It’s time to put on our thinking caps as Trent takes us on a tour of the philosophy of time and shows why it’s important to our Catholic faith.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
There’s something about the midnight hour, or late into the night when, for me at least, I want to ponder deep philosophical questions. So, that’s what I want to talk about today here on the Counsel of Trent podcast, I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Here is the deep question I want to talk about on today’s podcast, what is time? Saint Augustine once remarked that he knew what time was when people didn’t ask him, but when people asked him, he didn’t know. So, when we start to think about time, we experience time, we use terms like past, present, and future, we think about time all the time. We’re the most temporal generation that’s ever existed.
I mean, you think about it, you go back in time, to avoid the pun, and people didn’t really think about time that much. You got up when the sun rose, and you went to bed when the sun set. But now we have all of these devices to keep us synchronized and scheduled down to the very second sometimes, but what is this time that seems to govern our lives? That’s what I want to talk about today here on the Counsel of Trent podcast, and it’s important to talk about this, because questions about time ultimately get to questions about who God is, what is the nature of our experience of reality, what is reality even? So, let’s strap on our thinking caps, and try to think through this difficult kind of question.
So, first I’m going to start with what motivated this podcast, it was a Tweet. It was a Tweet that I sent out, I was up late thinking about all this, and I wanted to see if other people were thinking about this subject as well. So, I wrote, “I’m up late doing reading on the philosophy of time. I wish I could devote a few solid months to this for a research project in order to finalize my own views on this fascinating and complex subject. Until then, which view of time do you accept or lean towards?” So, then I did a poll, and I got about 500 votes actually in this poll, and here’s how it turned out. The four options were, presentism, growing block, spotlight view, eternalism, and then the last option, there’s different views of time.
So, it broke down presentism had 16% of the votes, growing block 12%, eternalism 28%, and about 40% of people were curious and puzzled at the idea that there are even different views of time. So, let’s jump into that to understand the nature of this debate. First, what is time? Ultimately, time is a measure of change. It’s a measure of change, and it’s fundamentally about the concepts of earlier and later, and past, present, and future. So, when you think about what happens with time when things undergo temporal change, they get older, they tend to decay, that’s where the second law of thermodynamics comes in, that a closed system always tends towards entropy or decay.
Like when you put billiard balls on a table they’re not going to roll themselves by themselves into a perfect rack formation, or if you hit one billiard ball, the odds of you hitting one ball, and then all of them reforming back into the standard formation on a billiard table, well, the odds of that happening are practically zero. That’s why if I were to show you footage of all the balls on a billiards table in a game of pool, of all of them reassembling back into the rack formation, what kind of video do you think I would be showing you? Well, you would think that I had shown you a clip of a billiards game but played in reverse. How would you know it’s played in reverse? Because you have an innate sense of what physicists call the arrow of time, that time naturally leads to change, and a particular kind of change towards entropy, disorder, decay.
So, if you were to watch all of the little billiard balls reassemble in the rack you would intuitively know you’re not watching a game actually being played, you’re watching a real game in reverse, because the arrow of time does not function that way. So, the big question in the philosophy of time is this, what is the nature of time? Specifically, what is most fundamental about time? Is it the earlier/later than descriptions, or the past, present, future descriptions of time? For example, consider these two statements, “The 2016 election is earlier than the 2020 election.”, then the next statement, “The 2016 election is in the past, and the 2020 election is in the future.”
So, if you think about it, the first statement, “The 2016 election is earlier than the 2020 election.”, that is what we would call a tenseless statement. It is true, you could utter that statement at any time in history and the statement is true. So, back during the time of Genghis Khan, it was true the 2016 election is earlier than the 2020 election. It’s true now, as I’m recording this podcast to you, and it’s going to be true 10,000 years into the future the 2016 election is earlier than the 2020 election, that’s a tenseless statement. So, is time a tenseless phenomenon fundamentally, or is it a tensed phenomenon, because the second statement deals with the reality of tense, which many people say is the most fundamental element of time.
So, that statement, “The 2016 election is in the past, and the 2020 election is in the future.”, that is true now as I record this episode today, July 14th, 2020, that’s true now, it’s probably true when you’re listening to this, but if you were to listen to this episode a year from now, the statement I’m uttering, “The 2016 election is in the past, the 2020 election is in the future.”, if you listen to this podcast one year from its recording date that statement will no longer be true, because it’ll be in 2021 where the 2020 election is in the past, not the future. So, it’s a tensed statement, it’s only true at certain moments of time, and it depends on privileged realities like now, or the present.
So, the person who really got this discussion and the philosophy of time jump started was a philosopher named J. M. E. McTaggart. So, McTaggart was a philosopher, a very smart guy, and he was also a weirdo. Some people said that he would ride around in a tricycle and say hi to cats, and you would expect that he was kind of weird, because he wrote an essay called The Unreality of Time back in 1906, and McTaggart had this paradox about time that led him to the conclusion that time is actually not real. This is what he says, “I believe that time is unreal, but I do so for reasons which are not, I think, employed by any of the philosophers whom I have mentioned. I propose to explain my reasons in this paper.”
He says, “Positions in time as time appears to us, prima facie …” on the face of it, “… are distinguished in two ways. Each position is earlier than some, and later than some of the other positions …” so there’s that earlier/later than distinction that we can talk about in points of time, and he says, “… and each position is either past, present, or future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent …” so remember, 2016, 2020, one’s always earlier, one’s always later, he says, “… while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N it is always earlier, but an event which is now present was future and will be past.”
So, McTaggart’s paradox is basically this, he says that time is a tensed phenomena, it has something to do with past, present, and future, but it’s impossible for an event to be past, present, and future all at once, or to have all those properties. So, for example, when we think about this podcast that I’m recording, it’s present for me, but it also is a past event for you listening to it, and it was a future event for me yesterday. So, it has this past, present, and future properties, all are true of it. So, people will say, like McTaggart, “Well, you can’t have all of those properties for the same thing, they’re contradictory.” So, McTaggart reaches the conclusion saying that, “Well, time just isn’t real at all.”
William Lane Craig has a thought on this, and Craig, to his credit, is actually a very good philosopher of time. Now, I disagree with many of his beliefs about time, and his belief about God’s relationship to time, but Craig has really put in the footwork here. He’s written one popular level book, and two academic books just on the nature of time itself. I think he was part of an international conference or international society of philosophers of time. He even features in a documentary on the philosophy of time on YouTube that I’ll link to in the show description, and by the way, if you want show descriptions, and the exclusive ability to comment on shows, and send me messages, and have all those sorts of bonus content, be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com. For just $5 a month you get access to all that, you’re not going to want to miss it.
So, Craig says this, “Tensers …” people that believe that tense matters, past, present, and future, “Tensers love the first part of McTaggart’s argument, that time is essentially tensed, but they disagree with his second part of his argument that tensed time is self-contradictory. Detensers …” these are people who think time is not about past, present, or future, it’s only about earlier and later than, that don’t rely on tense, so you could describe at any point in time and still be true, he says, “Detensers love the second part of his argument, because it shows that the tensed view of time can’t be true, but they reject the first part because they think that time is, in fact, tenseless.”
Virtually no one agrees with McTaggart himself that time is unreal. Rather, the question has become the nature of time, is it tensed or is it tenseless? And that has led to two different views of time that McTaggart himself coined, he gave them the very uninspired names of the A-theory and the B-theory. So, the A-theory is considered the dynamic view of time, that at its most basic level time changes, there is temporal becoming, and past, present, and future are realities that change as time moves along time’s arrow, so to speak. It’s a dynamic view of time, the A-theory, the most basic feature of time are the realities of past, present, and future that change as time changes.
That’s to contrast with the B-theory of time, or the static view of time. So, the B-theory says no, past, present, and future are just things that our consciousness observes, but they’re not the most fundamental element of time. The most fundamental element of time for the B-theory is the earlier/later than description. There are events that earlier in the timeline, other events are later, but every moment of time past, present, and future is equally real, much the same way that every location on the earth is equally real, it’s just separated by lines of latitude and longitude. There’s no privileged here or there on earth when it comes to locations, here is just where you happen to be, but there’s infinitely many number of heres based on where you are on the earth.
That’s how B-theorists, or tenseless theorists, look at the static view of time, that now is like here on earth, just as there’s no privileged here on the earth, there’s no privileged now in time. Now is just wherever you happen to be in the timeline, but every moment of the timeline is equally real just like every acre on the earth is equally real, and could become a here if you happen to be there. So, for the tenseless people, past, present, and future, all moments of time are equally real, where we are in time determines whether it’s the past, the present, or the future, it’s not the most fundamental element of time.
George Ellis, who’s a very famous physicist, who doesn’t hold a strict B-theory, I’ll explain his view when we get to the end of the episode, but he describes this from a physicist perspective, because most physicists believe in this B-theory of time because they model time as being a fourth dimension of space, and that the universe is just one four-dimensional block. You have three dimension, height, width, and depth, but the fourth dimension would be moving along the three dimensions along a kind of temporal axis that’s just part of one big block universe.
Here’s what Ellis says, “There is a prevalent view in fundamental physics that space and time are best described as a four-dimensional spacetime, which represents all the places and all the times that ever exist as a single unchanging entity. There is no essential difference between the past and the future, because there is no present time defined to separate them they cannot be distinguished from each other, so there is no meaningful present. Without an objective present, time does not flow in any real sense, the passage of time is an illusion.”
So, if I could make a distinction between these two, the A-theory and the B-theory, I actually talk about this in my book, Creation Out of Nothing, because the theory of time does factor into this, imagine you are observing the universe, and you’re sitting in a theater, the A-theory of time would be like if you’re watching a play. So, when you’re watching the play on stage, the play is only real as it’s being performed for you in the present moment, or at least that would be a sub-theory of the A-theory called presentism we’ll get to shortly. It’s the most common version of the A-theory.
So, under this dynamic view, the past, the performance in the play you were watching a half hour ago, it doesn’t exist, it has no existence anymore. It only exists as a memory of the play that was performed, but the actors aren’t there performing the play anymore, it doesn’t have existence, they’re on stage performing right now, and the future scenes of the play that you’re watching, they have not happened yet. They will only become real when the actors perform them.
Now, the B-theory would be different. It wouldn’t be like watching a play on a stage, it’d be more like watching a movie on a filmstrip. So, the movie is all equally real along the filmstrip and you’re watching it projected onto the screen, what you’re watching is the present moment of the film. But the past moments you already watched, they didn’t disappear into the ether, they still have existence, and the future moments, they do exist, you just haven’t seen them yet. So, unlike a play, which only has existence on the stage in front of you when you’re watching it, which would be the A-theory, or dynamic theory of time, the B-theory of time would be more like … now, this is an imprecise analogy, but do bear with me, if you’re a big philosophy or time buff you’ll start poking holes into it, but it’s the best I can do with an analogy, it’s like a filmstrip.
So, if you look at a filmstrip, a filmstrip is made up of all the different scenes and when you string them together it gives you the illusion of movement in the film, but your eye is processing it. So, it gives you that illusion of movement, even though it’s all these different elements kind of linked together. So, you’re watching the movie, the past scenes, they exist on another part of the filmstrip, the future scenes haven’t shown up yet, but they all exist. So, that’s the key difference between A-theory and the B-theory of time, and that there’s no privilege now.
So, in this B-theory that the now is just where you happen to be along in the filmstrip, there’s a wonderful scene from the Mel Brooks film Spaceballs, which is a parody of Star Wars, and if you haven’t seen it, you got to go see Spaceballs. I think I’m going to do an episode of Free For All Friday soon called, You Got to See It, of movies if you haven’t seen them you really need to see it. There’s a scene where the bad guy, portrayed by Rick Moranis, Dark Helmet, he’s trying to find Lone Starr. And so one of the other officers on the ship says, “Wait, let’s just get the Spaceballs movie. It’s the newest breakthrough in video cassette technology, you can get the movie in your home theater before they’ve even finished filming it.”
So, it’s just an absurd thing, and they sit through, and they start scrolling through the movie, and they watch a beginning part of the scene that they already did, and they’re kind of embarrassed about what happened, but then they get to this part of watching the movie Spaceballs that they’re currently in. Oh, and actually I should make clear, they stop the film, they’re all sitting around a monitor looking at a TV monitor, and they stop the tape and they see themselves in the monitor looking at themselves in the monitor. So, they’re watching themselves when they stop the tape. So, let me play it, and-
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What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
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Now. You’re looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.
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What happened to then?
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We passed then.
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When?
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Just now. We’re at now now.
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Go back to then.
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When?
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Now.
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Now?
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Now.
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I can’t.
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Why?
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We missed it.
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When?
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Just now.
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When will then be now?
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Soon.
Trent Horn:
So, once again, we’re getting pretty heady, but the idea here is on the B-theory there is no privileged now, just like there is not privileged here on earth. When you ask, “Where is here?”, you’d say, “Well, it’s wherever you happen to be.” But many people who defend the A-theory of time will say that time is not like space, time has a particular privileged direction that it flows, it’s not like space. If I were to try to go to Perth, Australia, to do a talk, and I love going to Perth, Australia to do talks, by the way, it’s a wonderful place. It’s the only other city in the world that I would describe as being exactly like San Diego in climate and affect, it just happens to be on the Indian Ocean.
I could go to Perth by leaving from LAX, flying to Sydney and flying to Perth, or I could fly LAX to London, and London to Perth. I could get to Perth in one of two directions going around the earth because there’s no privileged direction, no privileged here, here is where I happen to be. But many defenders of the A-theory will say, “Well no, time doesn’t work like that. You can get to Perth in two directions, but you could only get to the future in one way. I can’t go backwards in time and end up at the future. Time moves in a particular kind of direction. There may not be a privileged here, but now, now seems like a very special moment. That there aren’t a multiplicity or infinite number of nows, there’s only one now we need to be cognizant of.”
But defenders of the B-theory will say, “No, now is just what your consciousness understands along this four-dimensional spacetime block.”, and they’ll say, “The passage of time, that time doesn’t really move like this, it’s more of an illusion.” So, here’s a clip from this documentary on the philosophy of time that has a voiceover talking about what Einstein thought about it, and then what contemporary philosopher Paul Churchland … Churchland also thinks that yourself is an illusion, that your conscious self is really an illusion that’s created, you don’t even really exist, and time doesn’t exist. So, here’s what they say.
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One person’s past is another person’s present and another’s future depending on the point of reference. Einstein said …
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You have to accept the idea that subjective time with its emphasis on the now has no objective meaning. The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion.
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The nature of time as it appears in human consciousness is a puzzle, because as many people will tell you the external world doesn’t seem to require the passage of time, or the flow of time. It’s as if the world were frozen, strung out in its temporal dimension, and yet, and yet from the point of view of an individual consciousness, we seem to be climbing up a ladder, and there’s this specious present. I’m inclined to think that the impression of a moving now, the impression of a now to begin with, and the impression that it’s moving is an impression that arises from the peculiar way in which the human brain is wired up.
Trent Horn:
Now, not everyone who holds to the B-theory of time, which is also called eternalism, uses this kind of language. So, Jimmy Akin actually has several articles on this online, I would say that he holds to the B-theory of time, and here’s what he says about this idea that it’s an illusion, he says, “I don’t agree with everything said by every eternalist. In particular, I reject the claim made by some, particularly among physicists and philosophers, that time is an illusion, or that it doesn’t pass. Both of these claims are manifestly untrue, and eternalists shoot themselves in the foot when they say such things.”
Trent Horn:
Now, I will say that Jimmy holds to the B-theory but there are other Catholics, Ed Feser would be an example, who holds the A-theory of time. So, the church does not have a definitive teaching on this subject, on which theory of time is true, so Catholic philosophers and theologians are free to hold different views on this subject. I’ll tell you the view that I’m inclined towards as we get to the end of the episode, suspense, but just so you say, so Jimmy has one view, other well-respected Catholic theologians and philosophers hold a different view. So, you’re free to evaluate the evidence and see which view you want to hold, or you’re free to not even engage the subject and just go through your temporal existence focusing on things that are maybe more present for you in the immediate moment, if this moment is even real?
Now, of course, those who argue for the A-theory say, “Wait a minute, you’re saying that it’s an illusion …” sans Jimmy doesn’t say it’s an illusion, he uses different language to describe it, but many other people, B-theorists and eternalists, use this language to say that the passage of time is an illusion. Many defenders of the A-theory will say, “Maybe it’s not an illusion, maybe if it appears that time is really passing, that the past things go out of existence, come into existence in the present, and they don’t exist in the future, maybe this idea of temporal becoming this moving now is just a real thing, and actually we should trust our commonsense intuitions on this point.” So, probably one of the most famous current defenders of the A-theory of time is the Protestant philosopher and theologian, William Lane Craig, and in this documentary on the philosophy of time this is how he describes his view on it.
If the past and the future are as real as the present then we are the victims of a universal and gigantic delusion, namely, the illusion of temporal becoming. Every one of us experiences what we call the passage of time, that moments of time elapse, the future doesn’t exist, it’s pure potentiality, we’ll create the future. The past no longer exists, it is ceased to be, and on this view that says that the past and the future are equally real, we have to say that all of this experience is illusory, and to me that is so counterintuitive. That’s like the person who says that the external world is unreal, that in fact you’re actually a brain in a vat of chemicals being stimulated by a mad scientist to hallucinate the external world. Why should you believe such a thing? In a similar way, I would ask, why in the world should we believe that the temporal becoming, the passage that we experience is, in fact, nothing but an enormous illusion?
Now, I need to point out that William Lane Craig has a bias when it comes to theories of time, so Craig is most famous for reviving the Kalam cosmological argument in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and that argument seems to be whetted to the A-theory of time, whatever begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause. It trades on the notions that things come into existence, they go out of existence, or at the very least they don’t exist at one point, and then they come into existence at a future point, and there needs to be a cause to explain that. But if everything past, present, and future is equally real, then nothing ever really begins to exist, and Craig has said that the Kalam cosmological argument does not work on the B-theory of time.
Now, there’s other people who disagree. Curtis Metcalfe is one person who’s tried to propose reformulating the argument to make it work on a B-theory of time. I will link to an interview he did on the Classical Theism Podcast with John DeRosa, and actually John DeRosa wrote a new book recently that I just endorsed, and I happily do endorse, it’s a great book at Catholic Answers Press, called, One Less God Than You: How to Answer the Slogans, Clichès, and Fallacies That Atheists Use to Challenge Your Faith. I have the book actually right here on my desk to remind me of it, so I’ll link to that episode where Metcalfe talks about how you could maybe reformulate Kalam to work on a tenseless theory of time, but Craig and others are pretty clear they believe the Kalam argument only works on the A-theory of time. So, Craig is known for defending the Kalam argument so he has quite the motivation to also want to defend the A-theory at any cost. Once again, that doesn’t prove that his arguments are wrong, but it’s a bias to watch out for as he vigorously argues for the A-theory.
So, let’s get into the A-theory of time before we talk about the arguments for and against these differently theories. Particularly with the A-theory I need to mention that it’s actually broken down into three separate theories, one of which is vastly more popular than the other two, so we’ll start with that one. Edward Feser is a defender of this theory, and this is how he describes it, that would be presentism. So, Feser puts it this way, he says, “The A-theory comes in three main varieties. The classical form taken by the A-theory is presentism, according to which only the present is real, with past events no longer existing, and future events not yet existing.”
So, that would be the presentist view that only the now, the present is real, the past no longer exists, it does not have any existence whatsoever, only as the memories we have in the present, the future does not exist yet, it has no existence, except maybe as predictions that we have now. So, this view is defended by Edward Feser, William Lane Craig, I think it’s also by Dean Zimmerman, I think there’re even atheists who defend this, too, I think Quentin Smith was one of them.
The second two kinds of A-theories are almost like hybrids of the A and the B-theory where they try to have not just the present existing, but having a kind of block universe but with temporal becoming. So, the first one would be the growing block view, Feser says, “A second kind of A-theory is known as the growing block theory, according to which the present is real, and all events that were present and are now past also in some way still exist, but future events do not yet exist.” So, think of the B-theory as just like a four-dimensional block, past, present, and future are all real, there’s no change. The only change is what our consciousness appears to perceive, but it’s this static block universe.
The growing block theory says that the present does move into the future, and everything that was present gets added to the block. So, imagine not a static block, but a block that is growing and getting bigger and bigger as time moves forward. So, that would be the growing block view. It’s not like the B-theory, the B-theory says that the future is real, growing block people would say, “No, the future’s not real, the present is the edge of the growing block, and past events are real in some way.”, though growing block theorists disagree about how the past is real. For example, some forms of the growing block theory, like Peter Forrest’s, say the past exists, but it’s not conscious, it’s a dead past. You have these past physical events, but no one is conscious of those past events.
Feser goes on to say of the third A-theory, he says, “The third kind of A-theory is the moving spotlight theory, which holds that past, present, and future events all, in some way, exist, but only present events fall under the spotlight of the now, which moves along and successfully illuminates this series of events.” I would call this one the Cousin Oliver of all of the theories of times, like Cousin Oliver was the least liked of The Brady Bunch, it’s like, “Why are we bringing Cousin Oliver here?”, or it’s like the Linux operating system when you compare Mac, PC, Linux, like, “Go home, Linux.”
The moving spotlight theory is believed to have all the worst parts of all the theories that everybody hates put into one theory, very few people defend it. Ross Cameron has actually written an entire book trying to defend the theory, so there’s still people out there who defend it, and actually my analogy earlier of you sitting in the theater watching the filmstrip and it’s being illuminated, as I said before, if you’re a big philosophy of time buff you might say that that’s kind of like the B-theory, but it sounds almost more like the moving spotlight theory of the A-theory.
So, the difference there between the moving spotlight theory, the moving spotlight theory would say that past, present, and future all have real realities about them, but they only become real in the present moment when the spotlight of time, so to speak, is shining on that moment to make it the present, whereas with the B-theory past, present, and future are all equally real, there is no privileged now, now is just wherever you happen to exist along the block, what you happen to be perceiving at that moment for you.
All right, let’s talk about the arguments for and against these views. So, when it comes to A-theory the most common argument is that it’s a commonsense view and we have no reason to reject this view. Dean Zimmerman puts it this way, he says, “Being part of commonsense gives a belief a non-negligible positive status. Such beliefs are not something that skeptical philosophers should expect us to give up at the merest hint of controversy, or in the face of anything but a powerful case against them. Everything turns, then, on positive arguments against the A-theory.”
Now, some B-theorists will say, “Well no, it’s not the commonsense view, because a lot of people have a commonsense view of the B-theory of time, that if you can imagine time travel, people imagine traveling through time, so why wouldn’t the B-theory be just as plausible? The time travel, like what we see in Back to the Future, so man other sci-fi literature involving time travel, it needs the B-theory, because especially if presentism were true, if only the present moment existed, you couldn’t be like, “Marty, we got to get you back to the future. You could go back to 1955.” There would be no 1955 for Marty McFly to go back to if presentism were true, because the past doesn’t exist anymore, and he couldn’t go to Hill Valley in 2015 because there would be no future either, only the present would exist.
So, our love and enjoyment of time travel movies seems to hinge on the B-theory of time being true. Though I will say that, for me, the fact that people can imagine traveling through time is not evidence for the B-theory anymore than it’s evidence for time travel, because I would say that time travel is impossible. You can’t go back to the past, because the past is fixed. Now, you could maybe travel into the future given relativity theory, I mean, if you travel … there’s an astronaut who’s actually traveled .2 seconds into the future, because the local clock for him ran slower because he was traveling so fast in orbit around the earth. So, traveling into the future is not as hard, we do it every day one second at a time.
So, there could be a way to travel maybe into the future, per se, but I would say you can’t travel into the past like Back to the Future, Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure, because the past can’t be changed. So, even if you could imagine it, doesn’t mean you can’t actually do it. So, I would say that’s actually not evidence for the B-theory itself, I still personally think the A-theory is the commonsense view. When you ask people to talk about what the past, present, and future are the way they would describe it would cohere better with the A-theory than the B-theory.
So, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is actually a good movie to illustrate the paradoxes of time travel. The two guys in the film, they go back in time and kidnap a bunch of historical figures so they can get an A on their history term paper report. So, they get them, but all the historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, and Socrates, I think Genghis Khan was one of them, end up getting locked in jail and they got to go and get them out, but they don’t have the keys from their dad to be able to open the jail to get in there and get them, so then they get this bright idea about getting the keys.
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Can we get your dad’s keys?
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We could steal them, but he lost them two days ago.
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If only we could back in time to when he had them, and steal them then.
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Well, why can’t we?
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Because we don’t got time.
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We could do it after the report.
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Ted, good thinking, dude. After the report we’ll time travel back to two days ago, steal your dad’s keys, and leave them here.
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Where?
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I don’t know, how about behind that sign? That way when we get here now they’ll be waiting for us. See?
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Whoa, yeah. So, after the report we can’t forget to do this otherwise it won’t happen. But it did happen. Hey, it was me who stole my dad’s keys.
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Exactly, Ted.
Trent Horn:
“We can’t forget, or else it won’t happen. But it did happen.” So, you could see the problems in causation when you allow time travel to be a live possibility. The major argument though for the A-theory beyond just commonsense, because our commonsense intuitions can fail us, we can have commonsense perception of things that actually turn out to be incorrect, we think that the Sun goes around the Earth, but it turns out it’s the Earth that goes around the Sun. Defenders of the A-theory will say that it’s the illimitability of tense that’s the problem, that past, present, and future are the most basic features of reality. You can’t say that we live in a tenseless universe, because there are facts about existence that trade on there being a privileged now, a real past, a nonexistent future.
For example, the statement, “Trent Horn recorded this podcast before you listened to it.”, that can be rewritten in a tenseless way to say, “Trent Horn records this podcast on July 14th, and you listen to this podcast on such and such date.” So, the idea is the B-theorists will say, “Well no, you can rewrite descriptions of reality, there are no temporal facts or facts that depend on past, present, and future tenses, you can rewrite them tenselessly.”
Defenders of the A-theory will say, “Well, not so fast, what about this fact? Trent Horn is recording this podcast now.” I am recording this podcast now, but there’s no way I can rewrite that sentence, you would think, in a way that’s tenseless, because even if I rewrite it as, “Trent Horn records this podcast July 14th.”, that’s not the same thing as saying, “Trent Horn is recording this podcast now.”, anymore than saying, “The meeting is July 25th.”, is not the same as the proposition, “The meeting is now.”, because you could understand those as distinct phenomena and, “I know that the meeting is July 25th.” “Well, did you know July 25th is now?” “Oh, no, I didn’t know that. I better get off to the meeting.”
Now, defenders of the B-theory will say, “Well, you can rewrite it, you would just say, ‘Trent Horn is recording this podcast when this statement is uttered.'” Then the A-theorists will come back and say, “You can’t rewrite everything that way, because what about the statement, ‘I am not uttering anything now.’? Could I rewrite that as ‘I am not uttering anything now, when this statement is uttered.’?” So, that’s just digging in deeper and deeper there to the tense arguments, the illimitability of tense, those are the philosophical arguments for the A-theory and the rejoinders of the B-theory.
I would say though the most common arguments that are given when it comes to defending the B-theory of time are not philosophical as much as they’re scientific, that basically people will say that science relies on the special theory of relativity, and the special theory of relativity assumes the … not just assumes, assumes to vindicate the existence of spacetime, this four-dimensional reality that space and time are woven together, and that there are features of spacetime that counts against the A-theory of time, especially the idea of some kind of absolute now.
And this will be related to relativity theory, so what’s relativity theory? Well, in a nutshell, say you’re sitting in an airplane and there’s a fly buzzing in the airplane. How fast is the fly going? Well, from your perspective he might barely be going one mile an hour, if that, but if I was standing on the ground, and looked with special binoculars at the airplane, it would look like the fly is going 500 miles an hour from my perspective. So, velocities, recording distances in physics is relative based on position. So, Galileo discovered this kind of relativity when he said that if you were on a ship, if you were in the hold and it was perfectly smooth sea you wouldn’t be able to tell if you were moving … same thing happens to you on a plane when you don’t hit any turbulence you can’t tell if you’re moving or not, that acceleration, or that movement is something that’s relative to your position.
We fast-forward to Einstein and the special theory of relativity includes a notion called absolute simultaneity, which is the idea that imagine a train is going on a track, and there’s someone standing on a platform, and there’s a person sitting in the train car and they can see the front and back of the car at the same time. The train is going, and the front and back are struck by lightning. The person on the platform, it looks like the lightning bolts hit the front and back of the train car at the same time, it’s simultaneous. But because the train car is moving the person in the car will see the front bolt hit first, the photons will hit their eyes first, and so what they will see is they will see the front bolt hitting first and then the back bolt hitting.
So then the question is, well, which is it? Did the front bolt hit first then the back bolt, or did they hit at the same time? And the special theory of relativity posits that, well, it’s both, the simultaneity of an event is relative based on a observer’s position and their velocity. So, don’t feel bad if that went over your head, it still goes over my head a bit, but there’s other theoretical experiments that are done to show that the relativity of simultaneity is a well-established part of the special theory of relativity as a whole. Now, you have people who defend the A-theory of time who try to find a lot of different ways around this. Craig and Quentin Smith actually have an entire anthology just on this question written by physicists and philosophers called, Einstein Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity, but I’m not going to get into it anymore, maybe I’ll leave it as a bonus at some point on the podcast, but it would be way too deep for everyone involved.
But I will just say this, that the special theory of relativity is not an absolute deal breaker when it comes to the A-theory of time, because look, science is provisional, Newton’s theories are eventually supplanted by Einstein’s, but Einstein’s may be supplanted as we learn more about physics and we develop something like a quantum theory of gravity, which we don’t have yet. We can’t model what happened to the Big Bang for example, in the extremely small moment of time that occurred right after the initial expansion. So, we’re still developing theories of physics, science is always provisional, it leads us in a direction, and A-theorists and those who defend temporal becoming have to take it seriously, but it doesn’t just shut down the debate.
Finally, as promised, which theory of time am I leaning towards? I’m not firmly committed by the way, I’m not firmly committed, I’m still doing my reading, but I kind of like the growing block theory of time. So remember, the growing block theory says that the past is real in some way, the present is the edge of a growing block, and the future does not exist. For me, this theory has a lot of beautiful elements to it. First, of all the theories, whether the B-theory, presentism, moving spotlight theory, I think the growing block view of time is the best view to explain the asymmetry between past and future that every view tries to show.
We have this instinctive, intuitive understanding that the past is different than the future, the future is open, the future can change, the past is fixed, it cannot change. The past and future are different, they have real ontological differences about them, I don’t think presentism explains it as well, and I don’t think the block theory, or the static theory, the B-theory explains it, but the growing block, there is a real asymmetry, because the past has real existence, but the future does not under the growing block theory, which I think privileges it above presentism and the B-theory view of time.
For me, I would hold maybe the Peter Forrest dead past theory, that the past elements of the block, their main purpose is to make special relativity work. I was reading, I think … What’s his name? His last name is Cundy, I forget his first name, I want to say Arthur, C-U-N-D-Y, he’s interacted with Ed Feser about presentism, and he actually talks about a way for the A-theory to overcome the objection of special relativity. What Cundy says is that you could offer a reply to defend the A-theory against special relativity and the relativity of simultaneity, but he says that the answer in that case, if we went far enough, we would no longer have presentism, but the growing block theory of time. And George Ellis, who I mentioned earlier, who is an expert in the general theory of relativity, a very famous physicist, he endorses a growing block theory of time. It’s a very particular view, but he endorses it.
For me, you could also have the Kalam cosmological argument even stronger because you couldn’t have that actually infinite past block of time that exists, you could make past events present. You would think of anamnesis that we make the sacrifice of Christ on the cross present now in the past, because it still has existence in the past part of the block, though Christ is not consciously suffering on the cross, because there is no conscious existence in that dead block of time. Also, the dead past would overcome one objection of the growing block view, which is the, “Is it now?”, objection. Other growing block theorists will say that the past is alive, it’s not dead like Forrest says, but that if it is alive, then we have problems like, well, is it now, are we on the edge of the block, or are we in the past and we mistakenly think that it’s now?
Whoo, we covered a lot. Let me reiterate though, Jimmy Akin believes in the B-theory, I’m partial to the growing block view, not totally sold yet, Feser believes in presentism, and church does not have a definitive view on these theories. You, as a layperson, any of us are free to adopt a theory we want, as long as we hold to basic dogmatic facts about God and creation, that God made time, God is not bound by time, God is eternal, he has a timeless existence, and so he possesses all of his existence in one eternal moment. So, as long as you believe that God exists, God is not bound by time, he made time, and that he’s eternal, God didn’t just exist in time along with us like, “I’ve been around for eternity I better come up with a universe by now.”, you can’t believe that.
You got to believe God created everything in the finite past, but whether the time he made has dynamic elements and is the A-theory, or the time he made is static and the B-theory, that’s up to you to decide, though those different theories do kind of reflect on your views about God and his relationship to time, which we couldn’t get in here on today’s podcast, because we ran out of time. So, thank you so much for listening, I hope you have a very blessed day, and a lot of these resources I will list on the show description at trenthornpodcast.com for you to go deeper into this. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
Speaker 1:
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