metonymy4u

for example, stephen hawking has proposed his famous chronology protection conjecture which states that stable worm holes allowing macroscopic transportation of matter through time would be instantly destroyed in the moment of their creation, even though general relativity predicts their theoretical possibility due to the curved nature of spacetime. he makes this assertion to preserve a notion of cause and effect in which causes always precede their effects. without such a “time always flows forward”-rule, he supposes, the universe would collapse upon itself because without such a rule, events could become their own undoing. yet the notion that the universe requires some sort of guarantee of existence is nothing more than yet another rationalist metaphor. kant pointed out long ago that it is a mistake to view “existence” as a predicate condition, i.e. an attribute of something. to say that the universe needs time to always flow forward it to say that the existence of the universe is a predicate condition requiring something to guarantee it. in other words, the chronology protection conjecture is just another word for “god.” straight line metaphors often seem to carry this flavor of the divine. certainly i can concede to professor hawking that such a notion seems to be indispensable to our understanding of our own limited experience. but who are we to claim to know the mind of god?