Debunking the "God is Beyond Time" xtian response

[drfuzzy]

Greetings, AF-ers!

So.  I played the Easter Vigil Mass at a Catholic Church on Saturday evening.  I was sitting beside a friend who is in the medical profession - very intelligent, very scientifically-oriented. Her understanding of evolutionary biology is much stronger than mine.  At the Vigil, they read the "Creation story", the "Exodus", and a whole bunch of other evil bullshit. So, at one point, I just said - "So, the creation story is a complete myth, right?" -- expecting her to agree.  She didn't.  Her response is "No, not exactly.  It's just not couched in scientific terms, because it was written down by people who didn't have that knowledge.  But I believe that it is accurate at it's core, because GOD exists OUTSIDE OF TIME." Well.  It wasn't a good time for a debate.  This debate may never come up, really.  Her Father is not well - she's stressed.

But I know that I have read good responses to that "beyond time" fallacy.  I just can't find them at the moment.  I did a search for a thread here, (I'm pretty sure SOMEBODY brought it up!) -- haven't found that yet either. It boggles the mind, because as far as we can tell, nothing in this universe is "beyond time".  And she certainly has no evidence for her assertion.  

But if anyone has a really good explanation for why this is a fallacy, an illogical dodge - - or can point me to a good source - - I need to study!  Thanks team!

-- Fuzz

[Minimalist]

The magical sky-daddy can be anything the assholes wish him to be.  That's part of being "magic."

Scares me to think of a doctor believing in fucking magic, though.

[Alex K]

As a physicist who has worked with higher dimensions, I'd say that it isn't a fallacy but merely an unwarranted assumption. You can e.g. postulate God having His own time or times as His temporal dimensions of movement which provide Him with something like a dynamical quality (actually doing things in our sense wrt His timeline.) while looking onto our timeline as a dimension which He can access arbitrarily and see whole. This only works if our timeline is deterministic though, but it isn't in and of itself contradictory or fallacious imho.

[henryp]

You can't debunk "God exists out of time" because the entire premise is that the rules of the universe as we know them don't apply, and any logical argument you'd make would be reliant on the rules of the universe as we know them.

The flaw in 'God exists out of time' is that they have to create such a fanciful story to make their beliefs work.

[Alex K]

Exactly, and you can assume that basically none of the people using that apologetic have really thought through whether it makes sense or what it implies...

[brewer]

As a physicist who has worked with higher dimensions, I'd say that it isn't a fallacy but merely an unwarranted assumption. You can e.g. postulate God having His own time or times as His temporal dimensions of movement which provide Him with something like a dynamical quality (actually doing things in our sense wrt His timeline.) while looking onto our timeline as a dimension which He can access arbitrarily and see whole. This only works if our timeline is deterministic though, but it isn't in and of itself contradictory or fallacious imho.

Interesting. If it's in an alternate temporal dimension can it physically show up and have actions in our dimension?

And if it's outside of our time how can humans perceive it? Have humans been able to perceive anything outside of our time/dimension?

Ignorant physics guy questions.

[drfuzzy]

You can't debunk "God exists out of time" because the entire premise is that the rules of the universe as we know them don't apply, and any logical argument you'd make would be reliant on the rules of the universe as we know them.

The flaw in 'God exists out of time' is that they have to create such a fanciful story to make their beliefs work.

This was exactly my thought.  This is one of the "cradle Catholics" who simply has never questioned her beliefs - never read the Bible - her Father is very religious, so she probably got that dodge from him.   But I really think that I remember SOMEBODY giving a really good explanation of why that "outside time" bit is ridiculous.  I loved Alex's response . . . thanks Alex! . . . but that one made my feeble brain hurt a little.   

[Alex K]

As a physicist who has worked with higher dimensions, I'd say that it isn't a fallacy but merely an unwarranted assumption. You can e.g. postulate God having His own time or times as His temporal dimensions of movement which provide Him with something like a dynamical quality (actually doing things in our sense wrt His timeline.) while looking onto our timeline as a dimension which He can access arbitrarily and see whole. This only works if our timeline is deterministic though, but it isn't in and of itself contradictory or fallacious imho.

Interesting. If it's in an alternate temporal dimension can it physically show up and have actions in our dimension?

And if it's outside of our time how can humans perceive it? Have humans been able to perceive anything outside of our time/dimension?

Ignorant physics guy questions.

This question is difficult to answer concretely because it has been very difficult to write down an actual field theory with more than one time dimension which actually obeys self-consistency and all the existing experimental observations. The ideas that have been proposed include scenarios in which the additional time dimension could in principle be noticed by particle experiments, but the idea is not currently studied intensely by theorists because past efforts have not been very fruitful, and adding more time dimensions doesn't seem to solve any of the current problems in fundamental physics, at least not without breaking more than one likes to solve. So, the proposition is not very popular right now once you let Occam's razor take care of it. But once you go away from simple natural explanations and postulate a very complicated entity existing across these dimensions, all these considerations are out of the window anyways. The important thing is that the idea itself is not inconsistent.

[Neo-Scholastic]

As a physicist who has worked with higher dimensions, I'd say that it isn't a fallacy but merely an unwarranted assumption. You can e.g. postulate God having His own time or times as His temporal dimensions of movement which provide Him with something like a dynamical quality (actually doing things in our sense wrt His timeline.) while looking onto our timeline as a dimension which He can access arbitrarily and see whole. This only works if our timeline is deterministic though, but it isn't in and of itself contradictory or fallacious imho.

Indeed, it depends on one's theory of time be it presentism or eternalism or something else. As for me, I see merits to both and remain undecided. I'm not sure what theological problem the Christian friend of the OP hoped to avoid with the phrase "outside of time."

[Whateverist]

My wife has the same problem. Never seems able to be on time.