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To: Mad Dawg
Does it help to mention that Aristotle says time is the measure of motion (which includes any change)? If you have change, I think you have sequence - one thing (or state) following another. So you have before and after. AND it would seem that to perceive a change is to change.

Yes, thank you. That sounds like a good way to look at it.

15,449 posted on 05/31/2007 5:07:25 PM PDT by Forest Keeper (It is a joy to me to know that God had my number, before He created numbers.)
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To: Forest Keeper; Religion Moderator
RM: Please delete the former message. I'm sorry - lousy proof-reading. It's the Jack Daniels (I wish.)

I'm glad it was useful. Old Aristotle ain't so bad.

And this is kind of how we back into the whole "eternity" line of thought. The notion is that God "in Himself" does not change. If all there is is God, then there is no time, because there is no change.

The Son is, in one formulation "eternally begotten of the Father" <contra the Arians whose initial position (I am told - haven't done the original research) was "There was a time when the Son did not exist," and their fall-back was to "There was when the Son did not exist," neither of which was acceptable to Athanasius. (And I would have objected to the second on the grounds that it was senselessly different from the first.)

Then, to maintain the idea that things don't "happen to God" -- His impassibility, His NOT "suffering" in any sense of the word, ancient or modern -- we have to put Him sort of "around" or "above" or "outside" of time, so that He can apprehend the whole mishegoss at once.

To start the thought, I envision a cottonmouth swimming across a pond. All he sees, with his eyes at water level, is where he is. But we are above the pond, and we see everything around him.

Then if we were to apprehend his every position in the pond at once, it would be sorta kinda like God and time. And then we can throw pebbles into the pond, before the snake, after him, or right at him. We see the whole thing and our view does not change, but for him every second is new and is swiftly slipping into the past, with NOW as the nexus where the water touches his eyes.

(What actually happened was that the farm owner shot him with #4 shot. This does not fit into my metaphor.)

And for God, all times are Now. (And a subset of, or reflection on, that observation is what Aslan says on Coriakin's island in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: All times are soon to me.)

Clearly this is a very inadequate image.

15,451 posted on 05/31/2007 7:20:58 PM PDT by Mad Dawg (I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.)
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