[Mad Dawg]

That God exists out of time just means that He is not subject to the rules of time that we experience. Time is just a measure of existence. Some people consider it to be its own dimension, as it were,....

And as it is.

It's not all that hard to do the meth work to underestand the relatiosip between time and space as depicted by Newton (and others ) and developed by Einstein. (Whose birthday was 3/14)

And it's good to do the work so as not to be swept away by people throwing around words like "Dimension" in impressive but vague ways.

PLEASE think about what it means to say "Time is a measure of existence" in comparison with my child's garden of Aristotle above. I think the concept of time is meaningless unless there is some change going on. And I mean "meaningless". If you do a thought experiment of a time without stuff changing, and look at words like "Before", "after", and "during", and ask yourself, "WHAT?": "Before what, After what, During what?" what do the words mean without something that was once like THIS and now is like THAT?

If you want to say, "Well, they must mean SOMETHING," hold your own feet to the fire.

It's not a useless exercise, I think.

What I call "pothead metaphysics" (revealing maybe a little more about my past than I'd care to) gets all excited about notions of time and dimension and Rod Serling and such. But a little cold hard thought goes a long way to take away the "Gee whiz!" and to clarify one's thinking.

It's been more than 25 years, But I think Max Born's "Einstein's Theory of Relativity" is as good a place to start as any. The first chapters are easily understood, believe me, or I wouldn't have understood them.

[Zero Sum]

Thanks for the discussion on time, MD. To make your thought experiment a little more concrete, suppose that everything in the universe just “stopped” for a million years, and then started up again. How would we know? In fact, how do we know that doesn’t happen periodically? The important question, which you asked, is: Does it even make sense to talk about “time” with no change or motion? Only in an abstract philosophical construct, which may or may not be useful in describing the world around us.

[Forest Keeper]

And it's good to do the work so as not to be swept away by people throwing around words like "Dimension" in impressive but vague ways.

But the premise is that not all dimensions are perceptible or even conceivable by men, so how can that supposition not be vague? Besides, I only use that as a possibility for God existing without taking up "space". :)