On God, Space, and Time

Akiva Vroman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351289900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Bibles

For Akiva Jaap Vroman "a day in the infinite past" is nonsense. All the days that have elapsed belong to a past of countable days; they started on a first day a finite number of days ago. Time began this first day. It follows that an eternal past does not exist. Vroman bases his reasoning on a simple mathematical law: an infinite quantity remains the same infinite quantity if a finite quantity, however large, is subtracted from it. On God, Space, and Time devotes itself to this proof.On God, Space, and Time is rooted in the epistemological thinking of Immanuel Kant and Jean Piaget and the law of Leucippus, and draws from the somewhat disparate fields of psychology, physiology, mathematics, and physics.

1

An Introduction to Reality and Imagination

We say a thing is real when we are convinced that it exists independently of the idea we have formed about it.

The term “exists” has been a source of much misunderstanding. To state that a thing “exists” does not contribute anything new about its characteristics. The German philosopher and mathematician, Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), counted existence among “second order predicates.” The statement “horses exist” belongs to the category “horses are numerous,” and it does not tell us anything new about horses per se. There have even been philosophers who included existence with occupation, and made statements such as “existing things are engaged in existing.” But the nonsensical statement “unicorns do not exist, they have better things to do” may open their eyes.

The term “existence” has very often been confused with “essence.” Essence delimits an object by its definitions; but even an exhaustive description of all its properties does not imply that the object really exists. We may imagine hobgoblins, but they will not be real—even if we ascribe to them all the attributes that may cross our minds, down to the last invented detail. The essence of hobgoblins has therefore nothing to do with their existence. But it is hardly possible to prove that hobgoblins do not exist. Tomorrow we may be shocked when we meet a real hobgoblin!

But this is an old story: the reasoning of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). He wrote: “Whatever and however much our concept of an object contains, we must go beyond it in order to ascribe existence to it.”¹ Nevertheless, we may demonstrate that our mind may imagine things that do not exist, and that we may even provide proof that they do not exist.

We are able to give free play to our imagination. We may keep our minds on a star of a galaxy in the remotest part of the cosmos, and entertain the illusion that it is over there in exactly the same state as we now physically see it. However, we must be well aware that this is nonsense because of the finite and constant velocity of light.

But we can just as well imagine a day in an infinite past as being an infinite number of days behind us—such as our day of birth. Our next step is to inquire if such a day in the infinite past can really exist. For example: we can check the next day and all the following days that move towards the present. The day in our minds becomes tomorrow, and after today it will retreat into the past and become yesterday. Then after the lapse of another day it would become the day before yesterday.

Time passes and we would expect that the lapse of every additional day would bring our day closer and closer to the day of our birth, to the point where the two days will coincide. But this first day of our existence will never arrive, for we assumed at the very outset of our reasoning that an infinite number of days separates the day we kept in mind from the day of our birth.

You must keep in mind that the passage of time does not skip even one day. Time counts all the days. There would be no end in time’s counting of the succession of days if the counting would start at a day in an infinite past. The days would lapse, but the dawn of known history would never rise, and we and all previous generations would never have been born.

A day in the infinite past is therefore nonsense. So we are forced to accept the only alternative: all the days that have elapsed belong to a past of countable days. They belong to a past that started on a first day a finite number of days ago. Time was created with this first day. And, as we do not call our own existence into question, it follows indeed that an eternal past does not exist. Time must have a beginning. This reasoning is based on a simple mathematical law that is often ignored.

An infinite quantity remains the same infinite quantity if a finite quantity—however large—is subtracted from it.

Let us apply this law to our day in the infinite past. An infinite number of days has to elapse before the day of our birth will break. This infinite time will never decrease, hence it will never become finite and then become zero. This follows from the simple reasoning that the duration, which is the total length of elapsed time measured from our chosen starting point, can never grow into an actual infinite eternity. It must always remain a potential infinite duration.²

Time is not an independent parameter. We cannot imagine velocity without time. Velocity is the time in which a moving object covers a certain distance. There is no movement without time, and in the absence of time all the objects would be at a standstill. Stop reading for a moment and take a minute to try and imagine a world without movement. The atoms in crystal latices would not oscillate with their clock-work precision, and would be in state of freeze at absolute zero degrees. Light would be absent, planets would not orbit around the stars, nor the stars around the neighboring stars. This would be an absurd situation. The force of gravity will draw all matter to one point and into naught. But this is equally absurd because such a process would need time which did not exist. The world is unthinkable without time. The world has a beginning, and it began to exist the moment time came into existence.

The alternative is that there has been a time-interval, a duration between the moment time came into existence and the moment when the world came into existence. This is a strange supposition because we are unable to comprehend a time-interval that in the absence of moving and changing objects is immeasurable in principle.

Let me elaborate: Our mind is a rather odd machine which knows from experience that the world is not static, but that it changes all the time. On the other hand it refuses to accept changes—it deems them arbitrary and whimsical. Just as we do not accept different things on the two sides of the equal sign of an equation, we tend to eliminate change by accepting a cause that brings about the effect. Each cause is linked to its effect by time interval. The law of cause and effect is unthinkable without time. This conflicts with the law of logic. Time does not play a part in mathematical logic. If A equals B, A does not equal C after B equals C, but because B equals C.³

It is clear that an equilateral triangle did not obtain three angles of sixty degrees after the sides became equal, rather the triangle is equilateral because the three angles are equal. In contrast, water boils after it has been put on the fire. But a causal link is not merely a link of temporal sequence. Our mind turns the “after” into a “because,” which means that we infer that putting water on the fire brings about its boiling.

Our conviction that this causal link exists is not enhanced by repeating this experiment continuously. Professor Jean Piaget stated, correctly, that this conviction does not depend on our sense perceptions. The law of Leucippus⁴—that every change must have a cause—is something innate in our mind. It is a law of thought on an equal footing with our other laws of thought, such as the laws of thought established by Plato and Aristotle—the so-called three laws of logic. Immanuel Kant called these laws a priori synthetic judgment.

The great miracle is that in our daily lives we are never disappointed by experience. The course of events always complies with our anticipation—in this case the anticipation that water will boil whenever we put it on the fire.

Why indeed should the external world be concerned with the laws of our anticipation? The mental law of cause and effect is so much part and parcel of our mind that it was taken for granted until the twentieth century. It is a law that has to be reappraised with the discovery that Kant’s synthetic a priori is a valid mental instrument under normal circumstances; but that the rules break down in the world of very high speeds—of very large gravitational forces—where the geometry of space is curved. And equally so in the world of nearly infinitesimal smallness of subatomic dimensions, where the speeding particles have no exact location and may even exchange identity when one particle crosses the fairway of another.

Notes

1.  Critique of Pure Reason.

2.  A potential infinite is defined as a finite that grows and grows but can never become an actual infinite—although the end of its growth is never in sight.

3.  The science of dealing with our innate ways of thinking is called epistemology. Immanuel Kant was one of its pioneers and the modern psychological aspects were studied by the Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget (1896–1980.) Piaget was a professor of child psychology and wrote numerous books on the subject. See Bibliography.

4.  Leucippus, a Greek philosopher, lived during the fifth century B.C. It is believed he proposed that matter is made up of indivisible and infinitely small atoms. He is regarded as the mentor of Democritus (c. 460–370 B.C.); but he lived in a past so dim that some doubt he ever existed.

2

The Modern Vindication
of the Existence of the Creator

That the world must have a beginning and must have been created out of nothing, the Creatio ex Nihilo, was already discovered in the early Middle Ages and followed the lines of logical and causal thinking; that is, not all from the consequences of our sense perceptions (modern physical experiments did not exist then). It was the first instant that it was discovered that our innate laws of thinking are, in a way, deficient—that impeccably rational thinking leads to an irrational conclusion. That everything we perceive has been created out of nothing. The reasoning, nearly 1500 years old, opened with the book Contra Aristotelem by the monk John Philoponus. The issue was taken up anew by the Muslim Kindi and finally brought to perfection by Saadyah Gaon (882–942).¹

William Lane Craig described this history in The Kalam Cosmological Argument. This discovery was of tremendous theological importance, because of the association of the Creatio ex Nihilo with the principle of a First Cause. A term is very often used as a definition for God. God is a Something we experience as Nothing that created everything out of a Something—the same Something we experience as Nothing.

It took the medieval Cosmological Argument (CA) of the Kalam School² three centuries to ripen. Then it sank into a long oblivion of thousands of years. This misfortune was caused by the very man who started the argument, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.). The Greek philosopher was well aware that actual infinites do not exist. He knew they only exist in the mind of the mathematician; but he believed without any practical reason that he was permitted to exempt time from this rule. He disbelieved in the real existence of time, and I have summed up his superstition with the following poem:

The past we forget

the future is not yet

the present is their joint

but it is just a point

Hence he believed that there is nothing real in time—it exists in the imagination.

The second factor that buried the Kalam Cosmological Argument for so many years was the great respect for Aristotle among the thinkers of the Middle Ages. The CA was regarded as a revolt against Aristotle’s garbled thinking about time. And it was so indeed. The modern view is that everything exists which is measurable, and that there is no other parameter that may be measured with greater precision than time. It is, moreover, a fact of life that there is no other parameter that kills more cruelly than the lapse of time—aging.

After a thousand years the Kalam Cosmological Argument has been resurrected as an archaeological curiosity by Dr. Herbert Davidson and by Harry Austryn Wolfson. William Lane Craig immediately recognized the enormous theological consequences.³

Albert Einstein (1897–1955) developed his own vision of time. He believed that time did not lose its reality, but the rate of its flow became dependent on the relative velocity of objects. It was realized that the Maxwell-equations⁴ of the electromagnetic field (light) imply that the velocity of light in space is invariable. As a consequence, the constant rate of flow of time went by the board, and a fourth linear dimension had to be added to the conventional length, width, and height that mark Euclidean⁵ space to describe the movements of objects. This fourth additional dimension contains the parameter time. But our imaginative faculties cannot conceive such a four-dimensional cosmos.

Albert Einstein’s original idea was that the cosmos is invariable as to its volume—it could neither shrink nor expand. But that was his conclusion until corrected (independently) by the Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter and the Russian Alexander Friedmann who drew Einstein’s attention to a miscalculation.

Einstein was broad-minded enough to admit mistakes, but this one had deeper philosophical consequences. It meant that Einstein’s universe must expand continuously.

I have reason to believe that it was not the future of the universe that annoyed him, rather it must have been the consequence of the “flash back” (what happened at the beginning). A cosmos expanding out of nothing. This conclusion went against the grain of his worldview, which was purely an idealistic one, and the argument that God and nature are the same⁶ had suddenly to be rejected. God could no more be identified with the gigantic clockwork of the revolving galaxies. He must have created it.

It seems that Einstein was wise enough to quit in 1923 from his view that the cosmos is static as to its volume. But in that same year his theory of relativity⁷ (proposed in 1905) implied much more than the original Kalam CA. It established the creation of time and space in a distant past and it revealed an inkling about the circumstances. But it was still nothing but a brilliant theory. The world waited eagerly for corroborating facts.

The first confirmation came with American astronomer Edwin Hubble’s⁸ discovery in 1930 of the red shift of the spectral lines from the light of the distant galaxies. The shift of the spectral lines to the red side of the spectrum (the side of the longer wave length) may only be explained as a speeding away of the radiating celestial bodies—the galaxies. This conclusion has been contested by several skeptics, such as Patrick Shaw (logics lecturer at the University of Glasgow).⁹

Shaw warned against the following reasoning: “Let us assume that the universe is expanding. If it were, then the spectrum of the furthest stars should show a shift towards the red. This redshift is precisely what we find. So we can assume that the universe is expanding.”¹⁰ And Shaw added the following warning: “Invalid as it stands. We need a way of blocking alternative explanation of the shift...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. An Introduction to Reality and Imagination
• 2. The Modern Vindication of the Existence of the Creator
• 3. God: The Ontological Argument and the Argument from Design
• 4. God, Mind, and Body: Part 1
• 5. God, Mind, and Body: Part 2
• 6. The Spanish Intermezzo
• 7. Spinoza: The Aftermath of the Spanish Intermezzo
• 8. The Very Few Jewish Idealists after Spinoza
• 9. The Legacy of Spinoza
• 10. The Development of the Concept of Space-Time
• 11. Immanuel Kant and His Spiritual Inheritance
• 12. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Max Wentscher
• 13. Charles Darwin and the Ensuing “-ism”
• 14. An Introduction to Ignorance
• 15. Religious Eschatology, Part 1: The Jewish Messiah
• 16. Religious Eschatology, Part 2: The Christian Messiah
• 17. Religious Eschatology, Part 3: Apocalyptic Revelation in Psychological Science
• 18. Religious Eschatology, Part 4: The Fate of the World in the...
• 19. God and Moral Virtue
• 20. The Modern World against God
• 21. The Question of Life and Death: The Medical Approach
• 22. Bridging the Chasm between God and Mankind in Judaism
• 23. On the Future of Humanism and Divine Justice in Judaism
• 24. Worship and Service in Prospect
• Index