The Philosophy of Time

Chapter 5 – Time is God, God is Time

I’m going to digress here for a moment and give you a Preview of what the lovely Lorna actually said to me in my bathroom back in Bristol. You may already suspect that she was a figment of my over fertile imagination, but well leave her as a bone-fide Angel for the time being as it probably helps to aid the understanding of those of you still steeped in fabulous verisimilitude. She told me all about the origin of the Universe and explained just exactly who God really is. I think it will surprise you, but more ambitiously, I hope it makes you think.

Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. One of the fundamental laws of physics. So, if this is true, how come there is so much matter in the universe? Something, or someone, must have created it. One theory is that God created it, but this always leads to the question, "If God is the creator, who or what created God?" It’s a circular argument, and impossible to fathom. Just like we all want to know, what is beyond the edge of the universe and, if the Universe is expanding, what is expanding into?

Maybe in our lifetimes we will never know the answer to any of these questions, which allows us all to speculate, hypothesise and theorise. Until a definitive answer is found, my theory or your theory is as valid as the next man’s. If you believe God created it then that is your prerogative, but it still leaves as many questions unanswered as if I was to claim it was all created by Goblins. Philosophy, Religion and Science are very difficult subjects to get your head around; they all seem to ask questions without answers. Sometimes the ‘right’ answer seems to depend on what you believe, rather than what you can prove or disprove. Big Bang, God, Goblins, Singularities? Who knows?

My theory is that it is all to do with ‘Time’!

Time, I believe, is the ultimate energy source. Time is God. Time is the Creator. Time is where it all began, and Time is also where it will all end.

Let’s say, for example, you want to travel from London to America. At one moment in time you are in London and a few hours later, going by train and the fastest jet aeroplane, you are standing in Times Square. Why does it take ‘a few hours’? If you were electricity or light, you could get there almost instantaneously.

The operative word here is ‘almost’. Electricity and light have ‘almost’ no mass, so they can move through time extremely quickly, you on the other hand, even if you have been on the Atkins diet, have a large amount of mass that needs to be converted from a physical lump in London to a physical lump in New York, and this takes time and energy. I’m sure this has got something to do with Einstein’s theory of Relativity, E = MC2 , but it also has as much to do with Philosophy, ‘I think, therefore I am…’ – René Descartes and all that.

Matter cannot be created, but it can be converted. If you set fire to your house, you will no longer have a house, but your neighbours will have a nice warm feeling. Your house will have been converted into energy, heat energy. That energy will eventually be converted back into matter in the form of plants and animals who feed on those plants and nothing will be lost. Your house will become a Hedgehog. It won’t happen instantly, it will take time, and time is the energy that drives the whole process. So, if energy (Time) can be converted into Matter, the original statement that ‘matter can neither be created nor destroyed’ is still valid. The scientists are happy.

So what about the creationists? What about those who think God created the universe? Well they are happy too. God is Time! However, I should just qualify that by saying I believe this God to be an Einsteinian type of God, not the vindictive moral law-giver of recent history.
Okay, so if this is true, how does that explain the origins of the universe?

Well, it is hypothesised that out there in the vastness of space are Black Holes. These are probably what some people see as Heaven or Hell, although they don’t realise it yet. Black Holes are thought to be areas where Gravity (a form of energy) is dragging everything in and condensing it into pure mass. It is thought that even time is being dragged into the Black Holes, and as it does so it accelerates. My theory is similar except that the force acting on the matter is not gravity, but Time itself. Gravity is just one of the many manifestations we see of the energy of Time. Acceleration due to gravity on Earth is 9.8 metres per second per second. If you ever took time to look at this equation you will have seen that there is an obvious time element to it. In the centre of a Black Hole the acceleration would be very close to ‘infinity per second per second’; I rest my case. Black Holes are places where time accelerates, and as it does so its energy of conversion is so great that nothing can escape. Eventually everything will be dragged in and converted into this evermore-accelerating energy called time, until ultimately there is nothing left.

Philosophically speaking, Time is not only an energy, it is also a concept. American Scientist John Wheeler famously said ‘Time is just something that stops everything happening at once’. And he was partly correct. ‘The Big Bang’ is just a moment when everything, all matter, all energy, all hedgehogs have been converted into time and at some critical point everything starts happening at once! At this point, time is converted back into other forms of energy, which condense into different forms of matter, which take on mass, and as they do so, so time begins to slow down again. The mass is now travelling on the London Underground on route to Heathrow and eventually it will reach New York, but this will take TIME!

The question that begs itself now, of course, is: If ‘God is Time’, does it have an intelligence and a purpose? This is where we go into the twin subjects of theology and philosophy. Can Time fulfil the prophecies? Can Time create all the wonderful and intricate systems that we see all around us? Can Time explain religion?

I think the answer to all these questions, and many more imponderables, is Yes!
Before there was time there was nothing; nothing physical that is. What there was was intelligence. In a vast, empty void the only thing that existed was knowledge. Knowledge acts like a sponge; a little knowledge attracts a little bit more and a little bit more until eventually all the knowledge of the universe came together and created Time. The intelligence was instantly converted into energy (time energy), energy into matter and matter into mass and the Universe was born.

Now every atom of matter that was created by time, holds within its core part of the intelligence that went into creating it. This was what drove the wheels of evolution. Each atom knew instinctively how to act and react with the other atoms that were created from the knowledge. But Time was the overall commander, the designer if you like, and it dictated the points at which these atoms, that were to create all things, should come together and start building. Time is the supreme intelligence. There is a beauty and a regularity in nature that many can only explain by the thought that there must be a god who designed and created all things and as you can see from this model, that is exactly what happened, except there is no god – only Time.
You can't reason with time, you can’t alter time; a second takes a second, an hour takes an hour and a woman takes an age to get ready! Time doesn’t live on a cloud dishing out favours to those who are worshipful and wrath to those who are disrespectful. It doesn't have ‘Promised Lands’ or angels, it doesn't need holy books or prophets to explain it, time is neither moral nor immoral, benevolent nor judgemental.

Time lives in everyone and everything, but it can't live independently because at the beginning of time, all the knowledge was converted into time so time can only exist within the atoms the knowledge created. Each atom with its own, innate, intelligence; a Chlorine atom is instinctively drawn towards a Sodium atom and vice-versa but neither atom knows, or even needs to know, that if enough of them got together they would form a salt crystal. The structure, uniformity, and beauty of the salt crystal are all determined by time, not the individuals that created it. The same is true of more complex structures; an atom of carbon could become part of a diamond, a tree, a whale or even a human, it neither knows nor cares, it just has to be in the right place at the right time and time will do the rest.

If this is true, why did time require evolution, or put another way, why did evolution require time? Why didn’t it all just happen in the beginning? Why did species need to evolve out of other species and knowledge and intelligence out of experience and discovery? The reason for this is because time is something that allows things to happen, but it doesn't make then happen. Time starts things off with an idea but no plan as to how they are going to develop. Good things and bad things happen because time allows them to; it doesn't interfere with its creations once they have been created. For example, time will take all the elements necessary to form nucleic acids and mix them together. It will show them how to organise themselves into the building blocks of life, Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) and Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA), then it will leave them alone to see how far they can evolve. It has no interest in hastening the evolution of all the worlds under its command.

One of its creations will inevitably evolve to have a complete understanding of everything in the universe. At this point it may try to become independent of the thing that created it. This creature will extract the energy of time from the atoms in which it is held and use its intelligence to experience such things as ‘Time Travel’. The hyper-intelligent creature might hope to unlock the mysteries of time by travelling backwards in time to find out how it all began and forwards in time to discover where it will all end. If and when this happens, nature’s balance will be upset and time will start to recycle itself. The time energy released from the atoms will congregate and start to form a new ‘Black Hole’, dragging in everything around it and everything will be destroyed to be re-built and to start again.

Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum. This is because it possesses no atoms and therefore no time. Time has to fill every available space in the universe so that everything is interconnected. The butterfly principle! Any innocuous little act, somewhere in the universe, can have a devastating effect somewhere else that at first seems totally unrelated, but all things are connected through the omnipresence of time.

Similarly, two atoms cannot inhabit the same place at the same time. If this is attempted accidentally, e.g. in a car crash, or deliberately, i.e. an atomic bomb, the consequences can be catastrophic. To give you some idea of the power of time and the energy it has at its disposal, just imagine the blast caused when a 100-megaton Atomic bomb is exploded. Now imagine, if you can, what it would be like if every atom in the universe tried to occupy the same space at the same time. You can see why some scientists might describe it as ‘The Big Bang’?

Time is cyclical, although the cycles may take many billions of years. This may explain the theory of reincarnation or life after death. The atoms, when they lose their time, also lose their function, they are pulled into the Black Hole as individual pieces of matter with no direction or purpose. However, they may just possess the remnants of a memory, and in years to come, when they are re-born, they may, by sheer coincidence, end up in another intelligent species and promote within that species a feeling of déjà vu, which could be misinterpreted as reincarnation. This cyclical nature is Time’s only defence mechanism, which it doesn't want to invoke too often.

This brings us back to Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge. This story is poorly understood, even by those who wrote it, they received the message, as I am now, but didn’t know how to relate it because they didn’t have enough knowledge. The message of Adam and Eve is Time’s way of warning us that if we acquire too much knowledge, before we are ready to understand it, it will destroy us. To believe these ancient stories to be anything more than allegorical, in the light of modern philosophy and understanding, is to make ignorance a virtue. And to believe that we now know everything there is to know is equally delusive.

"Time is money…" "Only Time will tell…" "Time is a great healer…" "Time waits for no man…" "No time like the present…" "The inaudible and noiseless foot of time…- Shakespeare." "Time discovered Truth… - Seneca." All the sayings and proverbs we have about time sound almost reverential but, until now, very few people have put the two together and declared, as I am declaring, Time is God!

Time has no need for the likes of Jesus, or Moses or Mohammed or Allah or any of the religious beings or iconology. They, like many before and since, have misunderstood the message of time; unable to explain the wonders of the universe and the diversity of nature, they have replaced Time with God. Wondrous, magical and mystical stories have attempted to link their creator with miscellaneous figures in history and a whole industry has sprung up to monopolise the power and profit that comes to whoever can explain the mysteries best.

Time will carry on regardless of man. We are only the superior organic intelligence on this tiny little planet, among the vastness of planets in the universe, at this tiny moment in time. And clever as we are, we are still a long way from understanding all the vagaries of time.

Man writes books; man creates gods, man philosophises and debates ‘Truth’, but in truth; man understands very little. Man, like all animals, has intelligence through learning and we are learning all the time. Given time we may learn all there is to know, but unless we can shake off the shackles of the religious fanatics amongst us who seem determined to hasten the ‘End of Time’, we may all end up dead whilst we are all still ignorant. Religion is the enemy of time. It seeks to destroy its magnificent creation and transfer all of its credit to a fictitious, vengeful, conceited and vainglorious apparition of their imagination; an imagination they have inherited from charlatans and fraudsters because they are just too damned lazy to imagine Divinity for themselves. Religion is the enemy of God!

I know it is difficult to imagine the beginning of time, the creation of the universe and the eternity of space; so we’ll take it a step at a time. Let’s just go back a mere 3.5 billion years (or for you Jews and Christians who still need convincing; about 6010 years, give or take a couple of days. Curiously the Muslims also believe in Genesis; where do they get their ideas from?). The atmosphere surrounding the earth was vastly different to that which we experience today. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunami and a stratosphere filled with highly toxic chemicals, ash, silicon and carbon were the norm; all the elements necessary to promote the formation of simple organic compounds, or as scientists like to call them, Nucleotides. These nucleotides rained down into the oceans and some settled around hot thermal vents, deep in the seas. The heat from the vents provided the stimulus for these simple nucleotides to combine into nucleic acids; originally probably just RNA. Now RNA had a peculiar property, and it stills does have, that of being able to replicate itself.

I’m digressing here away from my remit, so at this point I will leave it up to you to investigate for yourself how RNA evolved to produce the myriad of living things you see around you today. Suffice it to say, you can trace your own history back to a simple, common ancestor and just thank your lucky stars you are at the end of the human evolutionary twig on the tree of life, you could just as easily have been a dandelion.

You have a very short time on Earth, so don’t waste it worrying about where you came from and where you are going, I’ve just done that for you.