Finding, Making and Killing time

By Oskar

Time is a fascinating and often incomprehensible thing. Our everyday lives are defined by it, our language almost treats it as a physical entity. We find it, we waste it, we make it, we take it, have it, we even kill it. Despite its extreme relevance to our ordinary functioning as humans, we often don’t take the time (I couldn’t think of a better way of saying this) to consider exactly what it is, what it is doing and how we know it is doing it.

In the studies of geology, evolutionary biology and astronomy, time is often referred to a ‘deep’, (a wonderful example of of metaphor in science if I have ever heard one). This term is attempting to come to grips with the shear magnitude of the time we have found to exist. Our seemingly important lives are less than a single atom in the ‘ocean of time’. We give it numbers in this context. Billions of years. In reality I doubt very many people are able to appreciate the significance of this. A billion years is not something our brains were evolved to understand (I am constantly troubled by the fact that I contemplate such weighty topics with a brain that is essentially a really good food detector).

James Hutton (arguably the first modern geologist) said: “…there is not vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” He was criticized, as he was thought to be implying that time was infinite, but my interpretation is that (like any good scientist) he simply didn’t know about such philosophical matters . He simply knew that time (and by extension Earth processes) was old beyond human reckoning.

Of course, when you move away from such physical sciences and into the realm of physics (ironic really), time becomes a whole lot messier. Some would say that time itself does not exist, that what we experience as time is really just our experience of change. To others time is a dimension, a strange one, unlike the spatial dimensions we are able to sense. It goes in only one direction, it cannot be turned on and off, or shaped by human intervention.

I hope I have given you something to think about, this article is by no means and end to itself, but more of a stimulus for discussion. Please comment if you feel you have something to contribute, but even if you don’t,  think twice next time you look at your watch.

Time is an amazing phenomenon, it still strikes me as strange that people are so intent on creating new mystery, replacing their world with imagined ones in an attempt to ‘bring back wonder’ that they claim has been taken by our modern understanding of the world. In reality, their creations could never exceed the wonder and mystery that is our own, rationally revealed world.

That last paragraph was a bit of a personal cause, it can be ignored if you wish.

Atheism is semantically erroneous

By Reuben.

Now that this post’s title has gathered your attention, let me draw your attention to a rather excellent quote:

I’m a polyatheist – there are many gods I don’t believe in.

- Dan Fouts

There is a subtle logic here; most believers (of a theistic or deistic bent) believe in one God – usually one ‘true’ God who has much political clout when it comes to dicatating matter. But they therefore must exclude all other Gods mustn’t they? A Christian does not call their God ‘Allah’ while most Jews do not follow the Scientology God known as Theta (or something like that…it’s hard to comprehend most of what Scientology says anyway). Nobody actually believes in every single conceivable God. It’s logically and morally inconsistent to believe in the God of the old testament whilst supposing that – at the same time – Thetans exist inside us (to borrow the Scientology example again). Jews are not also Muslims, Catholics and those who follow the Bahai Faith. That would certainly render the entire purpose of religion in politics (that is, to divide people based on a set of irrational superstitions) completely and utterly useless for starters…never mind the theological side.

Monotheism thrives wholly on the principle of exclusivity even though you can blatently see that, for example, Jews and Muslims worship the same theistic tyrant (who has given false impetus for both people to engage in bloodshed). You’d be hard pressed to find a Muslim, Christian or Jew who’d freely admit their God is the same as another monotheistic religion. Intelligent believers do concede that the Koran, the Bible and the Torah have many traces and evolved from a common source…but they stop short of saying that, name notwithstanding, their God is the same as each others. For the atheist, this is plain to see. Since it’s obviously inconceivable that all three Gods exist as per their relative religious texts’ instructions side-by-side (thus forfeiting their own ‘all powerful’ identity), monotheism has more than enough to answer for…

Pantheism is more curious. Spinoza espoused his own version of this and touched on the idea that perhaps pantheism is a precursor for atheism. Dawkins takes this one step further and I quote:

“Deism is watered down theism. Pantheism is sexed up atheism”

- Richard Dawkins

It would appear that if we were to truly follow pantheism, the whole concept of a powerful being is void. You might as well, Dawkin argues, call the theory of gravity the ‘God of Gravity’ and Einstein’s relativity theory the ‘God of relativity’. We have effectively supplanted the word ‘God’ with various undisputed observations about the natural world. Scientists may have already found something that links every known bit of scientific truth together. We could call this ‘one rule for all’ as some sort of God – but this might be too ironic, since a scientific explanation does not postulate what we expect to see – rather it explains it. A belief in God explains nothing.