4 Votes
The Nature of Time and Biblical Creation Arguments
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Yes, Newton’s apple affects the fabric of spacetime. |
I’ve always been an applied physics kind of guy. My degree is in engineering and my career is in industry. Recently, though, I’ve been reading The Elegant Universe to expand my nerd-horizons.
One concept that struck me was the effect of speed and gravity on time. Basically: The greater the speed and the stronger the gravity, the slower the passage of time. So, if you’re standing “still” and I run by you, time is moving slower for me. (Yes, I know the speeds need to be much faster to make any real difference, but it’s still true.) Similarly, if you stay on Earth and I go hang out on Mercury, my time would again be moving slower (due to the warping of space-time caused by the Sun).
The reason this concept seems so counter-intuitive is obvious to me now: We all live on the same planet and move around at relatively slow speeds. We have no concept of how life would change if we took a vacation to the event horizon of a black hole, or if we traveled at 99% of the speed of light for a while. Our intuition is based completely on circumstances unable to demonstrate the variable nature of time.
In any case, my thought was this: If we can accept that time changes based on how you are moving and what masses are warping the space you’re in (i.e., what gravity you’re experiencing), why doesn’t this play a role in discussions about the Creation story in Genesis? Whether or not you believe in God or the Bible isn’t my point; it’s that when discussing even the idea of a being creating the universe in a certain amount of time, you have to consider how fast he was moving and how warped was his space.
Similarly tagged OmniNerd content:
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- Time Slowing Down?, by gnifyus over 5 years ago
This article was edited after publication by the author on 18 Jul 2010.
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What is the mass of God by Occams
I assume that it is because people who understand, or have any insight into, the relationship between time and speed and gravity are not the kind of people who would believe in the literal truth of the Genesis story.
Those of them who are Christian are probably quite happy with creation coming from a natural phenomenon like the big bang and the physics that go with that explanation.
you have to consider how fast he was moving and how warped was his space.
In order to have that data you one would need to know a lot more about Him than anyone does. Perhaps we nerds could kick the discussion off with some assumptions.
My contribution is that there is no evidence that He has any mass, and I think that not having this would mean that he is not affected by gravity or the speed of light.
Can He be said to exist if He has no Mass? I guess an idea has no mass.
It doesn't work that way by scottb
Whether or not you believe in God or the Bible isn’t my point; it’s that when discussing even the idea of a being creating the universe in a certain amount of time, you have to consider how fast he was moving and how warped was his space.
From what I’ve seen, creationists fall into two camps—straight up, literal creationism, where the gods created everything pretty much as it is now, less than 10,000 years ago, and “theistic evolution”, which accepts the basic findings of science but theorizes that the gods manipulate the process so as to bring about certain favored outcomes (usually, that means humans).
Theistic evolution pretty much accepts the scientific theories, and leaves all of the divine activity to be “behind the curtain” as it were—we can’t observe it.
Young earth creationists don’t care that much about actual physics. They’re the ones who’ll make up any old thing that lets them hang on to their absurd belief. That’s where you get the silly ideas like thousand-year “days”, radically different particle decay rates in the past, and so on.
To get to a point where one cares about how fast the gods move or warp space or whatever, one has to start from a position of caring whether theory and observation are consistent. That means taking a scientific approach.
Of course, we’ve already done that. It’s not that long since scientists were overwhelmingly creationists. They’re the ones who started us on the road to the theories of cosmology and evolution we have today—following the line of thinking that might lead to having ideas like you propose matter leads you to realize there’s no need for any gods in the explanation whatsoever.
Time is an illusion by Anonymous
There is only the present. Past is a memory of what was a ‘present’ at that time. Future is an extrapolation of memories.
The thing is how to come to a sure understanding of this. How to know that this really is true. Thats where Zen, meditation etc come in. They help one live in the present and then understanding this becomes easier.
There is another thing – to understand Bible one needs to have a high spiritual level (that can be attained with practice). A lot of stuff in it is symbolical & metaphorical.