Paradox

AQUINAS: CAN GOD HAVE A BIOGRAPHY? 185goodness that is over!” She is pleased that her labor is in thepast, not that her labor precedes a particular date. The A seriesalso guides our actions. Knowing that the baby is scheduledto be fed at noon leads to action only when coupled with thebelief that it is now noon.McTaggart believes that the A series (past, present,future) is more fundamental than the B series (earlier, simultaneous,later). He defines “x is earlier than y” as “Either xis past when y is present, or x is present when y is future.” Hethen argues that the A series (and therefore the B series) issubjective. McTaggart agrees with Augustine that the paradoxof measurement refutes the objectivity of time. But hethinks Augustine’s equation of past-present-future with thepsychological series memory-perception-anticipation makestime viciously subjective. Time cannot vary from mind tomind. If your perceptual span increases from childhood, thereis no corresponding change in the duration of the present. Ifthere is time, there must be a single perspective from whichall temporal statements can be harmonized. Since there is nosuch perspective, time is an illusion.McTaggart offers a battery of intriguing arguments forthe unreality of time. What binds them together is theirexploitation of tensions between the A series and B series.Metaphysicians credit McTaggart for specifying the conceptualorigin of a whole family of temporal paradoxes. Inretrospect many earlier metaphysicians can be seen asresponding to the disharmonies between the A and B series.Aquinas generally writes in a way that makes the B seriesmore fundamental than the A series. Most twentieth-centurythinkers share Aquinas’s preference for the B series. Theydefine the A series in terms of the B series—with the help ofthe demonstrative term “this.” Under one scheme “now”