The Immateriality Of Time

Here I want to prove and explain a scarcely discussed fact (it's not as if most of the things I write about are discussed or grasped by many anyway!): time is a nonphysical thing.  Although physical means are used to measure time--digital clocks, sand hourglasses, and so forth--the thing they measure is purely immaterial.

Time has no physical manifestation, although events in the natural world can only occur because of time.  There are two ways to prove that time is immaterial, and both are simple.  The first is that time, which is a duration and not a set of physical events, is intangible.  What is tangible and observable through the senses is the occurrence of certain events in the material world.  Natural phenomena occur in time.  They are not moments of time themselves.  Without time, events could never happen because there is no duration for them to happen in.  However, time could still elapse even if there were no natural events--because time could still exist in the absence of all matter.

The uncaused cause could have created time, but never created the material world.  That time is a created thing is necessarily true because of the impossibility of an infinite past: if there was an infinite number of past moments/events, then the present moment could never be reached.  But the present moment exists and cannot be illusory.  Thus, time had a beginning and was created by an atemporal thing.  But one does not even have to know that an uncaused cause exists or that time had a finite beginning to know that it is logically possible for time to exist without matter.

The fact that time could exist in the absence of matter serves an an alternative proof for the immateriality of time; either proves the point on its own, establishing the same truth as the other, just as 7 + 2 and 8 +1 both equal 9.  There are immaterial things like logic and space that exist by intrinsic necessity, and there are also immaterial things like human consciousness and time that could have never existed.  And yet they do.  Time is omnipresent in my experiences because I am a being trapped within the present moment.  The fact that it does not possess a necessary existence does not mean that it has little to do with my own existence, for I, being the type of metaphysical entity that I am, can only perceive and act in time.