Are There Variations in Our Experience of Time?

DR. CRAIG: The question here is not about time itself, but our experience of time. I think all of us experience time in different ways. Sometimes time flies; other times time drags by. In current physics, your experience of time will be very different depending upon a number of factors. For example, if you are moving at near light speeds, your clock that measures your time will be radically slowed down compared to the time kept by an observer who is taken to be conventionally at rest. And this leads to the famous twin paradox where the traveling twin goes off on an outer space journey and then returns and is still a young man upon his return; whereas his earthbound brother is now an old man nearing his death. This is a prediction of relativity theory that not only your mechanical clocks but your biological clock will run slowly relative to another clock at rest. So your experience of time would be radically different. Also, it's been shown that clocks in a gravitational field run more slowly than a clock that is not in that gravitational field. This has actually been detected in earthly clocks. They have done experiments where they flew clocks in jetliners around the world in opposite directions, and it turned out that the clocks when they came back read differently; they had different readings, and this was due to the gravitational field of the Earth. So these physical phenomena are well established and genuine, but I would simply add, characteristics of physical time (that is to say, our measures of time). And I think that our measures of time need to be distinguished from time itself which, as Isaac Newton held, is something that is independent of our physical measures of it. Indeed, I think that God in that sense exists within metaphysical time even though he isn't bound by any sort of physical clock time because he's not an object in motion nor is he in a gravitational field.