A Peircean Semiotic Analysis

of Time
In Response to an Argument of Richard Swinburne's on God and Time

Ummm, yeah, this piece originally had tons of footnotes.

But I discover that this little flight into the ionosphere
reads just as well without footnotes as with. Which, in my
experience, is usually a hopeful sign.
There's also an interesting little story connected with this
paper, which was originally written for a graduate seminar
in philosophical theology. I was up in the middle of the
night with insomnia, pacing around in the dark in my
cockroach-infested apartment in Durham, North Carolina,
when the ideas contained in this paper combusted in my
mind, instantaneously, as a fully finished Gestalt. Not the
only time that's happened to me-- I refer to it, somewhat
tongue in cheek, as a "direct semiotic download"...
Introduction
Can we say that, in some appropriate sense, God is in time? Or
shall we say that God is beyond time, even immutable? Either
alternative seems to bring with it knotty problems.
For if God is in time, then would he not, like all who dwell in time,
forever be losing his present moments into the past? Would this not
be a loss of being unbecoming of God? And would not God then
have to wait, like the rest of us, for tomorrow to know tomorrow's
news and to perform tomorrow's work? For if God, in time, can
know and act in advance, then there seems to be an end to human
freedom. God's foreknowledge would seem to preclude it. And so if
God is in time, it seems that either human freedom would have to
go, or else divine omniscience and omnipotence would have to
abide by certain temporal restrictions.
And if God is beyond time, then in what sense would God be living
and dynamic? How would the interaction between a God beyond
time and humans in time be more than just a charade eternally
planned and staged for human benefit? Could the timeless truly
"get its hands dirty" by dealing with that which is in time? A God
who was not only timeless but immutable would seem like a fly
trapped in amber, very unlike the living God of the Jewish and
Christian faith traditions.

The question of God's relationship to time is an old one in

philosophy and theology. In his book The Coherence of Theism,
Richard Swinburne wrestles with this question and arrives at some
interesting conclusions. Assuming that God is in time in something
very 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 which
Swinburne struggles. We will bring to bear on the issues a Peircean
semiotic analysis of time, in an attempt to see whether temporal
assumptions more relaxed than Swinburne's can shed light on these
questions. Our conclusion will be that, in fact, lurking in
Swinburne's assumptions regarding a God in time is a particular
assumption which a person who affirms a God beyond time would
probably share. If we reject this hidden assumption, then we can
hold coherently both to the position that God is in a strong sense
"in time," and to stronger versions of omnipotence and omniscience
than Swinburne can allow, versions compatible with human
freedom.
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 is
able to bring about the existence of any logically
contingent state of affairs x after t, the description of the
occurrence of which does not entail that P did not bring it
about at t, given that he does not believe that he has
overriding 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 any
logically possible action." (CoT, 149) Here he substitutes "logically
possible state of affairs" for "logically possible action," since certain
individual actions can logically "only be performed by beings of
certain kinds, and a being S cannot (logically) be a being of all
these kinds at the same time." (CoT, 150) The observation that
there are certain "logically possible state[s] of affairs which it is
logically impossible for anyone to bring about"-- for example,
retroactive influence on the past-- leads to the further qualification
that omnipotence at time t involves only those states of affairs after
time t which are "logically compatible with all that has happened at
and before t." (CoT, 150-51) For the sake of logical coherence,
Swinburne makes the additional restrictions that the state of affairs
be "logically contingent"-- that is, both it and its negation coherent- and that it not be required to be an uncaused state of affairs ("the

description of which does not entail that P did not bring it about at
t"). (CoT, 152) Finally, to take God's freedom into account,
Swinburne adds the last proviso, "given that he does not believe
that 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 he
knows of every true proposition about t or an earlier time
that it is true and also he knows of every true proposition
about a time later than t, such that what it reports is
physically necessitated by some cause at t or earlier, that
it 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 preserve
God's freedom and to make room for human freedom, unless we
are willing either to deny human freedom or to posit a God outside
of time (CoT, 176-77).
Both these accounts of omnipotence and omniscience are rooted in
Swinburne's assumption that the eternity of God is to be conceived
in a manner roughly equivalent to the traditional notion of
sempiternity: "God is eternal" means "God has always existed and
will go on existing forever." (CoT 210-11) Such an existence in time
would differ from the temporal existence of finite creatures by and
only by its infinite extension into both past and future. Swinburne
rejects the idea of an immutable God who "does not change at all"
as incompatible with the affirmation of a free and living God (CoT
211-15). 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 because
timelessness "seems to contain an inner incoherence": simultaneity
is ordinarily held to be a transitive property, which would imply the
absurd 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 qualified
sense, 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

any statement entailed by it to be true." (CoT, 12) We will also

assume the structure of Peircean semiotics which we will introduce
in 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 his
own lifetime (1839-1914), have been reduced to something like a
state of order in his posthumous Collected Papers; but the result is
still rambling, repetitious, and filled with obscurities and
inconsistencies, as a result of the growth of Peirce's thought over
the years. Fortunately, we will need only a portion of the full
Peircean 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 in
interaction with one another. The most familiar example of such a
system of signs is human language. But Peircean semiotics is not
restricted to this narrow model. In fact, language, thought,
emotion, sense perception, formal logic, mathematics, physical
action, human existence, and the workings of nature itself are only
a few of the processes which can be seen as special cases of the
Peircean semiotic sign. Since Peirce's sign is completely general, his
semiotic 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 a
sign.
Yet Peirce's semiotic can be trained on any phenomenon as a supple
and subtle method of analysis to yield often surprisingly detailed
and concrete insights. This "double-barrelled" combination of
complete generality and concrete particularity arises out of the
correspondingly "double-barrelled" nature of the three universal
categories on which Peirce's semiotic is built-- categories which
Peirce called Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.
A universal category is something which is found to be present in
every phenomenon, "one [category] being perhaps more prominent
in one aspect of that phenomenon than another but all of them
belonging to every phenomenon." (CP 5.43) Thus, Peirce's claim is
that his categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, in one
way 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 the
fact that each category can be described both from a formal,
combinatoric, logical viewpoint, and from a material, descriptive,
phenomenological perspective. These logical and phenomenological

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 it
is by itself, without comparison or interaction or relationship to
anything else; independent of any "other," pure, spontaneous,
original, sui generis. Phenomenologically, Firstness is any possible
quality of feeling taken by itself, whether "the color of magenta, the
odor of attar, the sound of a railway whistle, the taste of quinine,
the quality of the emotion upon contemplating a fine mathematical
demonstration, the quality of the feeling of love, etc." (1.304)
Imagine that state which sometimes comes over a person on the
brink of sleep, when on the edge of consciousness a quality springs
unbidden into the fading awareness and fills it without division or
distinction: "nothing at all but a violet color," or "an eternally
sounding and unvarying" musical note. Such a quality-- or rather,
the possibility of such a quality-- is a near approach to sheer
Firstness (1.304). As embodied in experience, an instance of
Firstness may be very broad and general-- for example, the entire
Gestalt, sensory and mental, which an entire landscape or story or
historical period evokes in one-- or it may be very particular-- for
example, 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 stands
over against a Second, regardless of any Third; being in
relationship to an Other; the action of cause and effect, stimulus
and 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, uncontrolled
givenness which we encounter in experience.
Peirce's favorite example of Secondness is that of trying to open a
door that is stuck:
Standing on the outside of a door that is slightly ajar, you
put your hand upon the knob to open and enter it. You
experience an unseen, silent resistance. You put your
shoulder against the door and, gathering your forces, put
forth a tremendous effort. (1.320)
Or imagine the steady tone of a musical note, which is suddenly cut
short: the tone is an instance of Firstness, as is the silence which
follows. But the transition between them is a moment of
Secondness. (1.332) Secondness is the hard, here-and-now
facticity which makes an object an actual individual and not just a
bundle of potential qualities. A vision of the cosmos, la
nineteenth-century physics, as a mere collection of hard billiard ball
atoms bouncing and colliding mechanically with one another, is a
vision of a world of sheer Secondness.

Thirdness, in its logical aspect, is triadic. It is a First bound together

in relationship with a Second by the mediation of a Third: "The
beginning is first, the end second, the middle third." (1.337) It is
combination, pattern, structure, mediation, continuity. A monad can
form no combination with another; two dyads can join only to form
another dyad (think of two lengths of pipe screwed together); but
triads can combine in arbitrarily complex combination (think of a
tinkertoy set, or of the colored plastic beads in a chemistry class
which 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; most
importantly, it is representation and signification: "A sign stands for
something to the idea which it produces or modifies... That for
which it stands is called its object; that which it conveys, its
meaning (the sign itself); and the idea to which it gives rise, its
interpretant." (1.339) Each sign which comprises knowledge and
experience is such a semiotic triad, composed of object, sign, and
interpretant.
Each sign, as an instance of Thirdness, has to it a hypothetical, "ifthen" status: Firstness is potential, Secondness actual, Thirdness
conditional; Firstness can be, Secondness is, Thirdness would be
(given appropriate conditions).
A sign is a continuous, dynamic process, since the interpretant to
which a sign interprets an object is ipso facto itself a further sign of
the same object. Peirce spells this out precisely in a formal
definition:
A Sign... is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic
relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of
determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the
triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the
same Object. (2.242)
This formal definition, which embodies a logical structure known as
direct recursion, has an interesting implication: (1) in any sequence
of related signs and interpretants, each element serves as both sign
to interpretants following and interpretant of signs preceding, but
there can be no first or last element to the sequence; (2) as applied
to any finite span in a sequence, statement (1) and direct recursion
iterated infinitely many times imply that elements of the sequence
converge (as an infinite subsequence) to either endpoint of the
finite span; (3) applying statement (2) to every possible span
traversed by the sequence implies that the semiotic sequence is in
fact a linear continuum, and thus that the semiotic process can be
seen, in the ideal, as a mathematically continuous progression from
a selected sign to a selected interpretant along a mediating

temporal continuum.
The reader can perhaps here see our semiotic analysis of time
already lumbering into view around the bend. Indeed, Peirce sees
time as built out of Thirdness, just as space can be (largely)
constructed out of Secondness. But several more remarks are
necessary 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; Secondness
alone is always totally precise.
Firstness is vague inasmuch as one can compare two qualities only
more or less approximately. Walking down a garden path, you see a
red flower, and then a minute later you encounter another red
flower. 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 flowers
up together for comparison; you might make your judgment very
nearly precise by subjecting the colors to a spectrographic analysis.
But notice how each increase in precision is bought by introducing
Secondness more and more prominently into the situation; and, in
the final case, Secondness has come to predominate very nearly to
the 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 termed
a "chair." The word must have some free play in it-- must be
applicable to a more or less broad and fuzzy-boundaried class of
entities-- if it is to be meaningful. And the same holds true of any
more complex sign, be it a statement, an argument, a ritual, a
belief system, a human being, or the wide world itself.
Indeed, the more common or important a sign, the more vague it
will tend to be. Thus, as Peirce often remarks,(cf. 6.494), one's
deepest feelings, one's deepest beliefs, one's concept of God will all
tend to be very vague indeed. This vagueness is not to be confused
with the inchoate: for such signs to become more finely articulated
by becoming richer in semiotic structure is one thing, but for them
to become precise by the simple abolition of vagueness would be to
suck them empty of meaning. In the former case, one might end up
with the Apocalypse of St John as read by the person in the pew if
vagueness grew faster than structure, or with Barth's Church
Dogmatics as read by a theologian if structure outpaced vagueness.
But mere abolition of vagueness would bring one in the end to the
state of those philosophers in Gulliver's Travels who made their
language perfectly precise by pointing mutely to objects carried
about in sacks on their backs: language reduced to sheer

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: an
object, a thing of mere Secondness, an "It." For Secondness alone
is never vague, its precision the precision of a world of billiard-ball
atoms in mechanical collision.
We must also note the approximativeness of the categories. Due
both to the hypothetical nature of thought, and to the
obstreperousness of reality, Peirce stresses that his three categories
are to be seen as only an approximation to reality as experienced, a
model subject to growth and revision, though, thought Peirce, a
relatively good model as is.
Not unconnected with this approximativeness are what Peirce calls
the 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 less
decomposed into a pair of monads, or instances of Firstness.
Phenomenologically speaking, one can think of a less than fully
dynamic existence of one item relative to another.
The first degree of degenerate Thirdness ("first-degenerate
Thirdness") is, logically speaking, a triad more or less fully
decomposed into a congeries of dyads. This decomposition is in
practice usually only approximate: most first-degenerate signs will
fall somewhere on a graded continuum between the ideal endpoints
of fully genuine Thirdness and fully first-degenerate Thirdness.
Phenomenological examples vary as widely as an object which one
has selected by pointing it out, a remark uttered without further
explanation, or an individual instance of a sign. In the limit, a pure
world 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, and
incidents on the evening news!
The second degree of degenerate Thirdness ("second-degenerate
Thirdness") is, logically speaking, a triad more or less fully
decomposed into a congeries of monads. Again, this usually only
approximate condition can be thought of as continuously variable
between genuine Thirdness and full decomposition. Some
phenomenological examples would be a photograph, the possibility
of red as a warning of danger, or the idea of schematic diagrams. In
the extreme, a pure world of second-degenerate signs would
approximate to, for example, a stream of consciousness made up of
a montage of images, feelings, and sounds: imagine the experience
of watching a rock video on MTV!

This brief exposition of several of the basic elements of Peircean

semiotics will supply the tools for our semiotic analysis of time. We
will begin by considering briefly the options available to us under
Peircean semiotics. Then we will subject the selected option to a
semiotic analysis. Finally, we will explore the implications of our
analysis for Swinburne's views on God and time.
Peircean Semiotic Options Relevant to Our Discussion
Discussions direct and indirect of God, time, and divine attributes
can 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 not
necessarily reconcilable approaches, the first and fourth of which
Peirce 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 to
Questions Concerning My Belief in God," (6.494-521) in which he
says of omniscience:
"Do you believe [God] to be omniscient?" Yes, in a vague
sense. Of course, God's knowledge is something so utterly
unlike our own that it is much more like willing... [But] we
cannot 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) This
indirect 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) with
the example of an infinitely detailed map of a country held over the
soil of the country. Somewhere on the map lies a copy of the map
itself, and somewhere on the copy an even smaller copy of the
copy, and so on, in infinite regression. The limit point of the
sequence of copies, which is second-degenerately triadic, of course
contains no copy, but stands directly over the point which it itself
represents!
This alternative would seem to yield a temporal analogue to the
characterization of God's spatial omnipresence as being like the
presence of a sphere with center everywhere and radius nowhere!
But such a temporality would seem quite timeless, contra the first
of our assumptions.

(3) We may assume that God is "Absolute Idea," that is, that God's
time is to be characterized by a perfect unity and continuity
covering and unifying all time (8.125). Although, as Peirce points
out, this conception lies at the opposite end of the scale from that
of pure self-consciousness, it leads by another route to a similarly
timeless notion of God's time as an instantaneous eternal moment.
(4) Peirce also affirms-- without explanation, and sometimes in the
same breath (8.124, 8.312)-- both that God is in time, and that
Augustine 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 although
Peirce leaves it for us to put the pieces together, our semiotic
analysis of time will lead to the conclusion that Peirce is speaking
here coherently, and that Swinburne's approach to the issue is
consequently too narrow.
A Peircean Semiotic Analysis of Time
The flow of time is, as we have already seen, for Peirce altogether a
matter of Thirdness, that is, a matter of signs. The continuity of
signs is constitutive of the temporal flow. Everything we can
experience, we experience as a complex of signs. Thus everything
we experience has temporality, belongs to our experience of the
flow 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 time
as if it were perfectly modelled by the mathematical continuity of a
line-- a perfect "time line." Indeed, Swinburne seems to do
precisely this, with his talk of time "at time t" or before or after
"time t." And for most practical purposes, this "time line" does
provide a fairly good model for our experience of time, which after
all does seem superficially to flow much like a continuous line.
Indeed, in those human contexts such as the physical sciences
where Firstness and Thirdness can in principle be very nearly
bracketed out of the picture, a mathematical time line will do for all
practical purposes, due to the precision of Secondness.
But from a Peircean semiotic viewpoint, this confusion of the "time
line" as a sign with the object which it represents may be
disastrous. 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." Our
modern tendency may be to assume that the mathematical time of
science is somehow more "real" than time as we experience it. But
Peirce, though he holds both kinds of time to be signs representing
time itself, argues as an objective idealist (cf. 6.24-25) that our real
experience of time is a hypothesis closer in important ways to the

common object of both models of time than is the somewhat

idealized abstraction of mathematical time (6.325).
Peirce illustrates the semiotic difference between mathematical time
and real time by imagining a straight, instantaneous river "whose
water should be perfectly homogeneous and not composed of
molecules, supposing however that we quite disregard the
dimensions of depth and breadth of the river." (6.325) If this
"Heraclitan river" is flowing at a uniform and constant rate, then it
is nothing other than an image of mathematical time. Peirce
converts this river to a model of real time:
Now then, I might imagine that this flowing water comes
into existence at a certain section of the stream, and is
annihilated at another section... I might even imagine
that the water never comes into complete existence, but
is instantly annihilated at the very instant of its
instantaneous creation, so that it consists of a series of
lengthless cross sections... We can suppose those limits
[between cross sections] to be at some cross sections
without saying which ones, nor even saying that it would
be possible exactly to define them. But with mathematical
Time all this is quite different... (6.325)
Although Peirce is writing very densely here, he is claiming that real
time differs from mathematical time in at least two ways: (1) real
time has a measure of that vagueness which inheres in Firstness
and Thirdness, a feature abstracted from mathematical time; and
(2) real time is less than absolutely continuous, a not altogether
uniform mixture of points and segments more or less tightly and
more or less indefinitely bound together in a discontinuous
approximation to a linear continuum.
This second feature we will recognize as nothing other than that
which defines the approximate state which lies between genuine
Thirdness on the one hand and the two degrees of degenerate
Thirdness on the other. In other words, Peirce's claim is that real
time is Thirdness, not altogether pure genuine Thirdness, but rather
a complicated structure of partially degenerate instances of
Thirdness-- congeries of instances of Secondness and instances of
Firstness-- bound together into a broader, somewhat "lumpy"
Thirdness. In terms of the purely logical side of Peirce's semiotic,
the triads composing real time are themselves many of them more
or less loose combinations of dyads and monads, and are built up
as elements of larger triads in a manner perhaps itself partially
degenerate.
Can all this be made less abstract? We turn to a more
phenomenological analysis of time (1.488-504, 6.110, 6.126-143,
etc.), wherein again we meet with the contention that time is
approximately, but not fully, continuous. Time as we experience it

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). The
duration of a moment may vary. At their briefest, experienced
moments merge like the separate images on a film blending
together into a motion picture: "It is of no consequence... whether
we are only conscious in a series of detached instants, like the
separate pictures of a zotrope." (8.113) At the broadest, our
image of the past several seconds "is almost or quite of the nature
of a percept." (8.123, fn.20) Think of the experience of hearing a
short remark or a phrase of music as a Gestalt: one can focus one's
attention on shorter intervals in the span, but the point is that one
does not always do so.
Given any two such moments, one comes before the other "unless
they are independent of one another, or contemporaneous." (1.495)
Such contemporaneity or simultaneity, unlike that of mathematical
time, is not necessarily transitive: while sitting in the kitchen, you
hear your teakettle start to whistle on the stove. Suddenly, you
hear two knocks on the front door in rapid succession. The sound of
each knock is simultaneous with the sound of the teakettle, but the
sounds of the two knocks are not simultaneous with one another.
Similarly, one moment can be contained within another: while you
glance 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-time
modification of his "Heraclitan river." The next observation to make
is that, if two elements distinguished in the temporal flow of one's
experience are simultaneous, they must differ in respect of some
instance of Secondness or of Firstness.
For example, if you are looking at two books on your bookshelf at
once, then those two books, even if otherwise identical, must differ
from one another by their relative spatial location-- that is, by
Secondness-- though if you are simply taking in the whole
bookshelf at a glance, this relationship between these two books
need not stand out, and likewise if you focus in upon the two books
you may make even finer simultaneous distinctions regarding them
in terms of Firstness and/or Secondness.
Or if, in looking at a single book, you notice two of its qualities at
once-- for example, that the book is red and that the book is
duodecimo-- 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 the
quality of feeling associated with the book as a Gestalt, or you may
make even finer distinctions regarding a quality of the book-- for
example, that the book is a faded scarlet red just tending to
orange.

One's flow of temporal experience, decomposed according to these

distinctions, yields a flow of fuzzy, overlapping moments, each
moment further decomposed into something like a living jigsaw
puzzle each "piece" of which is distinguished by spatial or
existential 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 the
outer world and one's inner experience. "Puzzle pieces"
distinguished by Firstness will have relative to those distinctions
more or less indeterminate "boundaries." Two pieces simultaneous
with a third are not necessarily simultaneous with each other.
Each piece of this puzzle is a semiotic sign, and all these signs
assembled into the jigsaw puzzle constitute one's experience of the
flow of time. The sometimes somewhat fuzzy boundaries between
these pieces are nothing other than the discontinuities, the partial
decomposition 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 instances
of Thirdness-- which constitutes the contours of one's experience in
time, 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 up
from the individual (perhaps vague) signs into more and more
complex and inclusive structures in time. Phenomenologically
speaking, the contours of real time would more or less strongly
mark off one episode or incident in one's experience from another.
Think of the more or less indefinite boundaries which separate the
various acts which make up an activity, the various activities and
incidents which make up the events of a person's daily life. Each
incident is built up in a contoured way out of smaller incidents, and
is 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 be
built up according to a type of structure which mathematicians refer
to as a "tree." The contouring of events would be structurally
equivalent to the branching of the tree.
"A Thousand Years Is as a Single Day..."
"Now a consciousness whose time-span was a thousandth of a
second or a thousand years would not ordinarily be recognized by
us... as being a consciousness at all." (8.124) So Peirce cryptically
remarks in one of the obscure passages where he asserts both that
God is in time and that "the time-span of the All-seeing must cover
all time." Now that we have carried out our Peircean semiotic

analysis of time, we are in a position to try to make sense of this

fourth of our Peircean options regarding God and time.
Let us refer to the model of real time developed in our analysis as
time1. Time1 is a model of time as human beings live through time.
There are several clearly identifiable features to time1: the vagueboundaried moments which range in duration from a fraction of a
second up to a few seconds; the relational and qualitative "jigsaw"
of signs and signs-within-signs into which each moment can be
decomposed, and out of which the moments themselves are built
up into larger events; and the contours which our experience within
time possesses due to the structure among these signs. Note that
each of these features ranges over a limited scale of magnitude. In
time1, moments are only so brief or so long, experiential
distinctions subdivide the world only into so fine a "jigsaw" and
integrate 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 a
second or a thousand years..." Peirce's remark suggests the
following 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 time1
contours. Think of the dense weave and design of a fine Persian
carpet versus the open weave of a fishing net. Likewise, the
dyadic/monadic jigsaw of signs under time2 would be incomparably
more finely subdivided, and incomparably more broadly unified and
integrated, 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 in
time would be included, under time2, in moments briefer than any
assigned interval, as well as in moments as long in duration as any
span 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

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

varying across a broad spectrum from the very, very brief to the
very, very long, two moments would be "simultaneous" less as the
discrete two-value comparison of two points on a line ("identical/not
identical") and more as the continuous two-parameter comparison
of two line segments on a line ("coincident/partially coincident/not
coincident" 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 before
and 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 m3
by being simultaneous with each of them. The time2 model would,
as duration of moments decreased without bound, approach in the
limit 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 the
uncontoured, fully continuous genuine Thirdness of Peirce's semiotic
"absolute idea." Between these two ideal limits would "stretch" the
entire 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 integrated
knowledge.
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 m3
later 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 is
always 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.

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 "thought
experiment." 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 our
assumptions nothing any less logically coherent about time2 than
about time1.
The reader may note that, unlike Swinburne, we have been very
careful not to attribute to God the structure we have developed. We
would claim for it nothing more than the status of a Peircean
semiotic "diagram"-- though the reader may also notice that the
features 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 more
integrated 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 comprehensive
foreknowledge while preserving freedom-- precisely what
Swinburne 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 that
course of events unfailingly to any desired result which is a
semiotically possible outcome of the initial state of that course of
events-- which is not precisely either traditional or Swinburnian
omnipotence, but which perhaps bears an even closer resemblance
to the scriptural images of God as "the Almighty" or "the
Pantocrator."
The reader who has thoroughly assimilated Peirce's semiotic-especially its phenomenological aspect-- may find it instructive to
meditate on as much of the phenomenological aspect of time2 as
the reader can encompass. Does the reader imagine the timelike
life 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

the grounds that if God exists, then God is the One quo maius
cogitare 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 any
wise less than any coherent conceptualization which we can arrive
at.) On these grounds, we can affirm a God who is at least even
more thoroughly timelike and dynamic than we are, yet to whom all
of time is ever simultaneously present; who is omniscient in a
strong sense which at least accommodates both foreknowledge and
human freedom; who is almighty at least in a sense consonant with
the use of that term in the scriptural traditions. To be precise, we
can affirm a God who is in all ways at least whatever we could
appropriately affirm of a being who was living its life under what we
have in some detail modelled as time2.
Among other points, this would include the affirmation that, in
some sense, God arbitrarily approaches simultaneously both to
something analogous to Peircean "pure self-consciousness" and to
something analogous to Peircean "absolute idea," while being
utterly distinct and different from either. The timefulness of God
can, in some sense, be spoken of as "big enough" to include even
timelessness. 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 not
move in the place in which it is not. But neither could it move in the
place in which it is..." Zeno's conclusion is that the arrow must
always be at rest. Before Newton and Leibniz discovered the
differential calculus, the only alternative in the face of Zeno's
paradox was the flat assertion that the arrow is in fact in flight. But
such an assertion may well embody the same assumption as the
paradox which it denies, namely, that time is to be identified with
mathematical time, and hence is to be dealt with either as a
collection of punctiliar instants or as a undivided and unstructured
continuum. An application of calculus can resolve this paradox by
showing that one can speak meaningfully of motion only by
considering that motion over a small but positive interval-- a
moment-- and taking the limit as the moment becomes arbitrarily
brief.
One can hardly avoid the impression that, on the question of God
and time, Richard Swinburne is really in the same camp as
Augustine and those others with whom he disagrees. A Swinburnian
assumption that time is "really" like simple mathematical time locks
one either into a temporal analog of the arrow paradox, or into its
flat denial. On the one hand, one may conclude that God is
timeless, whether in the sense that for God all time is an
instantaneous and eternal moment, or in the sense that in time as

in space God is like a sphere with center everywhere and radius

nowhere. On the other hand, one may conclude as does Swinburne
that God, like humanity, lives in a simple mathematical time; in
which case something like Swinburne's positions on omnipotence
and omniscience do follow.
But, as we have argued in this paper, there is no good reason to
lock ourselves into this false dichotomy. Certainly there is an aspect
of time-- the aspect one abstracts and deals with in the natural
sciences-- of which mathematical time is an arbitrarily good model,
at least on the macroscopic level and in situations where relativistic
considerations can be disregarded. But time as human beings
experience it is more complicated than mathematical time. Under a
Peircean view, there is no reason to believe that humanly
experienced time is "less real" than mathematical time. And once
we grant that, and think it over in detail, we may well conclude that
there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in Swinburne's
philosophy.

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