# Humanities & Anthropology > Philosophy >  Time vs Eternity

## Pararousia

I'm starting a new thread because my angle is somewhat different from "philosophical question #12" that Mycernius began. 




> I guess it all depends on your frame of refrence in respect to time.
> 
> The way I see it is this: Time is a line, not a line with a definate start or end, just a one dimensional plane running ad infinitem in all directions. You may be able to state that your existence is at a certain point on the line but you never will be able to prove it, because each frame of reference you use is based upon another and another. So thus you can only prove your existence in the 'time line' by a comparison with another event. This time line can never be broken or inturrupted or redirected, it is constant and unmoving. I do believe in the supernatural as a convenience to an explination in how to tie everything together. Imagine the afterlife or whatever you subscribe to as a realm existing outside the plane and bounds of time. This means that in ejecting from the time line/continuum you now exist at every single point in time, yet at no single point because you do not exist in the bounds of a formal line. That means that at any time you can choose to 'visit' any point in time at any place (4 dimensions) because you can from an outside refrence frame plop yourself down upon any point and time you wish, something I believe you cannot do from inside the time continuum. Thus the fact that a pseudo fate arises. That because the time is infinate in both directions, that the time continuum has and always will exist. Thus because it has always existed that means that everything has already fallen into place upon the line ad infinitem. Thus fate does exist, in my terms, only in this world. The reason I can say this is that in my time continuum everything that has happened and will happen has already happned an infinate times before since the line never began nor will end.


I haven't really organized my thoughts completely on this so please bare with me. Try to visualize the following: place a dot *.* on a piece of paper and place the paper in the middle of a football field. Now try and imagine all of our known and unknown galaxies, universes and cosmos' inside that dot. Now imagine everything outside that dot as eternity. 

*breathe deeply now before your brains burst*

I also visualize time as a river that flows with curves and banks. But I visualize time as a created thing just like space and matter. The space-time continuum didn't come from nothingness, by blind random processes. And it had a beginning, and, just as all other things we know of here on earth are running down, so is time will have an end. No human knows when that will be however. 

To quote Jill Carattini, "We are not lost and wandering in a cosmic circle of time and chance. Moreover, there is One who stood at the foundation of the world, Who with wisdom, majesty, and purpose, caused life and history to begin... God's Word places us in the timeline of our true history, delivering us from the deceptions of the enemy, telling us who we are, and where we came from, what is wrong with us, and how we are made whole. Moreover, we are told where we are going."

God's perspective is from eternity, which has no beginning or end. He knows all that will or has already happened. He can and has popped into our time-continuum at different moments in our history and will again in the future at His choosing. This is how He knows who will and will not believe because from where He is, time is completed. And, let me add, you and I are already in eternity either with God or without Him. In our time line we are making our decisions, we are choosing, we are exercising our wills. Where God exists, He already knows--it's already done.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, "God has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."

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## Tsuyoiko

Time is no different from space - it is just another way to measure reality. The easiest way to see this is to think of how to arrange a meeting with someone. You have to tell them where you are in three dimensional space, but you also have to specify a time. All four coordinates are necessary.

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## Mars Man

I have visited this thread more than once, and this is by no means the second time. This is really a big, big bite to chew on, and I should give it a lot more thought before diving head first off the Rainbow Bridge. 

It has been argued that time is an illusion anyway, a matter of entropy states that our brains see as a 'flow'. It has been argued that there is a singularity, say in a black hole, and that in that state, there is no time anyway. I don't know, but will get back some fine day; when I have the time.  :Poh:  (American joke)

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