating with them, and therefore seeing -- not foreseeing -- what they may do at any particular point of the space-extension, or at any instant of the time-extension, in which they may exist or operate. God may be considered as an immovable point in the centre of a world which, whether as a more or less closely connected group of granulated individuals, or as an absolutely continuous ether mass, turns round Him as a sphere may be supposed to turn in all directions round its centre (St. Thomas, Cont. Gent., I, c. lxvi). The imagery, however, must be corrected by noting that while in the time-line God's duration is an ever-enduring point or "now", his immensity in the space-line is not at all like the centre of a circle or sphere; but is a point, rather, which is coextensive with, in the sense of being intimately present to, every other point, actual or possible, in the continuous or discontinuous mass that is supposed to move around Him.

Bearing this correcting notion well in mind, we may conceive Him as this immovable point in the centre of an ever-moving, though here and there continuous, circle or sphere. The space and time relations are constantly changing between Him and the moving things around Him, not through any change in Him, but only by reason of the constant change in them. In them there is before and after, but not in Him, Who is equally present to them all, no matter how or when they may have come into being, or how they may succeed one another in time or in space. Some of them are free acts; and almost from the time the human mind began to speculate on these questions, and wherever still there are any even rudimentary speculations, the question has arisen and does arise as to how an act can be free not to happen if, as we suppose, God's absolutely infallible foresight saw from all eternity that it was to be. To this Catholic philosophy supplies the only answer which can be given; that it is not true to say that God either saw or foresaw anything, or that He will see it, but only that He sees it. And as my seeing you act does not interfere with your freedom of action, but I see you acting freely or necessarily, as the case may be, so God sees all finite things, quiescent or active, acting of necessity or freely, according to what may be objectively real, without in the least interfering thereby with the mode or equality of their existence or of their action. Here again, however, care must be taken not to conceive the Divine knowledge as being determined by what the finite may be or do; somewhat as we see things because the knowledge is borne in upon us from what we see. It is not from the infinite that God gets His knowledge, but from His own Divine essence, in which all things are represented or mirrored as they are, existing or merely possible, necessary or free. On this aspect of the question see GOD. When, therefore, one is asked or tempted to ask, what God did or where He was before time and place began, with the creation of the world, the answer must be a denial of the legitimacy of the supposition that He was "before". It is only in relation to the finite and mutable that there can be a before and after. And when we say, that, as faith teaches, the world was created in time and was not from eternity, our meaning should not be that the existence of the Creator stretched back infinitely before He brought the world into being; but rather that while His existence remains an unchangeable present, without possibility of before or after, of change or succession, as regards itself, the succession outside the Divine existence, to each instant of which it corresponds as the centre does to any point in the circumference, had a beginning, and might have extended indefinitely further backward, without, however, escaping the omnipresence of the eternal "now" (See Billot, De Deo Uno et Trino, q. 10, p. 122).

If you understand some of the points being made here, and find them more agreeable (expressed as they are in more Christian language), then you might go back and read my final paragraph which you claimed made no sense. You might even change your mind.

Peace,

Balder