BB, I'm an old science fiction buff. I'm very familiar with this concept, because it's used in many -- if not most -- time travel stories. The problem of writing such a story is that for your character to be dashing forward and backward in time, he needs some kind of "place outside the course of time" in which to function. This is where the "Time Patrol" has its headquarters. In Asimov's classic The End of Eternity, his time traveling cops, or agents, or whatever they were, lived somewhere -- it was never explained where -- from which they could observe all the centuries, and zip in wherever necessary to improve things, then return to their headquarters to observe the effects which would then ripple through the centuries -- while leaving the agents unaffected in their "neutral territory."
This is a great plot device. It's a plot necessity. Otherwise your lead character and his memory is going to get altered along with everything else when he makes some adjustment in history.
The problem is -- at least I see it as a problem -- there just ain't no such place. You're either in the universe, which means being in time, or you're nowhere. There are no priviliged reference frames. Except in science fiction novels.
Patrick, the excerpt I quoted is not about science fiction plots. It is about the way the world appears to us intuitively, and to what extent that appearance really matches the universe as it actually is. The speculation begins with a search for what it means when we say the space-time universe had a beginning, before which (by logical implication) there was no space and no time. The Big Bang is widely understood to be the beginning of both space and time.
What Overman and Pannenberg suggest is that the beginning is the creative act sine qua non. But we can know nothing with certitude about this beginning, either on the basis of direct observation (impossible) or imaginatively, based on the laws of physics. That’s because the laws of physics utterly break down at Planck time – that ridiculously teensy (10^-43 second) quantum of time following the “explosion” of the singularity.
But if time starts at Plank time (and space too, for that matter), then the singularity itself is not part of time (or space): It belongs to eternity (to “no time”). And if it belongs to eternity, while at the same time (so to speak) specifying (i.e., as a kind of cosmic program) all of universal reality evolving in time -- natural laws, the “tuning” of the primary physical forces in nature, etc. -- then you might say natural laws and physical forces, etc., are eternity -- or at least marks or expressions of eternity -- operating in time.
It is perhaps in this sense that we might understand what Einstein meant when he observed that the distinction between past, present, and future is in many respects a stubborn illusion. I can imagine the “world view” of relativity theory as Pannenberg describes it. I can see what he means when he says that it is, in a certain sense, “a last contemporaneousness of all events that for us are partitioned into a temporal sequence.”
I’ve been yelling and jumping up and down and turning blue in the face for some time now, from yelling out loud my claim that man “stands at the intersection of time and timelessness.” Pannenberg sheds light on what I mean by this. FWIW.
Another fun thing to think about is that everything that exists, including our own bodies, is composed of matter -- particles and atoms -- that was manufactured by distant stars, and released when those stars exploded.... "Living stars" like our Sun make our life possible, and sustain it continuously.
Truly, we need "cosmologies of wholeness" in order to describe the actuality of our universe. Everything is connected to everything else, and everything is always on the move....
Thanks for writing, Patrick!