Thor Q. Mada

I have asked this before but never got a really satisfactory answer.
My proposition is as follows:

An eternally living being, OK, call it god, cannot be aware of us living on an entirely different time scale.
For example we would not be aware of living things around us that are born , live, and die in a fraction of a second as compared to our time line.
What I mean is the 5th dimension is actually an unlimited number of dimensions, and if the speed is different enough, one cannot be aware of the other.
Thank You

Stephen T-B

Since gods are mythical, they can be as irrational as the human imagination requires them to be, so it’s no problem for an “eternal” god to be present everywhere at every time, whether that be possible or not.

One of the good things about being supernatural is that “natural” constraints simply do not apply

Theophage

Howdy Thor,

You may be right that an eternal being would not be able to notice the lives of little mortal beings like us, but probably not in the same way as the analogy you gave.

In your analogy, we, who measure our lifetimes in decades, are generally not aware of things whose lifetimes are measured in microseconds. This is mostly true, but not because of the comparitive lengths of our lifespans. The reason why we don't notice things of such an ephmeral nature is due to our senses and our nervous systems. We simply cannot percieve things (normally) that happen in too short of time. The hypothetical immmortal being may not be so constrained with his/her/its sensing apparatus, and so the analogy fails.

But even given our human limits, we have most certainly built devices to increase our sphere of awareness, so that we can notice and pay attention to things which happen measured in both nanoseconds and nanometers. Is it inconceivable that a sufficiently clever immortal being would not be able to do this also? Especially if we were created by said being with our time and space parameters precisely a to his/her/its desired specifications?

But I do have to agree with you somewhat; it seems very strange that the an eternal, all-mighty, and all-knowing master of the universe would be interested in what a particular clever primate was doing with its naughty bits at any given moment.

Thor Q. Mada

Thank you guys, and of-course, yes, an eternal living being would only be interested in us if he was bored??
Coming to think of it, we would then be like a pet , where this eternal being is playing with. And like a child, he can be very cruel??

Gnomelord

Not touching this post with an 8-foot Swede.

fando

There is science fiction about sentient stars that don't notice the presence of beings like humans because a star's plasma-based nerual system operates on a much longer timescale. IIRC, Pohl wrote one book where all the stars in a galaxy went about blowing each other up in a massive war and humans could do nothing about it. Wish I could remember the title...

Jesse

Olaf Stapledon's classic 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker also featured intelligent stars which didn't recognize planet-based lifeforms as intelligent, and were going nova because they considered them to be a dangerous infection (the story is about the history of intelligence throughout the cosmos, so this little drama only takes up a few pages).

paul30

Time, as I have maintained in other threads, is not a reality "out there" but only a concept in our heads.

It is our way of understanding change and recurrence.

Many have said that no, time is a real fact of the external universe; but it is no more real than beauty--and no less real.

So time is always seen differently by different people, and way differently by different classes of being.

The word "eternal"--meaning lasting forever--probably has no meaning. If, however, it means the timeless sense all of us contain within our unconscious (and which we experience, for example, in dreaming), then it has meaning: roughly, that all events are essentially simultaneous.

Space (yes, I know time and space are the same) also has no "external" reality. It is not just an emptiness in which stuff bangs around. It is a relationship. This is true on all levels from the quantum to the cosmic, and maybe even between dimensions.

seebs

I think the theology is questionable. Eternity isn't just a very long time scale; it's bypassing the notion of time entirely. One way of thinking of it is to just treat all of time as a single very complicated "present". Very different from our normal view of time, but everything fits better.