God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.
-Nietzsche
You start off with such an interesting topic, "time."
Seriously, I'm interested, time is just not that talked about, kind of like Solipsism. It's one of those interesting concepts to sit and think through, but the answer your come up with isn't going to alter your life; if you don't believe time exists, you're either going to continue living life as you did before or you go spend some time in a room with padded walls (this also applies to Solipsism and pluralism). Yet these questions may offer some epistemological benefit, for any serious inquiry on these lines must begin with "I" and "Experience," (thus advocating empiricism as base and primary) and reason outward from that point (thus advocating rationalism as secondary, but still essential).
It ends up as interesting philosophy. Of course one must contextualize the philosopher doing the questioning, Augustine in this wasn't familiar with modern scientific theory and the concept of non-linear time (as in moment to moment progression, not the historical "time is circular" argument, which Augustine would have been well versed in). The problem isn't the pre-modernity evidenced in Augustine, instead the problem is the same encountered in Aquinas, Descartes, and plenty of others throughout the years.
God got in the way of interesting philosophy.
I'm not saying god doesn't exist, nor that the question of god is not philosophically interesting in itself, instead I'm saying that creating philosophical systems predicated on the belief in god as base causes problems. Or rather, not even the belief in god, but the belief in specific attributes about god. Descartes, for instance, started of so nicely with "I know that I exist," but went horribly awry when he started building a system around the idea of a good or perfect god.
A first cause? Sure. An intelligent first cause? If you must. A perfect creator? Why? Was it necessary?
But before Descartes was talking about the goodness of god, Augustine was talking about the "omni"s of god (omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, etc). For god to be god for Augustine, he needed to exist outside of time.
He couldn't precede time, for that would imply a regress of time to which the earlier form of time god was subject, but Augustine doesn't actually adress this point, instead time started when god created. Time, for Augustine, is still infinite, but began when god created it. Meh, ok, I can deal with that.
God's relationship to time is where Augustine starts to lose himself. As the creator of time, god exists in full knowledge and experience of every point of eternity at once (which implies gods omniscience and omnipresence, the former Augustine touches on without directly naming in book XI, the latter Augustine doesn't address in this text). This eternal-experience-at-once-ness of god is interesting in light of god as creator. If god is experiencing/knowing every moment of eternity at once, then god knows every ramification of every trait placed into a creation.
Every action committed by every-everything is known at the point of creation. Which brings up the interesting question, "Does god know what ramifications specific changes to creation will have?" If no, the god is not omnipotent or omniscient. If yes, this implies a multiplicity of timelines. Further, this sets up a deterministic system, as every outcome is determined a priori.
But the point I'm most interested in is the conflict of Confessions Book XI with the text the publishers decided to offer right after it, a dialogue on free will. In the dialogue Augustine says God gives us free will and judges our eternal resting place on the actions we commit.
Wait, what?
God knew exactly what I was going to do from the first point of creation (since he experiences every point from eternity to eternity simultaneously), knew what certain changes to my psyche may have done* (or else he is not omniscient), and still punishes those that don't act according to his wishes?
God cannot be creator, all knowing, and judge and there be a system in which any entity other than god has free will.**
Moral of the story: Don't let god ruin interesting philosophy. Don't force a train or reasonable thought down some path to prove a point, instead let it go where it will.
*say the impulse to question everything were removed, I'd probably be a happy pew sitter
**Actually, this brings up a new paradox! If we define free will as the ability to do what one desires (and of course, the definition of free will falls into contention throughout philosophy), then can god create a system in which god is still creator, all knowing, and judge where there is free will of the created?
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