Phi 105 Augustine on God and Time

Augustine on God and Time

The theory that God created the world out of nothing, has invited many questions from Christian theology, such as “Why did God choose this time instead of another?” Augustine goes to claim that God does not exist in time and that instead time was created with the creation of the world, more specifically “us”. Augustine suggested that time is a subjected phenomenon, and only exists “in the mind.” He states that the present of things past is memory, present of things present is sight, and that the present of things future is expectation.

It’s interesting to hear this theory, because recently I had watched a show on SciFi about space and time, and there was a study done specifically on how the mind perceives time, and how that when one grows older is seems to them that time is going by much quicker. They theorized that the mind may “miss a beat” and what you once perceived as seconds going by was actually much longer than that. They showed a study where an individual would click on a black circle on a computer screen, and then afterwards it would disappear and explode pink (Let’s say it was ½ a second later). After having the individual do that for a long period of time, they then made it where the pink flash would happen before the black dot went away, yet the individuals mind reset it to what it originally knew and made it seem that it was still in the same order as before.

The weaknesses I found in Augustine’s theory are at first the introduction of religion. Although at first it is based off a religious theory, a lot of the time religion and science do not intertwine very well, and are most of the time kept separate when trying to find a way to improve our knowledge of things like time and space. Another debatable weakness is his idea that the future is our present expectation. As we all know, some things don’t go as expected and can even go in directions we never even thought of, so it plays on the theory that either the...