If Time is Not Real, Might Eternity Be?
If you are a physicalist, the very idea of eternity appears ridiculous. It’s one of those outlandish religious beliefs that, from your perspective, should have gone the way of belief in the Holy Grail a long time ago. Science teaches us, you think, that we exist in time and in space in some kind of four dimensional world now called spacetime, and that spacetime had a beginning 13.8 billion years ago and it will have an end approximately 1.7×10¹⁰⁶ years from now. Isn’t science wonderful, that it can be so precise?
Eternity is described as either time without end or an existence without time. But, no such thing can exist in our experience because we all experience events moving from the past through the present to the future. That’s not what science appears to be saying now. So, who or what are we to believe? Our experience of what scientists today are telling us?
Time is not the only thing that we experience at variance with science. We don’t experience light beams or our new electric car as a fuzzy collection of atoms and particles operating here there and everywhere in some kind of state called superposition. But, we are told, that is exactly what they — and we — are. We experience interactions locally so that if I hit a good golf shot it the ball may go 100 yards but it doesn’t mean that something on the far end of the universe is affected by that…
