Note: I think Engels was incorrect about the possibility of the unchanging transitioning from an unchanging state to a changing state. We can conceive of it; so it's not, strictly speaking, impossible. As I quote Graham Oppy in Stubborn Credulity, "'The universe exists changelessly and timelessly with an eternal determination to become a temporal world.' Sounds fine to me!" (52). I don't know how well such a rebuttal would be received by the general public. Also, professional philosophers would probably disagree with Engels about a "motionless state of matter [being] … one of the most ridiculous of ideas…" Why ridiculous? There are no logical contradictions involved. As Michael Martin argued, "One possibility is that the creator or creators of the universe created it out of something that existed in some timeless realm" (Atheism: A Philosophical Introduction, Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990, 104). When confronting the "man in the street," I don't recommend bringing up such an idea, even as a fallback position. I strongly recommend reading Engels's words quoted here as well as Oppy and Martin.
In his critique of Dühring, Engels assumed arguendo that time had a beginning. He then asked, "What was there before this beginning?" Instead of answering the question immediately he asked what he believed to be the same question in more exact verbiage: "If the world had ever been in a state in which no change whatever was taking place, how could it pass from this state to a changing state?" His answer is particularly relevant for those interested in theology:
The absolutely unchanging, especially when it has been in this state from eternity, cannot possibly get out of such a state by itself and pass over into the state of motion and change. A first impulse must therefore have come in from outside, from outside the universe, an impulse which set it in motion. But as everyone knows, the "first impulse" is only another expression for God … [H]owever infinitely small the parts into which Herr Dühring minces his transition from non-motion to motion, and however long the duration he assigns to this process, we have not got a ten-thousandth part of a millimetre further. Without an act of creation we could never get from nothing to something.
Engels is using Dühring's premise that "time exists only through change" here. Given this premise, no time implies no change and no change, according to Engels implies no matter: "A motionless state of matter is … one of the most ridiculous of ideas…" Even if we conceded the possibility of motionless matter we must then wonder how it was "loaded with force." We are left with grave difficulties, as Engels explained:
[F]irst, how did the world come to be loaded, since nowadays guns do not load themselves (?) … [S]econd, whose finger was it then that pulled the trigger? We may turn and twist as much as we like, but under Herr Dühring's guidance we always come back again to - the finger of God. (Engels 1939, 59 - 69)
The first edition of Engels' book was published in 1885. That same decade, an author suggested that it is an illusion that "there is a three-dimensional world enduring in time". Instead, he claimed, "the world is a four-dimensional spatial manifold". In the twentieth century, this "block universe" hypothesis was seriously endorsed by esteemed scientists and philosophers. As G. J. Whitrow explained,
[T]his hypothesis has been powerfully reinforced by the space-time interpretation of the theory of relativity. From the point of view taken by Einstein and also by Weyl, "The objective world simply is, it does not happen." … In other words, the relativistic picture of the world recognizes only a difference between earlier and later and not between past, present, and future. (Whitrow [1961] 1963, 293 & 308)
This idea appears to be an ancient one; long ago, Parmenides wrote that existence wasn't always, "nor will it be, since now it is, all together." (Prigogine 1997, 10) The lay public may be surprised that the "block-universe" hypothesis has been, in modern times, canonized. This will be clear to anyone who recognizes the following fictional exchange:
Dr. Manhattan (John): Why does my perception of time distress you? … Everything is preordained. Even my responses.
Laurie: And you just go through the motions, acting them out? Is that what you are? The most powerful thing in the universe and you're just a puppet following a script?
Dr. Manhattan: We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings … There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet. (Moore & Gibbons 1986 - 87, IX, 5 & 6)
If this dialogue was between two ordinary characters it would still be noteworthy. What makes it even more significant is that Dr. Manhattan is God, essentially. What he says is, therefore, infallible truth. (In the fictional book about Dr. Manhattan by Professor Milton Glass excerpted in the graphic novel, Glass wrote, "On the newsflashes coming over our tvs on that fateful night, one sentence was repeated over and over again: 'The superman exists and he's American.' I never said that … What I said was 'God exists and he's American'.")
[redacted]
[redacted] quoted Stephen Hawking because he believed that Hawking disagreed with the Intelligent Design movement. William Lane Craig's criticism of Hawking was briefly mentioned. Because Craig is a well-known philosopher of time, this is the place to examine his teaching more thoroughly. Prior to Hawking's best-seller, Craig published a book where he explained the two competing theories of time, the A-theory and the B-theory. He wrote,
The commonsense view of time (called the A-theory) holds that temporal becoming is objectively real and that future events do not in any sense exist. Only the events of the present are real; future events are but unactualized possibilities. On the other hand, a good number of scientists and philosophers reject the commonsense view of time. They hold the view (called the B-theory) that the passage of time is purely subjective and events in the future and past are every bit as real as events in the present. The only reason we are in the present is that we are conscious of this particular moment. But people in 1775 and 2075 are conscious of their respective moments as present. There is no privileged present. All moments and events - whether past, present, or future to us - are equally real and existent, and the difference between them is a subjective feature of consciousness. (Craig [1987] 1999, 79)
After Hawking's book came out, Craig attacked it. According to him, Hawking's model "is rife with controversial philosophical assumptions…" For example, Hawking was accused of "spatializing time" and, therefore, "implicitly reject(ing) the A-theory". According to Craig, "(Hawking's) statement concerning the universe as he models it that 'It would just BE' is an expression of the tenseless character of its existence." In other words, Hawking has adopted a B-theory of time. (Craig & Smith [1993] 1995, 288 & 295) It gets even worse for [redacted]. According to physicist Don Page,
The question as to whether God created the universe is not directly related to whether the universe has an edge, even though many people think it does. It's actually somewhat irrelevant. For example, I've drawn a couple of straight lines on a piece of paper. This straight line here has two ends: you could say this end is a beginning and this one is an end, if we imagine time going that way … You might think of this as one model for the universe, a universe that has a beginning and has an end. Then there's another universe shown in this circle, where, as time goes across here, in some sense there's an earliest time; but if you follow the line in a circle, the line has no end, it just goes around. But I myself drew both of those lines, so in a sense I created them both … It's through faith that we can ask the question of whether it was created by God. That is a question that science can neither affirm nor refute. In his book, I think Hawking is careful not to come out and say directly there is no God. He just says: What place then for a Creator?...
Page felt that "the concept of time itself breaks down near the beginning…" (Hawking 1992, 136, 140 & 141, emphasis added) This view, however, is controversial. It is not unanimous among physicists. For example, a famous physicist has written that no one has shown that "conventional ideas of time and causality must fail when a singularity is approached. Until the theory forces us to face it, or at least until someone explains clearly what it would mean for time to cease to exist, it would perhaps be best to put this possibility to one side while discussing cosmological problems." (Smolin 1997, 82)
The nature of time is important because atheists, when confronted with Kalam-type arguments (like the ones discussed in the previous chapter) can, as a last resort, endorse a B-theory of time. ("Time starting and stopping is no problem for the block-universe picture, within which what's real is the history of the universe taken as a timeless whole." (Smolin 2013, 74)) This is still a live option because of the brilliant scientists who subscribed to this theory. When it comes to the pronouncements of some scientists, the public, we are told, is credulous. (A social scientist once complained, "The layperson believes Stephen Hawking when he writes that an electron can be in two places at the same time, but scoffs in disbelief when Milton Friedman writes that free trade makes the U.S. richer." (Murphy 2007, 147)) Paul Davies, whose work I've relied on in earlier chapters, was unequivocal in his embrace of the B-theory or tenseless view of time. ("The objective world is spacetime, with all events, for all time, included. There is no present, no past, no future." (Davies [1980] 1982, 46)) Theologians use Davies' work too. If they treat Davies like an authority it would be ad hoc for them to condemn atheists for agreeing with him.
The B-theory of time enables scientists and philosophers to avoid a genuine beginning of the universe. For example, the metaphysical naturalist Richard Carrier can write sentences like "(The multiverse) 'begins' at a tiny point and … most likely ends in an endless curving expanse - but both beginning and end exist together." He claimed that most scientists today are B-theorists. [redacted] Carrier conceded that the "B-Theory" of time is "certainly a very difficult concept to grasp" (Carrier 2005, 88 & 89) [redacted] [Dan] Barker compared time to a large spherical object:
We have read about the hypothetical ant crawling on the surface of a huge beach ball. Like flat-earthers wondering where the edge of the world was, no matter where the ant moves, it will never get to the end, to the edge. Every point on that surface is the same, so we might just say that every point is the beginning and every point is the end. The same is true with the dimension of time. Every instant is now. Every point in time is the "beginning" and every point in time is the "end". (Barker 2008, 138)
If this passage bothers you, you're in good company. At least one major scientist had, to put it mildly, misgivings about "the tradition of spatialized time." Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, claimed, "I am certainly not the first to have felt that the spatialization of time is incompatible with both the evolving universe, which we observe around us, and our own human experience." According to Prigogine, it is not true that "relativity implies the spatialization of time." (Prigogine 1997, 58, 59 & 171)
At least one physicist has endorsed the A-Theory. John Polkinghorne wrote that the future "is not already formed ahead of us, waiting to reveal itself to our exploration, as the fixed contours of a valley reveal themselves to the traveller who makes his way through them. The future is in part our creation…" (Polkinghorne 1989, 79) Even an undeniably mainstream physicist has expressed discomfort with the tenseless view of time:
Maybe there is a way to … really view ourselves as four-dimensional objects that only perceive our intersections with a three-volume. So in a sense we are solid in four-dimensions, there is no time, only the sequence of our perceptions as we intersect a three-surface that we interpret as the spatial world. It becomes clumsy trying to discard time. It's difficult to imagine motion of any kind without a concept of time. So even the sequence of intersections implies an ordering of that series which contains in it something we might as well call time. Any discussion of time has time ensnared in it. (Levin 2002, 112)
The tenseless view is a weak reed to hang any metaphysical position on when physicists, in general, no longer can be expected to come to the B-theorist's defense. According to Sean Carroll,
Concerning the debate between eternalism (B-Theory) and presentism (A-Theory), a typical physicist would say: "Who cares?" Perhaps surprisingly, physicists are not overly concerned with adjudicating which particular concepts are "real" or not. (Carroll 2010, 25)
If this is, indeed, the disposition of physicists today then the nature of time is once again a philosophical issue, as it has been since the days of Archimedes and Aristotle.
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