Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2010 9:28 am
As I understand Zimmerman and Padget (Padget’s easier to understand than Zimmerman), they’re basically offering a qualified version of temporal being, not a THIRD option in addition to ‘temporal’ and ‘atemporal’ modes of being. And their qualification is that sans creation God is psychologically unaware of the passage or flow of conscious experience. There are no clocks or any discrete ‘moments’ of experience that could serve as ‘countable’. So the actual infinite is avoided and God still gets enough flow to his experience. I might be understanding them wrongly, Bro
I don't know about Padget, but Zimmerman seems to be saying more.
He doesn't just say "what if there were no clocks ticking," he says "what if there were no clocks, and couldn't even be any clocks, because there were no laws of nature"--no laws of physics, and no time to be measured (other than whatever experiential, phenomenal, psychological "time" God does consciously remember.)
Zimmerman ackowledgs that "time was, in a sense, created."
M: …(and if you understood the alternative offered by Zimmerman or Padjet, you made no attempt to enlighten us.) That amounts to "suggesting we turn our brains off, shelve them, and ignore intellectual questions."
T: It doesn’t amount to that actually. You chose to understand me that way, but my not saying more, or as much as you wished, might be explained in other ways. For example, it might be that I simply assumed you understood that if ‘atemporal’ and ‘temporal’ are contradictories and I was rejecting one (atemporality), then my alternative was to hold that God is temporal. If you offer me A or ~A and I reject ~A, then by definition I've affirmed A. I didn’t know I ‘had’ to spell it out. But nevrtheless, that may be poor communicating on my part. But it doesn’t amount to suggesting that we turn our brains off, shelve them, and ignore intellectual questions.
The only alternatives I was considering were temporal (in the sense of time as we know it) and atemporal, and for you to assume that I (or anyone else reading along) would understand you as offering a qulified temporal alternative (without bothering to explain it) was offering no alternative at all.
if being a person requires feeling, knowing, and willing, and these can constitute the fullness of personal existence while being absolutely unchanging in every respect, then what ARE your problems with atemporal personhood? You say first here that you did (or do?) have a problem with atemporal personhood. Just what problems do you have with it? In other words, if unchanging feeling, knowing, and willing are not problematic qualities, what qualities constitute the objectionable sort of atemporal experience that you do have problems with? Hope my question here is clear.
I said "did" Tom.
I started this topic heading when I came across the suggestion that feeling, knowing, and willing are the essential qualities of personhood, and before that I "did" have a problem with atemporality--you're the one who said you still had a problem with it (without offering an alternative.)
Do you take temporal and atemporal to be contradictory or contrary modes of being?
No more so than conscious and unconscious.
Do you take them to be "contradictory or contrary modes of being?"