Of dominoes and time

Domino games have never been that exciting to me.  Nevertheless, thanks to Christmas and birthday parties, Gabe and Camille have two boxes of dominoes which, inevitably, I am asked to play once in a while.  The games I come up with are nowhere in the instructions and Gabe and Camille could care less - they just want Dad to play.

We all like the dominoes to knock each other down as they fall. So we set up our dominoes in a line, we use a ruler as a ramp to go over an obstacle, and take turns aiming the marble at the first domino.  The goal is to be the first person to knock the whole line down.  The further you are from the ramp the longer the game lasts.

From of dominoes and time

During the first game we ever played, I started to think about eternity and God's relationship to time.  Watching the dominoes fall raises a great question for the kids to think through.



How did time begin?
Some say Time always was, that an eternity past exists, and that there is no need for a free agent to create space and time.  Their conclusion is that there is no need for God to create it all.  The Universe, Buffaloes, Sea Horses and Babies just happened by natural materialistic events.  Dominoes, however, tell a different story.



Kids understand that if an eternity of past moments exists then we would never be done setting up the game!  There would always be one more domino to set up.  Another amazing thing is we would not be any closer to being done whether we started today, tomorrow or a year from now.

To see this, take the domino at the front of a straight line and pretend it represents Today. Now, say each domino behind it represents one day in the past, the second domino yesterday, the third the day-before-yesterday, and so on.  If an infinite past exists we would keep placing dominoes to the back of the line one after the other and never be done.  So far no problems, you would just never finish and presumably be on your way to infinity past.

From of dominoes and time

The problem arises when we try to start from the first domino in this long infinite line of past moments - the first moment in time.  To reuse JP Moreland and William Lane Craig's illustration, it is like trying to "jump out of  a bottomless pit," we could never get started.  We could not get any traction for there is not a first moment to start from, as the person is still counting to eternity past.

Only an uncaused free agent can start time. This free agent, God, is timeless without creation and temporal, that is he is in time, he exists now, since creation.