The Nature of the Universe 3 Naturalism and Timelessness

Naturalism has its own irrationalities; the very idea that there is no time or space outside of the boundaries of the physical universe is one of them, however, of late, even the Naturalists have violated this tenant. The unscientific religions belief is called the multiverse theory, and, even with no evidence whatsoever is gaining ground because, like the billions of years theory, “science” needs it because their probabilities are all way off so they jump to a “scientific” mysticism, claiming things are true without any evidence.

However, if the idea that dimensions are everywhere that is real is extended beyond the last particle of the physical universe which allows the physical universe to expand into something, then they are correct.

Stated differently, dimensions are everyplace that is real (as opposed to “natural” or, of nature. Let’s give naturalism one point for that idea, but they misunderstood where that reality reaches because of a preconceived notion that is false, that is, only the universe exists and there is nothing outside of it.

The question is what is real? What actually exists?

Recognize that for your ideas, theories, and thinking in general to exist something other than physical things must exist.

I am using my body to encode into the English language an idea that exists in my mind, and you are reading it from a computer, most likely in the same coded language to understand that idea. No mass or physical matter has traveled from my brain to your brain transporting something physical so you can have this thought. This is metaphysical.

I covered this previously but it is worth repeating. No one lifted up a rock and discovered naturalism. Naturalism is an idea, and ideas are metaphysical by nature, not physical, they exist in the mind, ergo, if the naturalistic theory is correct, that is, only things we can sense are real, then it is false because it isn’t “real” since it cannot be sensed until a mind uses a body to express it to another person with a body which can hear it, using the same coded language, written, as here, or verbalized then translated into a thought or idea that enters into the mind of the other person.

A person speaking a different language will not catch the idea, even if they hear it since it is a coded message, that is, it is transmitted in a specific language, but it can be translated into their language. An animal can hear the words but will never understand the idea because it is a human metaphysical idea.

So, something other than physical things exists.

It is obvious that only terms whose dimensions are the same in some respect or that interact in a domain can be equated or measured in any manner whatsoever.

To measure length, an instrument, say, a ruler, must have some length, it must already be a portion of the domain which is measured. Note that you cannot use a ruler to measure duration of existence; you need a measuring instrument and a metric that incorporates change in time because existence and time are always “now.”

A digital watch uses a change in time, from one second to the next to display a progressive display of numerals, while analog clocks display time by a change in position or location of the hands of the clock.

Both types of time measurements, and all other time measurements measure a segment of a dimension, duration, that really exists and is already present, or it could not be measured.

To attempt to relate or equate, to associate or compare dimensions that are unrelated and relate some value to them produces absurdity.

Let’s take a number and an equation with variables you can calculate, numerals 4 and 2 and write an equation that reads 4/2=2. You can also replace a numeral 2 with one, or two algebraic variables: 4/x=x (replaces 2 with one variable x), or 4/x=y (replaces 2 with two different variables). You can also write it completely with variables like so: w/x=x or w/x=y, however, there must be a dimension that is similar or the equation is absurd, there must be a way to relate them to each other.

Let’s reverse the left side of the equation so it reads 2/4. Take the statement x/w=y and let x=2, w=4 and y=New York City. This variable specification made the equation nonsense because it now it means: 2/4=New York City, which is absurd unless there is some shared dimension, domain, or property such as population, then it would be at least proper to claim that New York is 2/4 the size of Tokyo (so then it would be claiming 2/4 is the fraction of NYC when compared to Tokyo). However, this is then subject to falsification and at this time that statement is false, NYC is >20M and Tokyo >33M, so the equation is in error (it should be about 2/3), but that 2/4 is not then absurd, it is simply in error, it is false.

Try using the metric of inches or millimeters to measure time. It simply does not work because it is the wrong dimension.

In order for things in different domains to interrelate they must share at least one common dimension. The way humans work is that the brain links two domains, the physical and metaphysical domains.

Why do we know the brain is in the physical domain and the mind is not? We know this because with a fair amount of regularity people die or nearly die and then are revived and they come back with testable knowledge of places their body and therefore their brain and senses have never been.

There is no physicality involved, nothing projected into the physical domain traveling through walls, yet they return with facts about physical things, events, and visual experiences they would not otherwise have.

“Godisnowhere” is a good way to compare the two ideas because it points to the fallacy. Of course, where you put the breaks in this run-on phrase makes the difference between “God is now here,” and “God is nowhere.”

For you Christians, this is your point of no return. You now must deal with the idea that cannot be true that if God is outside of time, he does not exist because having no time is equal to saying his duration is zero, he has no endurance. Is this what the Bible claims? Read Psalms 136 where the theme that actually runs through each verse, that is, it is stated 26 times is “His love endures forever.” How often must it be stated? His endurance is perpetual.

You are precisely at the point the Roman Catholic Church was with Galileo. You need to make up your mind and become more rational. (Not atheistic, more rational about the God of the Bible. What you have been taught about God is a false Greek myth, not the Bible which repeats virtually thousands of times exactly the opposite.

The Godisnowhere phrase is cute, but do you realize that if what I am saying is false, if God is not also in the same dimensions we are, then God is in fact logically nowhere. He has no location to be in or to be described in. God is in no location at all. Heaven is also nowhere. Now you have a problem with the Biblical text because it claims Jesus is permanently in a physical body, and that he is in heaven, but, according to this belief, heaven is not a place, it is in fact no place, and a physical body necessarily is someplace or it does not exist.

This is irrational, and the Bible is not irrational, your doctrine is.

Don’t jump to conclusions, I will stand on the Nicene Creed.

You are at a crossroad. I know you are uncomfortable right now, but keep reading, I can make you very comfortable just ahead.

Additionally if God is outside of time then God does not exist “now” because there is no “now” without time, which is always “now.” Ergo, it is false that God is “now” “here,” it would be true to say God is nowhere by your definition. Is that how you think of God? I don’t think so.

Before you fall into that trap let me remind you again that the Bible claims Jesus is in an eternal, glorified physical human body and the location of that body is in heaven right now, that is, in time, and a specified location. These are descriptions requiring dimensions for them to be true statements, but I will not pretend to know where that is. I do know in Daniel that it took time for an angel to traverse distance from heaven to earth.

Remember your Bible: Jesus, after the resurrection, appeared, ate, drank, walked, talked, and presented his hands (forearms) to Thomas to touch to confirm he was real. Thomas responded by addressing him as “my Lord and my God.”

It really is self-obvious that man lives in a universe as partly described herein. It is less obvious that this must be true of God also for him to exist at all in any real manner. (Millions of ‘gods’ exist in peoples mind only, but that is not what the Bible claims of God, is it?)

Let me be very clear, I am not claiming a pantheistic god, that is, the god that Einstein claimed when he said “god does not play dice with the universe.” Einstein did not believe in an objective supernatural personal being, or even an objective personal being, in fact he believed in naturalism which is the absurd belief, as above naturalism claims that the only things that exists is nature, that which can be sensed by man.

This idea led Einstein to absurd mistakes still limiting “natural science” such as the speed of light being a constant and that nothing else exists outside of the universe, or Ptolemy’s perfect spheres surrounding a geocentric earth. Naturalism continues to fail at describing the world as it really is, and continually makes errors and fault models.

I am speaking of a personal, all powerful creator God, an objective being who lives outside of our physical universe but did create that physical universe as something different from himself. The God who revealed himself and told us true things about the universe that we could have not otherwise known, and some of which are being proved by modern science as I write. There is very good evidence what the Bible tells us is true, and in the last one hundred and fifty years, it has overthrown nearly every challenge to things that can be verified found therein.

You must differentiate that from the choices various churches have made in their doctrines based on non-Biblical ideas, theories, and thoughts. The Catholic Church accepted a mixture of the Greco-Roman cosmologies, a little from Aristotle, a little from Ptolemy, and that was their error. The naturalism of Aristotle interpreted in Ptolemy failed as does the worldview as a whole.

But ask, where does the idea of naturalism, and I am speaking here of the naturalistic theory, exist? It is not something that was discovered.

Now I can describe a simple thought experiment using something most of us have unfortunately had some experience with, dead people.

When a person dies all of their thought go with them. You cannot dissect the brain and find the idea.

Remember that a computer works a little bit like a brain in that it stores information similarly using an electrical code that needs to be interpreted before it is understood. But interpretation of each requires an intelligent mind.

In a computer the human mind created the software that can interpret, but in a human that mind is gone when one dies. Here is where the analogy breaks down: Sometimes people die and then return. When they return they return with data that is verifiable sometimes about places the brin, housed inside the body had never been. The ideas that had went with the mind somewhere the brain had not been. This is not physics, it is metaphysics.

Naturalism fails to explain why there are persons, that is, beings with personality beyond the simple naturalistic chemical determinism resulting in purposeless man and chemicals interacting in a purposeless manner resulting in what we refer to as “thought” that have no more meaning than snail slime on the sidewalk, or carbon dioxide dissolving in water.

So, what else can we say about the metaphysical world? How else can we know things about it?

Remember deductive logic? We can deduce things by using principals we have discovered then reasoning to something else that must be true.

Let’s deal with the idea of God: Is it reasonable, that is, rational to believe that God exists?

I believe there is more than sufficient proof that it is rational to believe he exists.

Does this surprise you? Didn’t I just bash the idea into pieces?

No, I didn’t. Like the irrational belief of the Catholic Church in Ptolemy’s cosmology which caused them to retract from the arguments of science, I am arguing you have the wrong model. Just the opposite reaction is called for, throw out the argument and keep the God of the Bible.

So, first, let’s logically prove some supernatural being exists and we will look to our Islamic friends for the basic argument.

The Kalam argument is an Islamic development of an argument stated by Aristotle, and later revived by Christians, most recently the focus of Dr. William Lane Craig.

In the classical form it is stated like this:

1. Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe has a beginning of its existence.

Therefore:

1. The universe has a cause of its existence.
2. If the universe has a cause of its existence then that cause is God.

Therefore:

1. God exists.

We can abbreviate this.

Bill Craig states it like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Think for a minute.

If the universe has a cause, then the cause is outside, or super-natural.

Inanimate things don’t cause other things to come into being, they can only be forced into change by other physical things, that is, molten granite can form a pluton, being forced into a crack by external pressure, and as it cools slowly can form crystals such as turmaline, but that is not creating something besides itself, it is forming something out of itself, of components already present by purely thermodynamic and chemical processes. In all of our experiences we see only living things causing other things to come into being.

Additionally, we never see and never have seen, and never will see anything except living things giving life to living things. Granite makes inanimate turmaline, not living, growing, thinking animated turmaline.

So the cause of the universe must be animate, i.e. alive. Also, things don’t create other things that are more powerful than themselves. The granite above cooling slowly does not create a mass of turmaline with more mass than it has, rather, less mass. So the living creator of the universe must of necessity be the all-powerful being we call God.

Though some quantum mechanics scientists deny the premise, claiming something does spring from nothing, those arguments use some extremely unreasonable logic and unproved scientific theories to create this denial, and so will be ignored, and they depend on speculative physics and twisted mathematics to prove quite literally that everything is nothing at all.

Self-denial seems counterproductive to intelligence.

However, the cause demanded by the argument is necessarily supernatural (outside the universe), more powerful than the universe (things cannot cause things greater than themselves), and must have been personal to explain where personality comes from, and be intelligent because the information, say just in the DNA is greater than all human intelligence has produced during our existence and it is at a higher state of organization. So the necessary cause of the universe is supernatural, intelligent, and personal. Since there can only be one all-powerful supernatural person, we who speak English refer to this being as “God.”

Naturalism is simply absurd. It fails to explain most of human experience, most of reality. Everything that is important to you as a person cannot be explained by Naturalism.

However, we need to deal with the false belief of most of Christendom that God is outside of time. Simply put, this denies he exists, as above, and simply must be rejected as what it is, a false Greek idea about their ultimate being, and the top god of their pantheon of gods. It is an absurd belief, but take comfort, it is not from the Bible.

For you non-Christians out there, now you have something to beat up your Christian friends with.