DESTINY

[Imam]

The perception we call time is, in fact, a method by which one moment is compared to another. We can explain this with an example. For instance, when a person taps an object, he hears a particular sound. When he taps the same object five minutes later, he hears another sound. The person perceives that there is an interval between the first sound and the second and he calls this interval "time". Yet at the time he hears the second sound, the first sound he heard is no more than an imagination in his mind. It is merely a bit of information in his memory. The person formulates the perception of "time" by comparing the moment in which he lives with what he has in his memory. If this comparison is not made, there cannot be perception of time either.

In brief, time comes to exist as a result of the comparison made between some illusions stored in the brain. If man did not have memory, then his brain would not be making such interpretations and therefore the perception of time would never have been formed. The reason why one determines himself to be thirty years old is only because he has accumulated information pertaining to those thirty years in his mind. If his memory did not exist, then he would not be thinking of the existence of such a preceding period of time and he would only be experiencing the single "moment" he was living in.

Films played backwards, make it possible for us to imagine a world in which time flows backwards.Yet, in such a world in which time has such opposite features, the processes of our brain and the way our memory compiles information, would similarly be functioning backwards. The same is true for the past and future and the world will appear to us exactly as it currently appears.

Since our brain is accustomed to a certain sequence of events, the world operates not as it is related above and we assume that time always flows forward. However, this is a decision reached in the brain and therefore is completely relative. In reality, we can never know how time flows or even whether it flows or not. This is an indication of the fact that time is not an absolute fact but just a sort of perception.

Einstein himself pointed out, as quoted from Barnett's book: "space and time are forms of intuition, which can no more be divorced from consciousness than can our concepts of color, shape, or size." According to the Theory of General Relativity: "time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it."

As Lincoln Barnett wrote: "Just as there is no such thing as color without an eye to discern it, so an instant or an hour or a day is nothing without an event to mark it."

Since time consists of perception, it depends entirely on the perceiver and is therefore relative.

The conclusion to which we are led by the findings of modern science is that time is not an absolute fact as supposed by materialists, but only a relative perception. What is more interesting is that this fact, undiscovered until the 20th century by science, was imparted to mankind in the Qur'an 14 centuries ago. There are various references in the Qur'an to the relativity of time.

For instance, the entire life of a person is a very short time as we are informed by the Qur'an;

"On the Day when He will call you, and you will answer (His Call) with (words of) His Praise and Obedience, and you will think that you have stayed (in this world) but a little while!" (Surat al-Isra, 52)

This relativity of time clears up a very important matter. The relativity is so variable that a period of time appearing billions of years' duration to us, may last only a second in another dimension.

This is the very essence of the concept of destiny- a concept that is not well understood by most people, especially materialists, who deny it completely. Destiny is God's perfect knowledge of all events past or future. A majority of people question how God can already know events that have not yet been experienced and this leads them to fail in understanding the authenticity of destiny. However, "events not yet experienced" are not yet experienced only for us. God is not bound by time or space for He Himself has created them. For this reason, the past, the future, and the present are all the same to God; for Him, everything has already taken place and finished.

Lincoln Barnett explains how the Theory of General Relativity leads to this fact in The Universe and Dr. Einstein: According to Barnett, the universe can be "encompassed in its entire majesty only by a cosmic intellect".The will that Barnett calls "the cosmic intellect" is the wisdom and knowledge of God, Who prevails over the entire universe. Just as we easily see a ruler's beginning, middle, and end, and all the units in between as a whole, God knows the time we are subjected to like a single moment right from its beginning to the end. People experience incidents only when their time comes and they witness the fate God has created for them.

Destiny is the eternal knowledge of God and for God, Who knows time like a single moment and Who prevails over the whole time and space, everything is determined and finished in a destiny.

[jessicalawes11]

Few thought for me there...