Now, Eternal

Philosophical Challenges

One of the challenges for this notion of a timeless divine specious present, or eternal now, is to preclude it from being static or frozen, thus lifeless and nonconscious. Can there be nondurational, non-successive consciousness? Does consciousness not require some dynamism or activity? Those who answer in the positive, like the philosopher Josiah Royce, tend to insist that our durational present should remain the model for understanding the divine consciousness and its eternal now. These critics understand the divine state as still somehow temporal, although this temporal present would be much wider in scope, perhaps infinitely wider, than our human specious present. Would such a divine durational now be a temporal flow that is parallel to our time? Or would it involve some sort of temporality, some hypertime, unknown to us? Could this divine now be, instead, some sort of nontemporal, nonsequential, dynamism? Does the latter notion make logical sense? Are we to take refuge in paradox here?

It is worth noting that 20th-century physics has also addressed the notion of time and of the present now. The theory of relativity proposed a union of space with time. According to a widespread interpretation of this union, though it is still debated, time becomes assimilated to a fourth dimension of the static continuum “spacetime.” Some philosophers and scientists have objected to this static-like interpretation of time. Even Albert Einstein argued that in relativistic spacetime, the time dimension is not equivalent to the spatial dimensions. He preferred viewing space as being dynamized by this union with time, instead of time being spatialized by it. For instance, simultaneity becomes relativized in Einstein's theory. This means that the notion of “instantaneous space,” that is, the notion of all events occurring at the same time across all space, becomes problematic. Such a set of “simultaneous” events cannot be extracted unambiguously from the four-dimensional world process. This is because a point-event occurring before, at the same time, or after, another point-event depends in part on the standpoint from which the sequential observation is made. (The exceptions might be cases of causally related events.) Thus in relativistic physics, unlike Newtonian physics, past and future are not separated by a durationless three-dimensional “now” instantaneously spread across the universe. Past and future are instead better viewed as separated by a four-dimensional region of “elsewhere.”

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