Paradoxes of Time.

In practice, we quite often witness that miracles and mysteries of faith provoke in some believers and practically all non-believers doubts about their actual existence because they contradict the laws of nature, contrary to “common sense,” and often represent a “bare impossibility.” We shall attempt, using several examples, to show that many of them are indeed mysteries, but not in that sense, that they should be rejected a priori, as impossible and nonsensical. We begin at once with the most central mystery -the existence of God. It very often happens that after lectures that tend to support the idea of the existence of God, a debater rises and triumphantly asks: “And who created God?” In the belief that he has thereby refuted all the lecturer’s arguments. The theologian’s answer to such a question is well known -God is the self-caused cause of his existence; therefore, he does not need to be created by another being. Such an answer of a man accustomed to pragmatic causality will not satisfy. Physics, however, can bring to bear the problem, thus posing a situation in which the issue of “self-cause” is practically absent.
The issue of causality always presupposes a temporal succession of events, whereby the preceding event may cause the following one. Therefore, we may argue that the assumption of causation is the passage of time. If time did not pass, there would be no point in looking for causal of existing phenomena; they would live as eternal and unchanging entities. With God, time does not pass; therefore, there is no point in asking to ask about the cause of its origin. This statement may naturally provoke the further question, How can one conceive of a reality? Which time does not pass? It is at this point in the reasoning that it may come to physics can come to the rescue because, for her, it is no problem to “arrange.” for time not to pass. Let us leave aside situations where it makes no sense to talk about the passage of time. These are situations related to the so-called thermodynamically equilibrium state of systems. Everything happens perfectly chaotic and reversible so that there is no evidence that the plan is moving in any significant direction, determining the flow of time. Physics, however, thanks to modern theories, also knows much more attractive and exciting situations in which something happens to time unusual.
It is irrefutably proven that the passage of time near large masses slows down, according to precise relationships found in any severe textbook on theoretical physics. The exciting thing about these relations is that according to them, there are (theoretically) such masses of objects for which every event appears as infinitely long. This implies that to an observer of such an object, every process seems to be infinitely slow, and in this situation, he; thus, time does not pass at all. The surprising fact is that such strange objects are called black holes. To observers on their surface, more precisely in the places defined in the so-called Schwarzschild radius, time does not pass at all.55)
The relativity of the passage of time, to which we have just drawn attention, gives us allows us to understand even better some very enigmatic texts from the Bible, such as the text, “With God, there is one day as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.” We know from physics that the time that passes in a moving system, depending on its relative velocity of motion relative to another reference frame, lengthens or slows down; therefore, it would be possible to calculate precisely at what speed a specific system should move relative to the rest frame so that all the time intervals measured in it are close to the intervals measured in the rest frame in such a proportion as a thousand years bears to the one day. Therefore, man is capable of the above “mystery” of the Bible to verify experimentally.
Related to the relativity of the passage of time is another question often more thoughtful listeners ask: what does the soul do between leaving the body and Last Judgment? For only there will it know whether it belongs to the realm of glorification or damnation. This problem has intensely preoccupied theologians and has been the subject of much controversy. From the point of view of physics, this issue is not an issue because, as we have already seen above – there are states in which time does not pass, and in such a state, the soul is also in. The passage of time is unconditionally connected with the matter. And the spirit is immaterial. Therefore, the soul does not differentiate between leaving a particular body and the Last Judgment. Some time has elapsed. It perceives this issue as an issue only of a being that has a material nature.