By Babatunde Jose
For millennia, Man watched the stars of the night give way to the rays of the Sun: And chose as a point of reference the moment when daytime and nighttime are equal, the day of the Equinox. Man, aided by the calendar, has counted Earthly Time from that point on.
To identify the starry heavens, the skies were divided into twelve parts, the twelve houses of the zodiac. But as the millennia rolled on, the “fixed stars” seemed not to be fixed at all; and the Day of the Equinox, the day of the New Year, appeared to shift from one zodiacal house to another; and so, to Earthly Time was added Celestial Time.
Six thousand years ago, in ancient Sumer, what modern astronomers discovered were already known; not only the true nature and composition of our Solar System (including the farthest out planets), but also, the notion that there are other solar systems in the universe, that their stars (“suns”) can collapse or explode, that their planets can be thrown off course—that Life, indeed, can thus be carried from one star system to another.
The Epic of Creation outlined the process by which our own Solar System came into being. It mentioned all the planets in the solar system including Uranus and Neptune, the latter two being planets unknown to modern astronomers until 1781 and 1846 respectively.
As the newly-created planets’ gravities tugged and pulled at each other, some of them sprouted satellites—moonlets. One called Tiamat, sprouted eleven satellites; one of them, grew to assume the aspects of a planet, on its own (Pluto). It would not be until 1609 that Galileo discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter: but the Sumerians were aware of the phenomenon millennia earlier.
As Tiamat passed by the outer planets, it caused changes that account for many of the enigmas that still baffle modern astronomy—such as the cause for Uranus’s tilt on its side, the retrograde orbit of Neptune’s largest moon Triton, which is the only large moon in our solar system that orbits in the opposite direction of its planet’s rotation; or what pulled Pluto from a moonlet to become a planet with an odd orbit (Pluto’s unusual orbit takes 248 Earth years for it to go round the Sun).
An invading planet from another system was drawn into the Solar System’s center and was forced onto a collision course with Tiamat, resulting in its splitting in two. One half of it was smashed into bits and pieces to become the Asteroid Belt; the other half, intact, was thrust into a new orbit to become the planet we call Earth; and shunted with it was Tiamat’s largest satellite, to become Earth’s Moon. For us on the planet earth, this indeed was when time began. This was when we started counting the days, weeks, months, and year (which is equal to one orbit round the sun).
Around 147 to 127 BC, an astronomer named Hipparchus came up with the idea of a fixed length of time irrespective of the season. The hours were known as equinoctial hours which were determined using the equinox. In this method, an hour lasted 60 minutes where night and day periods were equal.
Physicists define time as the progression of events from the past to the present into the future. Basically, if a system is unchanging, it is timeless. Hence, we say God is timeless.
So, what is time? To put it simply, time is duration. We could say, then, that time is a necessary precondition for change and change is a sufficient condition to establish the passage of time. In other words, whenever there’s change of any kind, we know that time has passed. We see this as we go through life, as we age. And we cannot recover the minutes that have passed by.
Additionally, the science of physics tells us that time is a property resulting from the existence of matter. As such, time exists when matter exists. But God is not matter; God, in fact, created matter. The bottom line is this: time began when God created the universe. Before that, God was simply existing. Since there was no matter, and because God does not change, time had no existence and therefore no meaning, no relation to Him.
Scripture reveals that God lives outside the bounds of time as we know it. Our destiny was planned “before the beginning of time” (2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 1:2) and “before the creation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20). “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible” (Hebrews 11:3). In other words, the physical universe we see, hear, feel and experience was created not from existing matter, but from a source independent of the physical dimensions we can perceive. It is metaphysical.
“God is spirit” (John 4:24), and, correspondingly, God is timeless rather than being eternally in time or being beyond time.
As far as the universe is concerned, time had a beginning. The starting point was 3.799 billion years ago when the Big Bang occurred. Will time end? The answer to this question is unknown. Only time will tell.
Time, therefore, is the progression of events from the past into the future. Time moves only in one direction. It’s possible to move forward in time, but not backward. Scientists believe memory formation is the basis for human perception of time.
Ayat-ul-Kurs, Quran 2:250 encapsulates the awesome and all-encompassing powers of God: In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Allah! There is no god but He, –the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal. No slumber can seize Him nor sleep. His are all things in the heavens and on earth. Who is there can intercede in His presence except as He permitteth? He knoweth what (appeareth to His creatures as) Before or After or Behind them. Nor shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He willeth. His Throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and He feeleth no fatigue in guarding and preserving them for He is the Most High, the Supreme (in glory).
This is the “Verse of the Throne”. The attributes of Allah are different from anything we know in our present world: He lives, but His life is self-subsisting and eternal: it does not depend upon other beings and is not limited to time and space. His life being the source and constant support of all derived forms of life.
His Life is absolute Life. His Being is absolute Being, while others are contingent and evanescent, our ideas of heaven and earth vanish like shadows. Such reality as our heavens and our earth possess reflects His absolute reality. The truth is better expressed when we say that everything is His.
Barka Juma’at and a happy weekend
