A Peircean Semiotic Analysis of Time

8/16/2019 A Peircean Semiotic Analysis of Time

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The question of God's relationship to time is an old one inphilosophy and theology. In his book The Coherence of Theism,Richard Swinburne wrestles with this question and arrives at someinteresting conclusions. Assuming that God is in time in somethingvery like the ordinary-language sense of the term "in time,"Swinburne arrives at a strongly temporally restricted concept of divine omniscience and omnipotence.

In this paper we will examine the issues of God and time with whichSwinburne struggles. We will bring to bear on the issues a Peirceansemiotic analysis of time, in an attempt to see whether temporalassumptions more relaxed than Swinburne's can shed light on thesequestions. Our conclusion will be that, in fact, lurking inSwinburne's assumptions regarding a God in time is a particularassumption which a person who affirms a God beyond time wouldprobably share. If we reject this hidden assumption, then we canhold coherently both to the position that God is in a strong sense

"in time," and to stronger versions of omnipotence and omnisciencethan Swinburne can allow, versions compatible with humanfreedom.

Swinburne's Position on God and Time

Swinburne proposes the following definition of omnipotence:

A person P is omnipotent at a time t if and only if he isable to bring about the existence of any logicallycontingent state of affairs x after t, the description of theoccurrence of which does not entail that P did not bring itabout at t, given that he does not believe that he hasoverriding reason for refraining from bringing about x.(CoT, 160)

Swinburne argues to this definition from an initial, much simpler

definition: "a person is omnipotent if and only if he is able to do anylogically possible action." (CoT, 149) Here he substitutes "logicallypossible state of affairs" for "logically possible action," since certainindividual actions can logically "only be performed by beings of certain kinds, and a being S cannot (logically) be a being of allthese kinds at the same time." (CoT, 150) The observation thatthere are certain "logically possible state[s] of affairs which it islogically impossible for anyone to bring about"-- for example,retroactive influence on the past-- leads to the further qualificationthat omnipotence at time t involves only those states of affairs aftertime t which are "logically compatible with all that has happened atand before t." (CoT, 150-51) For the sake of logical coherence,Swinburne makes the additional restrictions that the state of affairsbe "logically contingent"-- that is, both it and its negation coherent-- and that it not be required to be an uncaused state of affairs ("the


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description of which does not entail that P did not bring it about att"). (CoT, 152) Finally, to take God's freedom into account,Swinburne adds the last proviso, "given that he does not believethat he has overriding reason for refraining from bringing about x."(CoT, 160-61)

Similarly, Swinburne argues for a time-bound definition of omniscience (CoT, 162). Swinburne defines "omniscience at time t"as follows:

A person P is omniscient at a time t if and only if heknows of every true proposition about t or an earlier timethat it is true and also he knows of every true propositionabout a time later than t, such that what it reports isphysically necessitated by some cause at t or earlier, thatit is true (CoT, 175)

The reader will notice that this definition omits knowledge of the

truth of propositions concerning contingent future states of affairs.Swinburne claims that such a restriction is necessary to preserveGod's freedom and to make room for human freedom, unless weare willing either to deny human freedom or to posit a God outsideof time (CoT, 176-77).

Both these accounts of omnipotence and omniscience are rooted inSwinburne's assumption that the eternity of God is to be conceivedin a manner roughly equivalent to the traditional notion of

sempiternity: "God is eternal" means "God has always existed andwill go on existing forever." (CoT 210-11) Such an existence in timewould differ from the temporal existence of finite creatures by andonly by its infinite extension into both past and future. Swinburnerejects the idea of an immutable God who "does not change at all"as incompatible with the affirmation of a free and living God (CoT211-15). He also rejects the notion of a God beyond time in whom"there is no temporal succession of states," as taught by Augustine,Boethius, Aquinas, and others. Swinburne rejects this notion

because timelessness implies immutability and also becausetimelessness "seems to contain an inner incoherence": simultaneityis ordinarily held to be a transitive property, which would imply theabsurd conclusion that in God all instants of time are simultaneous(CoT 220-21).

Our Assumptions in This Paper

In this paper we will grant, for the sake of the argument, three of Swinburne's assumptions: (1) that, in some appropriately qualifiedsense, God leads a timelike life, and is not timeless or immutable;(2) that it is worthwhile to try to talk of this timelike existence of God in ordinary language; and (3) that a coherent statement is"one such that we can understand what it would be like for it and


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any statement entailed by it to be true." (CoT, 12) We will alsoassume the structure of Peircean semiotics which we will introducein order to be able to carry out a semiotic analysis of time.

A Sketch of Some Aspects of Peircean Semiotics

Any student of the semiotics of C.S. Peirce will realize that any brief description of Peirce's thought must of necessity be incomplete.Peirce's voluminous writings, few of which ever saw print during hisown lifetime (1839-1914), have been reduced to something like astate of order in his posthumous Collected Papers; but the result isstill rambling, repetitious, and filled with obscurities andinconsistencies, as a result of the growth of Peirce's thought overthe years. Fortunately, we will need only a portion of the fullPeircean semiotic apparatus for our present purposes.

Semiotics may be understood as the attempt to see all knowledge

and experience as a structured system of signs and symbols ininteraction with one another. The most familiar example of such asystem of signs is human language. But Peircean semiotics is notrestricted to this narrow model. In fact, language, thought,emotion, sense perception, formal logic, mathematics, physicalaction, human existence, and the workings of nature itself are onlya few of the processes which can be seen as special cases of thePeircean semiotic sign. Since Peirce's sign is completely general , hissemiotic purports to yield an ontology , a philosophical analysis of

being: your every thought and experience is a sign; you are a sign;creation as a whole, and each thing which lies or could lie in it, is asign.

Yet Peirce's semiotic can be trained on any phenomenon as a suppleand subtle method of analysis to yield often surprisingly detailedand concrete insights. This "double-barrelled" combination of complete generality and concrete particularity arises out of thecorrespondingly "double-barrelled" nature of the three universal

categories on which Peirce's semiotic is built-- categories whichPeirce called Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

A universal category is something which is found to be present inevery phenomenon, "one [category] being perhaps more prominentin one aspect of that phenomenon than another but all of thembelonging to every phenomenon." (CP 5.43) Thus, Peirce's claim isthat his categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, in oneway or another and to one degree or another, appear in every

phenomenon which we could possibly encounter.

The "double-barrelled" nature of the categories derives from thefact that each category can be described both from a formal,combinatoric, logical viewpoint, and from a material, descriptive, phenomenological perspective. These logical and phenomenological


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aspects can, so to speak, be taken as two sides of the same coin.

Firstness, in its logical aspect, is monadic . It is whatever is what itis by itself , without comparison or interaction or relationship toanything else; independent of any "other," pure, spontaneous,original, sui generis. Phenomenologically, Firstness is any possiblequality of feeling taken by itself, whether "the color of magenta, theodor of attar, the sound of a railway whistle, the taste of quinine,the quality of the emotion upon contemplating a fine mathematicaldemonstration, the quality of the feeling of love, etc." (1.304)

Imagine that state which sometimes comes over a person on thebrink of sleep, when on the edge of consciousness a quality springsunbidden into the fading awareness and fills it without division ordistinction: "nothing at all but a violet color," or "an eternallysounding and unvarying" musical note. Such a quality-- or rather,the possibility of such a quality-- is a near approach to sheerFirstness (1.304). As embodied in experience, an instance of

Firstness may be very broad and general-- for example, the entireGestalt , sensory and mental, which an entire landscape or story orhistorical period evokes in one-- or it may be very particular-- forexample, the quality pertaining to that fifth rung on the bannister of your staircase, with the funny little horsehead-shaped chip out of the paint on one side of it.

Secondness, in its logical aspect, is dyadic . It is a First as it standsover against a Second, regardless of any Third; being in

relationship to an Other ; the action of cause and effect, stimulusand response, action and reaction. In its phenomenological aspect,Secondness presents itself as brute fact, as struggle and opposition,shock, surprise, effort and resistance. It is the hard, uncontrolledgivenness which we encounter in experience.

Peirce's favorite example of Secondness is that of trying to open adoor that is stuck:

Standing on the outside of a door that is slightly ajar, youput your hand upon the knob to open and enter it. Youexperience an unseen, silent resistance. You put yourshoulder against the door and, gathering your forces, putforth a tremendous effort. (1.320)

Or imagine the steady tone of a musical note, which is suddenly cutshort: the tone is an instance of Firstness, as is the silence whichfollows. But the transition between them is a moment of Secondness. (1.332) Secondness is the hard, here-and-nowfacticity which makes an object an actual individual and not just abundle of potential qualities. A vision of the cosmos, à lanineteenth-century physics, as a mere collection of hard billiard ballatoms bouncing and colliding mechanically with one another, is avision of a world of sheer Secondness.


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Thirdness, in its logical aspect, is triadic . It is a First bound togetherin relationship with a Second by the mediation of a Third: "Thebeginning is first, the end second, the middle third." (1.337) It iscombination, pattern, structure, mediation, continuity. A monad canform no combination with another; two dyads can join only to formanother dyad (think of two lengths of pipe screwed together); buttriads can combine in arbitrarily complex combination (think of atinkertoy set, or of the colored plastic beads in a chemistry classwhich can snap together to form models of molecules).

In its phenomenological aspect, Thirdness is continuity, process,growth, and development; it is any manifestation of law, regularity,generality. It is rationality, intelligibility, predictability, habit; mostimportantly, it is representation and signification: "A sign stands for something to the idea which it produces or modifies... That forwhich it stands is called its object ; that which it conveys, itsmeaning (the sign itself); and the idea to which it gives rise, its

interpretant ." (1.339) Each sign which comprises knowledge andexperience is such a semiotic triad, composed of object, sign, andinterpretant.

Each sign, as an instance of Thirdness, has to it a hypothetical, "if-then" status: Firstness is potential, Secondness actual, Thirdnessconditional; Firstness can be, Secondness is, Thirdness would be(given appropriate conditions).

A sign is a continuous, dynamic process, since the interpretant towhich a sign interprets an object is ipso facto itself a further sign of the same object. Peirce spells this out precisely in a formaldefinition:

A Sign... is a First which stands in such a genuine triadicrelation to a Second, called its Object , as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant , to assume thetriadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the

same Object. (2.242)

This formal definition, which embodies a logical structure known asdirect recursion, has an interesting implication: (1) in any sequenceof related signs and interpretants, each element serves as both signto interpretants following and interpretant of signs preceding, butthere can be no first or last element to the sequence; (2) as appliedto any finite span in a sequence, statement (1) and direct recursioniterated infinitely many times imply that elements of the sequenceconverge (as an infinite subsequence) to either endpoint of thefinite span; (3) applying statement (2) to every possible spantraversed by the sequence implies that the semiotic sequence is infact a linear continuum, and thus that the semiotic process can beseen, in the ideal, as a mathematically continuous progression froma selected sign to a selected interpretant along a mediating


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temporal continuum.

The reader can perhaps here see our semiotic analysis of timealready lumbering into view around the bend. Indeed, Peirce seestime as built out of Thirdness, just as space can be (largely)constructed out of Secondness. But several more remarks arenecessary before we meet our analysis of time head on.

The first remark involves the vagueness of Peirce's three categories.Firstness and Thirdness can be more or less vague; Secondnessalone is always totally precise.

Firstness is vague inasmuch as one can compare two qualities onlymore or less approximately. Walking down a garden path, you see ared flower, and then a minute later you encounter another redflower. How close is the redness of the first flower to the redness of the second? You may be able to form a fairly good offhand judgment-- but by the nature of things it cannot be altogether

precise. You might increase its precision by holding the two flowersup together for comparison; you might make your judgment verynearly precise by subjecting the colors to a spectrographic analysis.But notice how each increase in precision is bought by introducingSecondness more and more prominently into the situation; and, inthe final case, Secondness has come to predominate very nearly tothe exclusion, or at least irrelevance, of Firstness!

Likewise, Thirdness is more or less vague inasmuch as meaning

must be at least slightly indeterminate in order to function at all.For example, the word "chair" is of the nature of a general law,instantiated in each object which is capable of being rightly termeda "chair." The word must have some free play in it-- must beapplicable to a more or less broad and fuzzy-boundaried class of entities-- if it is to be meaningful. And the same holds true of anymore complex sign, be it a statement, an argument, a ritual, abelief system, a human being, or the wide world itself.

Indeed, the more common or important a sign, the more vague itwill tend to be. Thus, as Peirce often remarks,(cf. 6.494), one'sdeepest feelings, one's deepest beliefs, one's concept of God will alltend to be very vague indeed. This vagueness is not to be confusedwith the inchoate: for such signs to become more finely articulatedby becoming richer in semiotic structure is one thing, but for themto become precise by the simple abolition of vagueness would be tosuck them empty of meaning. In the former case, one might end upwith the Apocalypse of St John as read by the person in the pew if

vagueness grew faster than structure, or with Barth's ChurchDogmatics as read by a theologian if structure outpaced vagueness.But mere abolition of vagueness would bring one in the end to thestate of those philosophers in Gulliver's Travels who made theirlanguage perfectly precise by pointing mutely to objects carriedabout in sacks on their backs: language reduced to sheer


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Secondness!

The human being as a sign stripped of all vagueness would be,under a Peircean view, no longer a sign, but a mere algorithm: anobject, a thing of mere Secondness, an "It." For Secondness aloneis never vague, its precision the precision of a world of billiard-ballatoms in mechanical collision.

We must also note the approximativeness of the categories. Dueboth to the hypothetical nature of thought, and to theobstreperousness of reality, Peirce stresses that his three categoriesare to be seen as only an approximation to reality as experienced, amodel subject to growth and revision, though, thought Peirce, arelatively good model as is.

Not unconnected with this approximativeness are what Peirce callsthe degenerate categories. In addition to genuine Firstness,Secondness, and Thirdness, Peircean semiotics works with a

degenerate Secondness and two degrees of degenerate Thirdness.

Degenerate Secondness is, logically speaking, a dyad more or lessdecomposed into a pair of monads, or instances of Firstness.Phenomenologically speaking, one can think of a less than fullydynamic existence of one item relative to another.

The first degree of degenerate Thirdness ("first-degenerateThirdness") is, logically speaking, a triad more or less fully

decomposed into a congeries of dyads. This decomposition is inpractice usually only approximate: most first-degenerate signs willfall somewhere on a graded continuum between the ideal endpointsof fully genuine Thirdness and fully first-degenerate Thirdness.Phenomenological examples vary as widely as an object which onehas selected by pointing it out, a remark uttered without furtherexplanation, or an individual instance of a sign. In the limit, a pureworld of first-degenerate signs would approximate to, for example,a stream of consciousness composed of sheer events and brute

facts: think of the rapid-fire barrage of sound bites, remarks, andincidents on the evening news!

The second degree of degenerate Thirdness ("second-degenerateThirdness") is, logically speaking, a triad more or less fullydecomposed into a congeries of monads. Again, this usually onlyapproximate condition can be thought of as continuously variablebetween genuine Thirdness and full decomposition. Somephenomenological examples would be a photograph, the possibility

of red as a warning of danger, or the idea of schematic diagrams. Inthe extreme, a pure world of second-degenerate signs wouldapproximate to, for example, a stream of consciousness made up of a montage of images, feelings, and sounds: imagine the experienceof watching a rock video on MTV!


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This brief exposition of several of the basic elements of Peirceansemiotics will supply the tools for our semiotic analysis of time. Wewill begin by considering briefly the options available to us underPeircean semiotics. Then we will subject the selected option to asemiotic analysis. Finally, we will explore the implications of ouranalysis for Swinburne's views on God and time.

Peircean Semiotic Options Relevant to Our Discussion

Discussions direct and indirect of God, time, and divine attributescan be found throughout Peirce's Collected Papers. Unfortunately,on these points even more than on many others, Peirce was not of a single mind. Out of the welter of Peirce's remarks emerge four notnecessarily reconcilable approaches, the first and fourth of whichPeirce himself seems to have embraced:

(1) We may assume that language regarding God is semantically

too vague for us to get a useful direct handle on the attributes of God. This seems to be the gist of Peirce's essay, "Answers toQuestions Concerning My Belief in God," (6.494-521) in which hesays of omniscience:

"Do you believe [God] to be omniscient?" Yes, in a vaguesense. Of course, God's knowledge is something so utterlyunlike our own that it is much more like willing... [But] wecannot so much as frame any notion of what the phrase

"the performance of God's mind" means. Not the faintest!The question is gabble. (6.508)

Peirce's recourse here is instead to something like a semiotically justified argument from the consensus gentium! (6.497-502) Thisindirect alternative, though clever, is not in line with the second of the assumptions which we have granted to Swinburne.

(2) We may assume that God can be spoken of as being, in some

sense, "Pure Self-Consciousness": Peirce illustrates this (5.71) withthe example of an infinitely detailed map of a country held over thesoil of the country. Somewhere on the map lies a copy of the mapitself, and somewhere on the copy an even smaller copy of thecopy, and so on, in infinite regression. The limit point of thesequence of copies, which is second-degenerately triadic, of coursecontains no copy, but stands directly over the point which it itself represents!

This alternative would seem to yield a temporal analogue to thecharacterization of God's spatial omnipresence as being like thepresence of a sphere with center everywhere and radius nowhere!But such a temporality would seem quite timeless, contra the firstof our assumptions.


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(3) We may assume that God is " Absolute Idea," that is, that God'stime is to be characterized by a perfect unity and continuitycovering and unifying all time (8.125). Although, as Peirce pointsout, this conception lies at the opposite end of the scale from thatof pure self-consciousness, it leads by another route to a similarlytimeless notion of God's time as an instantaneous eternal moment.

(4) Peirce also affirms-- without explanation, and sometimes in thesame breath (8.124, 8.312)-- both that God is in time, and thatAugustine and the others were essentially correct in their"atemporal" arguments reconciling foreknowledge and free will!

Although this sounds incoherent on the face of it, and althoughPeirce leaves it for us to put the pieces together, our semioticanalysis of time will lead to the conclusion that Peirce is speakinghere coherently, and that Swinburne's approach to the issue isconsequently too narrow.

A Peircean Semiotic Analysis of Time

The flow of time is, as we have already seen, for Peirce altogether amatter of Thirdness, that is, a matter of signs. The continuity of signs is constitutive of the temporal flow. Everything we canexperience, we experience as a complex of signs. Thus everythingwe experience has temporality, belongs to our experience of theflow of time, by virtue of the continuity which, as a sign, everything

experienceable possesses.

It would thus be tempting for us to think of our experience of timeas if it were perfectly modelled by the mathematical continuity of aline-- a perfect "time line." Indeed, Swinburne seems to doprecisely this, with his talk of time "at time t" or before or after"time t." And for most practical purposes, this "time line" doesprovide a fairly good model for our experience of time, which afterall does seem superficially to flow much like a continuous line.

Indeed, in those human contexts such as the physical scienceswhere Firstness and Thirdness can in principle be very nearlybracketed out of the picture, a mathematical time line will do for allpractical purposes, due to the precision of Secondness.

But from a Peircean semiotic viewpoint, this confusion of the "timeline" as a sign with the object which it represents may bedisastrous. Time as we actually experience it-- what Peirce calls"real time"-- is also of the nature of a sign, but it is subtly different,

and far richer, than what Peirce calls "mathematical time." Ourmodern tendency may be to assume that the mathematical time of science is somehow more "real" than time as we experience it. ButPeirce, though he holds both kinds of time to be signs representingtime itself, argues as an objective idealist (cf. 6.24-25) that our realexperience of time is a hypothesis closer in important ways to the


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is, due to the vagueness of Thirdness, made up not of instantaneous points in time (like mathematical time), but rather of moments of small but positive duration (6.110, 6.126). Theduration of a moment may vary. At their briefest, experiencedmoments merge like the separate images on a film blendingtogether into a motion picture: "It is of no consequence... whetherwe are only conscious in a series of detached instants, like theseparate pictures of a zoötrope." (8.113) At the broadest, ourimage of the past several seconds "is almost or quite of the natureof a percept." (8.123, fn.20) Think of the experience of hearing ashort remark or a phrase of music as a Gestalt : one can focus one'sattention on shorter intervals in the span, but the point is that onedoes not always do so.

Given any two such moments, one comes before the other "unlessthey are independent of one another, or contemporaneous." (1.495)Such contemporaneity or simultaneity, unlike that of mathematicaltime, is not necessarily transitive: while sitting in the kitchen, you

hear your teakettle start to whistle on the stove. Suddenly, youhear two knocks on the front door in rapid succession. The sound of each knock is simultaneous with the sound of the teakettle, but thesounds of the two knocks are not simultaneous with one another.Similarly, one moment can be contained within another: while youglance momentarily toward the camera, the flashbulb goes off.

Our real timeline is now beginning to look something like a row of overlapping shingles, a jumble of fuzzy-boundaried bits and

fragments of various lengths-- just like Peirce's real-timemodification of his "Heraclitan river." The next observation to makeis that, if two elements distinguished in the temporal flow of one'sexperience are simultaneous, they must differ in respect of someinstance of Secondness or of Firstness.

For example, if you are looking at two books on your bookshelf atonce, then those two books, even if otherwise identical, must differfrom one another by their relative spatial location-- that is, by

Secondness-- though if you are simply taking in the wholebookshelf at a glance, this relationship between these two booksneed not stand out, and likewise if you focus in upon the two booksyou may make even finer simultaneous distinctions regarding themin terms of Firstness and/or Secondness.

Or if, in looking at a single book, you notice two of its qualities atonce-- for example, that the book is red and that the book isduodecimo-- then even if those two qualities occupy the same

extent in space and time, they differ by being distinct qualities--that is, by Firstness-- though you may just as well experience thequality of feeling associated with the book as a Gestalt , or you maymake even finer distinctions regarding a quality of the book-- forexample, that the book is a faded scarlet red just tending toorange.


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One's flow of temporal experience, decomposed according to thesedistinctions, yields a flow of fuzzy, overlapping moments, eachmoment further decomposed into something like a living jigsawpuzzle each "piece" of which is distinguished by spatial orexistential relationships (Secondness) and/or by qualities of feeling(Firstness) which are not experienced as being further subdivided.Of course, this jigsaw puzzle includes both one's experience of theouter world and one's inner experience. "Puzzle pieces"distinguished by Firstness will have relative to those distinctionsmore or less indeterminate "boundaries." Two pieces simultaneouswith a third are not necessarily simultaneous with each other.

Each piece of this puzzle is a semiotic sign, and all these signsassembled into the jigsaw puzzle constitute one's experience of theflow of time. The sometimes somewhat fuzzy boundaries betweenthese pieces are nothing other than the discontinuities, the partialdecomposition into dyads or monads, characteristic of the two

degrees of degenerate Thirdness. Clearly, according to our analysis,it is the formal pattern of these boundaries among the "pieces"--that is, the complicated structure of partially degenerate instancesof Thirdness-- which constitutes the contours of one's experience intime, the discontinuities in Peirce's "Heraclitan river."

Our analysis has broken real time down into its constituent signs.But we could just as well proceed in reverse and build real time upfrom the individual (perhaps vague) signs into more and more

complex and inclusive structures in time. Phenomenologicallyspeaking, the contours of real time would more or less stronglymark off one episode or incident in one's experience from another.Think of the more or less indefinite boundaries which separate thevarious acts which make up an activity, the various activities andincidents which make up the events of a person's daily life. Eachincident is built up in a contoured way out of smaller incidents, andis itself included along with other incidents within the contours of incidents still more complex.

Logically speaking, this is equivalent to saying that real time can bebuilt up according to a type of structure which mathematicians referto as a "tree." The contouring of events would be structurallyequivalent to the branching of the tree.

"A Thousand Years Is as a Single Day..."

"Now a consciousness whose time-span was a thousandth of asecond or a thousand years would not ordinarily be recognized byus... as being a consciousness at all." (8.124) So Peirce crypticallyremarks in one of the obscure passages where he asserts both thatGod is in time and that "the time-span of the All-seeing must coverall time." Now that we have carried out our Peircean semiotic


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analysis of time, we are in a position to try to make sense of thisfourth of our Peircean options regarding God and time.

Let us refer to the model of real time developed in our analysis astime1. Time1 is a model of time as human beings live through time.

There are several clearly identifiable features to time1: the vague-

boundaried moments which range in duration from a fraction of asecond up to a few seconds; the relational and qualitative "jigsaw"

of signs and signs-within-signs into which each moment can bedecomposed, and out of which the moments themselves are builtup into larger events; and the contours which our experience withintime possesses due to the structure among these signs. Note thateach of these features ranges over a limited scale of magnitude. Intime1, moments are only so brief or so long, experiential

distinctions subdivide the world only into so fine a "jigsaw" andintegrate it into unities only so large, and the contours of experience are only so rich and so dense.

"Now a consciousness whose time-span was a thousandth of asecond or a thousand years..." Peirce's remark suggests thefollowing revision of time1: let time2 be that model of real time

which results when we remove the restrictions on the magnitude of the features of time1 and let those parameters vary without bound.

The contours of experience under time2 would in their general

structure resemble those under time1, but whereas time1 contours

are comparatively sparse, time2 contours would be arbitrarily

dense, and incomparably richer and more detailed than time1contours. Think of the dense weave and design of a fine Persiancarpet versus the open weave of a fishing net. Likewise, thedyadic/monadic jigsaw of signs under time2 would be incomparably

more finely subdivided, and incomparably more broadly unified andintegrated, than that under time1. Think of a view, not merely of a

head of hair, but of each hair on the head (and on every head).

Most important for our present considerations, any given point intime would be included, under time2, in moments briefer than any

assigned interval, as well as in moments as long in duration as anyspan of time one cares to name. This would imply moments of time2 (perhaps a great many moments) which would embrace the

entirety of time.

We would have to broaden the notion of simultaneity for time2. In

the case of time1, all moments are of nearly enough the same order

of magnitude that, although time1 simultaneity is not strictly

transitive, it is still very close to the precise simultaneity of mathematical time. Two moments are either "simultaneous" or "not


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simultaneous." In the case of time2, with the duration of moments

varying across a broad spectrum from the very, very brief to thevery, very long, two moments would be "simultaneous" less as thediscrete two-value comparison of two points on a line ("identical/notidentical") and more as the continuous two-parameter comparisonof two line segments on a line ("coincident/partially coincident/notcoincident" and "commensurate/less commensurate").

Temporal flow under the time2 model would be even more"dynamic" and "timelike" than under time1 (consider the greatly

more detailed contour density). There would be moments beforeand after other moments, as under time1; but there would be at

any moment m2 no "waiting" for any subsequent moment m3 and

no "loss" of any previous moment m1 in that there would be a more

comprehensive moment m0 which would embrace m1, m2, and m3by being simultaneous with each of them. The time2 model would,

as duration of moments decreased without bound, approach in thelimit to the totally second-degenerate Thirdness of Peirce's semiotic"pure self-consciousness." Conversely time2 would, as duration of

moments increased without bound, approach in the limit to theuncontoured, fully continuous genuine Thirdness of Peirce's semiotic"absolute idea." Between these two ideal limits would "stretch" theentire finely articulated time2 structure as already described.

The analog to knowledge under time2 would be as preserving of

freedom as knowledge under time1, and time2 simultaneity would

imply that at any moment m1 there would be knowledge of states

of affairs at a later moment m2 in the sense that there would be a

more comprehensive moment m0 simultaneous with m1 and

simultaneous with m2, and knowledge at m0 would embrace both

knowledge at m1 and knowledge at m2. Due to the arbitrarily

detailed contouring and subdivision of time2, knowledge under

time2 would be arbitrarily comprehensive, detailed, and integratedknowledge.

The analog to intentionality under time2 would, as under time1,

involve an event a1 at m1 producing a second event a2 at m2 later

than m1, as a means to the production of a third event a3 at m3later than m2, such that a1 is a sign of a purported object b to

interpretant a2 and such that, if object b obtains, then a2 will be an

effective means to a3 from a1. However, since under time2 there isalways a moment m0 embracing m1, m2, and m3, then by

knowledge under time2, event a2 would always be capable of being

an effective means for producing a3 from a1 whenever a3 is a

semiotically possible outcome of the state of affairs at m1.


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The reader will notice that our entire account of "time2" is a

semiotic construct-- what Peirce referred to as a semiotic "diagram"(cf. 2.148), and what many of us would call a "thoughtexperiment." Taking the model of time2 purely as a "diagram" in

this sense, and bracketing any questions regarding the possibility of its actual existence, there seems according to the third of ourassumptions nothing any less logically coherent about time2 than

about time1.

The reader may note that, unlike Swinburne, we have been verycareful not to attribute to God the structure we have developed. Wewould claim for it nothing more than the status of a Peirceansemiotic "diagram"-- though the reader may also notice that thefeatures of time2 bear quite a striking resemblance to what many of

us may inwardly imagine when we try to conceptualize the life of God as a "timelike" life!

For the contours and subdivisions of the structure of time2 would

offer a structure of temporal experience both arbitrarily moreintegrated and more unified, than that of time1. The temporal flow

of time2 would be even more dynamic and timelike than that of

time1, and yet under time2 no moment would ever have to be

either awaited or lost. Knowledge under time2 would be arbitrarily

finely detailed and arbitrarily well integrated in such a way as to

accommodate something very much like comprehensiveforeknowledge while preserving freedom-- precisely whatSwinburne cannot allow under his account of omniscience.Intentionality under time2 would be capable of embracing an entire

course of events simultaneously so as to be capable of shaping thatcourse of events unfailingly to any desired result which is asemiotically possible outcome of the initial state of that course of events-- which is not precisely either traditional or Swinburnianomnipotence, but which perhaps bears an even closer resemblance

to the scriptural images of God as "the Almighty" or "thePantocrator."

The reader who has thoroughly assimilated Peirce's semiotic--especially its phenomenological aspect-- may find it instructive tomeditate on as much of the phenomenological aspect of time2 as

the reader can encompass. Does the reader imagine the timelikelife of God as anything less than this?

We have been very careful not to impute to God this structure:finitum non capax infiniti . Nonetheless, if this time2 structure is

coherent-- and it would seem to be, if time1 is coherent-- then,

whatever can be affirmed regarding the semiotic "diagram" of time2, we must a fortiori affirm at least as much regarding God, on


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the grounds that if God exists, then God is the One quo maiuscogitare non potest . (You will glimpse here my own interpretation of Anselm's ontological argument, not as a proof of God's existence,but rather as a proof that, if God exists, then God cannot be in anywise less than any coherent conceptualization which we can arriveat.) On these grounds, we can affirm a God who is at least evenmore thoroughly timelike and dynamic than we are, yet to whom allof time is ever simultaneously present; who is omniscient in astrong sense which at least accommodates both foreknowledge andhuman freedom; who is almighty at least in a sense consonant withthe use of that term in the scriptural traditions. To be precise, wecan affirm a God who is in all ways at least whatever we couldappropriately affirm of a being who was living its life under what wehave in some detail modelled as time2.

Among other points, this would include the affirmation that, insome sense, God arbitrarily approaches simultaneously both tosomething analogous to Peircean "pure self-consciousness" and tosomething analogous to Peircean "absolute idea," while beingutterly distinct and different from either. The timefulness of Godcan, in some sense, be spoken of as "big enough" to include eventimelessness. Which leads on to our closing observations...

Concluding Remarks

The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno is well-known for his classical

arrow paradox, one account of which begins, "The arrow could notmove in the place in which it is not. But neither could it move in theplace in which it is..." Zeno's conclusion is that the arrow mustalways be at rest. Before Newton and Leibniz discovered thedifferential calculus, the only alternative in the face of Zeno'sparadox was the flat assertion that the arrow is in fact in flight. Butsuch an assertion may well embody the same assumption as theparadox which it denies, namely, that time is to be identified withmathematical time, and hence is to be dealt with either as a

collection of punctiliar instants or as a undivided and unstructuredcontinuum. An application of calculus can resolve this paradox byshowing that one can speak meaningfully of motion only byconsidering that motion over a small but positive interval-- amoment-- and taking the limit as the moment becomes arbitrarilybrief.

One can hardly avoid the impression that, on the question of Godand time, Richard Swinburne is really in the same camp as

Augustine and those others with whom he disagrees. A Swinburnianassumption that time is "really" like simple mathematical time locksone either into a temporal analog of the arrow paradox, or into itsflat denial. On the one hand, one may conclude that God istimeless, whether in the sense that for God all time is aninstantaneous and eternal moment, or in the sense that in time as


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in space God is like a sphere with center everywhere and radiusnowhere. On the other hand, one may conclude as does Swinburnethat God, like humanity, lives in a simple mathematical time; inwhich case something like Swinburne's positions on omnipotenceand omniscience do follow.

But, as we have argued in this paper, there is no good reason tolock ourselves into this false dichotomy. Certainly there is an aspectof time-- the aspect one abstracts and deals with in the naturalsciences-- of which mathematical time is an arbitrarily good model,at least on the macroscopic level and in situations where relativisticconsiderations can be disregarded. But time as human beingsexperience it is more complicated than mathematical time. Under aPeircean view, there is no reason to believe that humanlyexperienced time is "less real" than mathematical time. And oncewe grant that, and think it over in detail, we may well conclude thatthere is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in Swinburne'sphilosophy.

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A Peircean Semiotic Analysis of Time

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