Is the Moving Now an Illusion if God is Omniscient?

Could it be that what is, for better or worse, called “the moving now” is an illusion, or, to put it a little more cautiously, could it be that at the deepest level description of reality there is no point in time that has the special status that we think this very moment has?

One widely held form of theism is committed to the  proposition. It is a usually unnoticed corollary of the combination of two widely held theological positions.

Suppose God is Outside of Time and Omniscient.

In orthodox theism, God is omniscient in a strong sense, that is, God knows all propositions that are now, have been, or ever will be true. This contrasts with the view of Geach, Swinburne, and others that God does not know everything about events in the physical world that are not yet causally determined.

It is at least a well represented minority theology that God is timeless, that is, “outside” of time. This contrasts with the theology on which God is everlasting, having existed already through an infinity of time.

Strong omniscience has often troubled theists who also want to maintain, as nearly all do, that human action is free in a strong sense – a sense incompatible with determinism. A timeless God has been embraced by some as a way out of apparent contradiction in God exactly foreseeing the result of radically free, uncaused, choice. C.S. Lewis takes this line in his best seller Mere Christianity.

But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call ‘tomorrow’ is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call ‘today’. All the days are ‘Now’ for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way—because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for Him. Mere Christianity, Book IV, ch 3, p 170 in Harper edition

I am not here going to address the merits of this position on free will and determinism, and I will stay well away from an examination of it as a theory of the nature of God. (For example, I will not consider whether something that is outside of time can have the attributes of a person or is consistent with the Bible narrative.) What I want to think about is only the consequence of the view for a theory of time, and particularly for the moving now.

The Moving Now Would Be an Illusion.

Being outside of time, on our hypothesis, God has no now. He can distinguish the past direction from the future direction of the time-line, but there is nothing that privileges any moment. Each of them is now for whatever sentient time-bound beings happened to be around at that time, but from God’s perspective, that is only creature-now. Our now, right now, is indistinguishable for God from all the other nows that have been and ever will be.

This is the point at which the assumed strong omniscience of God comes in to yield the striking conclusion that our moving now is an illusion. If God knows everything, and God cannot distinguish one moment from another with respect to now, then there really is no difference between one moment and another with respect to now. There can be no moving now because God does not see now moving. Therefore, it must be an illusion of ours.

A Limitation of Finite Mind?

Why would God permit us to be deluded about something so basic as the nature of time? One answer that has circulated is that we perceive things in time because it would be too much for finite intelligence to handle reality unless ordered in the way time orders it. The moving now permits us to encounter reality serially instead of all at once, as Lewis's God does.

Clearly, it is right that a finite intelligence cannot take in everything at once. It does not automatically follow from this, however, that finite intelligence could not be outside of time and observe it as from above. We are working here on the assumption that such as-from-above observation is not itself an unsound idea. The only question, then, is whether, given that it is possible for infinite intelligence, it is also possible for finite intelligence?

The time-line might itself only contain a finite number of finitely describable points. If so, it could be perceived as from above by a finite, if perhaps capacious, mind. Suppose, however, that the time-line is infinite either to the past, the future, or both, or that it is finite in length but mathematically dense, or that at least some of its points are infinitely informationally rich. In these cases a limited mind will not be able to comprehend it all. But so what? I do not take in all of the detail of the landscape when I look down out of a plane's window, but I still do see it as from above.

I conclude that our subjection to the great illusion of the moving now, if such there be, must be a matter of God's policy rather than metaphysical possibility. Perhaps living through time moment by moment is ideal for the development of a moral character or faith. I will, again, not head down this path.

We can conclude that, although we are subject to the moving now illusion, angels or space aliens might not be depending, again, upon policy considerations.

Kant would be to the contrary, certainly for us, and probably for angels and space aliens. The conclusion that we could, in at least some metaphysically respectable sense of “could,” escape the illusion of the moving now is flatly at odds with Kant's theory that our experience is only made possible by the imposition of the form of time (including the moving now) upon what is experienced. 

Kant was surely right that ordinary experience of the world is thoroughly temporal, and that imagining the contrary is difficult at best. Once, however, we hypothesize the existence of experience as if from above the time-line on the part of God, the difficulty of our imagining what that it would be like for us also to be free of the illusion no longer counts for anything. Something unimaginable is going on; if for God, then why could it not be for us as well?

So starting with the Lewis hypothesis, we are left with the conclusion that it is simply a fact about our lives in this reality that we are stuck with the illusion of the moving now. Angels and extraterrestrials might or might not be similarly deluded.

We Would Have Immortality of a Sort.

That the moving now is an illusion has the surprising consequence that we get a certain kind of immortality free. Every moment of your life is fully real in the deep and important sense of “real.” Your tenth birthday party exists no less than your reading this sentence. Neither of them will ever go out of existence. This bears some resemblance to Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, literally understood, in which you will live your life, exactly the same in every detail, infinitely many times. Like eternal recurrence, timeless reality of your entire life may not seem a fully satisfactory form of immortality. It is unlike an afterlife in which you get to do new things and have novel experiences. Perhaps, however, the immortality we would have were the moving now only an illusion seems unsatisfactory to us partially, at least, because we are under the illusion.

Should We Accept the Illusion Conclusion?

Do we have good reason to believe in immortality of this peculiar sort or in the underlying thesis that the moving now is an illusion? There may be other arguments in their favor, but so far as I have explored the theses here, their support depends upon some pretty controversial premises: that there is a God; that this God has knowledge of all propositions that ever will be true; that there is free will in a strong sense, a sense inconsistent with physical determinism and foreknowledge; and that the idea of a timeless perception of the entire time-line is conceptually coherent.

We might be getting ahead of ourselves in publicly declaring that the moving now must be an illusion or that our unending personal existence is metaphysically guaranteed. 


For what taking seriously that there is no privileged now might mean for personal identity over time (that it is an illusion!): https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2019/06/time-relativity-and-mayfly-self.html. 

For the possibility that the moving now is real, but there might be more than one moving now:  https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2017/07/two-or-more-moving-spotlights-of-time.html.