Page 770 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

TIME IS A PERCEPTION, TOO

t this point in the book it has been explained that matter, thought to be an absolute existent, is ac-

tually nothing but a perception—an image experienced by every person in his brain. And it has
A been shown how important this reality has been for the increase of fear and love toward God, the
spread of spirituality and good morals and the collapse of materialism.

There is another concept similar to matter that materialists have considered eternal and absolute—time.
But like matter, time is also a perception and is not eternal; there is a moment when it was created. This fact,
which has now been established by scientific proofs, was revealed in several verses of the Qur’an.

Time Is A Concept That Is Formed From The Comparison Of One

Moment With Another

Time is a concept that depends totally on our perceptions and the comparison we make between our
perceptions. For example, at this moment you are reading this book. Suppose that, before reading this book,

you were eating something in the kitchen. You think that there is a period between the time when you were
eating in the kitchen and this moment, and you call it "time". In fact, the moment you were eating in the
kitchen is a piece of information in your memory, and you compare this moment with the information in
your memory and call it time. If you do not make this comparison, the concept of time disappears and the
only moment that exists for you will be the present moment.

For example, a high school graduation ceremony is something in a person's memory. By comparing
other pieces of information in his memory since the graduation, with the present moment, he forms an idea
of time and, according to the information in his memory, he determines the length or the shortness of this

time. But this sense of length or shortness is completely in his brain, and comes from this comparison.
In the same way, when someone sees a person bend over to pick up a pen that he had dropped on the
floor and put it on the table, he makes a comparison. In the moment when the observer saw the person put
the pen on the table, that person's bending over, picking up the pen, walking to the table are pieces of in-
formation in the observer's brain. The perception of time arises from the comparison of the person putting

the pen on the table with these pieces of information.
Renowned physicist Julian Barbour defines time in this way:

Time is nothing but a measure of the changing positions of objects. A pendulum swings, the hands on a clock ad-
vance. 40

In short, time is composed of a few pieces of information hidden as a memory in the brain; rather, it

arises from the comparison of images. If a person did not have a memory, that person would live only in

768 Atlas of Creation Vol. 3