Is Time a Figment or an Ordinance?

Science lives by discovery,
and discovery requires a world
that exists without our permission

 

Is Time a Figment or an Ordinance?

by John Wise, PhD

Phase I: The Disappearing World, Continued

Last week in the context of quantum physics, Jo Marchant told us that reality may not exist objectively, but is instead a “joint project” of observers, a pluriverse stitched together from perspectives. This week, the next step is proposed:

Perhaps not only objective reality, but time itself is a function of subjective experience.

I have argued for quite some time that the reigning 19^th century vision of a materialist science is being forced into an unwelcome dichotomy. If it is to paint a coherent picture of our world, it must abandon materialism, and it must choose between an immanent idealism[1] and a transcendent dualism.[2]

The materialist project has failed.[3]

Another recent article by Jo Marchant, this time in The Guardian, asks, “Is time a figment of our imaginations?” March 22, 2026. It suggests that the flow of time, the passage from past to future, is not a feature of the external world but a structure of human experience. She says,

We tend to imagine time as incessant and non-negotiable, ticking by somewhere out in the world, impossible to slow or stop. Yet an emerging scientific picture is that such “clock time” isn’t a standalone, physical phenomenon at all. It’s a mathematical tool or book-keeping device – useful for coordinating our interactions, but with no independent existence of its own. [emphasis added]

This move is, by now, familiar. Where Marchant’s earlier argument relocated reality into perspective, this one relocates time into consciousness.

What is new is not the direction, but the depth of the retreat.

Premise: When reality resists explanation, science increasingly dissolves the external residue and retreats into the subjective.[4]

Earlier this week, David Coppedge commented on precisely this: materialists are inconsistent about time.

Phase II: The Phenomenological Turn

It is here that the argument becomes more serious.

Drawing on phenomenology, Harald A. Wiltsche[5] wrote for iai News in “Consciousness is the hidden architecture behind fundamental and quantum physics,” March 16, 2026:

Objectivity is constituted through structured relations between appearance and possible variation. Objectivity emerges not from the elimination of perspective, but from invariance within structured contexts. Quantum mechanics forces physics to confront this same structural feature at a deeper level: properties are not self-standing attributes waiting to be uncovered, but arise within determinate experimental contexts governed by reproducible rules.

Up to this point, and remaining within the context of phenomenological investigation, the analysis is both careful and illuminating.

Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology was designed precisely to investigate such structures. It asks how objects are given in experience, how identity is maintained across variation, how objectivity is constituted within the field of consciousness.

But phenomenology also imposes a radical discipline on its investigations. Husserl called it the epoché.

The epoché suspends judgment about ontology – what objects are in themselves.

• It does not deny reality.
• It does not redefine reality.
• It brackets the ontological question in order to describe experience, but it demands we do so without converting that description into ontology.

That discipline is not consistently maintained in the arguments advanced by Wiltsche and echoed in Marchant.

Reality Check: Describing how we see the world is not the same as defining what the world is. Our perspective is the window, not the landscape.

The violation of this rule is subtle for those not trained in phenomenology, but it is decisive. While Wiltsche focuses in his article on the ‘hidden architecture’ of spacetime, his methodology provides the ontological license for the retreat we see in Marchant. This shift functions in two stages:

• The Structural Collapse: Wiltsche moves from the claim that objectivity is constituted through relations of appearance … to the suggestion that objects themselves are nothing beyond those relations.
• The Temporal Collapse: Marchant then applies this same logic to time, moving from the observation that physics does not capture lived temporality to the conclusion that time itself belongs not to the world, but to consciousness.

The phenomenological insight is real. The metaphysical conclusion is not. In our last article we saw the same move – epistemological insight is reified into ontological reality.

Premise: A description of experience (epistemology) does not license a redefinition of reality (ontology).

As we said last time, if we collapse the distinction between Knower and known, we lose science. It seems as though increasingly many in the scientific community are willing to make that sacrifice, happily or not.

Phase III: Kant’s Guardrail and Its Removal

While this conflict may be new to science, it is not the first time philosophy has faced this tension.

Immanuel Kant held together two claims that must not be separated. He called himself both an empirical realist – the objects of experience are real, ordered, and not reducible to private perception – and a transcendental idealist – our knowledge of those objects is conditioned by the structures through which we encounter them.

Carefully understood, this is the precise distinction upon which science stands.

We cannot conflate epistemology and ontology.

Knowledge, Kant argued, requires both intuition and concept. We truly know objects as they are given. But we do not, indeed cannot, thereby claim exhaustive knowledge of things as they are in themselves. That is the “God’s eye view,” unavailable within our limited epistemic capacity.

The result of acknowledging our limits is a disciplined restraint of scientific investigation.

Limits in our knowledge do not define reality; they define the limits of our claims about it.

Phenomenology inherited this restraint as method. It describes how objects appear without collapsing them into appearance. Wiltsche understands this structural requirement well, noting that:

Objectivity is not something that is given to us from a ‘God’s-eye view’; rather, it is something that is constituted through the structured correlation between the appearing object and the subjective perspective. [emphasis added]

What we see in the scientific argument we’ve been tracing is the loss of the guardrail that keeps this “correlation” from becoming a “collapse.” What begins as a legitimate claim about the conditions of knowing becomes a claim about the nature of what is known. Objectivity is not merely described within experience (phenomenology proper); it is redefined in terms of the experience.

The remaining independence of reality has been absorbed into consciousness. Time is not merely analyzed as lived; it is relocated into consciousness. Marchant says,

Time … is less a universal truth than a feature of how we interact with the world.

The distinction between knower and known, so carefully drawn by Kant and Husserl, is collapsing.

Premise: When epistemological limits are taken as ontological conclusions, objectivity is replaced rather than understood.

Phase IV: The Genealogy of the Wound (Again)

In our last article, we identified methodological naturalism (MN) as a “self-inflicted wound.”

For over a century, science has defined itself by this strategic restriction of inquiry to natural causes. When used to investigate the given order of a creation, MN is a modest, practical discipline – a way of focusing the lens. However, a tool for focus has been mistaken for a definition of the field.

The method did not remain a discipline; it became a metaphysical enclosure. What was announced as a heuristic tool was quietly promoted to an ontological filter. By defining the “natural” in advance as a closed system of describable processes, the scientist does not merely limit his scope – he pre-determines his results. Knowledge is no longer understood as an encounter with an independent world, but as part of the same system it seeks to describe, and the distinction between knower and known dissolves.

Reality Check: Methodological Naturalism is a blindfold, not a lens. By pre-defining the world as a closed material system, scientists have made it impossible to see the “Other” that stands over against them.

What cannot be grounded externally is relocated internally. Reality becomes perspective. Objectivity becomes invariance within experience, and time a structure of consciousness.

Premise: When a procedural rule for investigating the world is mistaken for the world’s boundary, science ceases to be an encounter with what is there.

Phase V: The Cost of Losing Time

Time is not a peripheral feature of reality. It anchors sequence, causality, and history.

If time is not a feature of the world, but a construction of consciousness, then the structure of reality becomes increasingly negotiable. If Wiltsche’s account is taken ontologically, the consequences are immediate:

• Causality weakens.
• History softens into interpretation.
• Prediction loses its grounding.

This works well if you want to tell stories, but it devastates the rigorous and powerfully predictive answers to questions about reality empirical science has given us. When reality can no longer correct us, we become increasingly unmoored from Truth.

Reality Check: If time is just a “figment,” then history is a ghost story. Science requires a stable past and an objective future to remain a pursuit of truth rather than a work of fiction.

If Marchant and Wiltsche are correct, then time is no longer part of the world we investigate. It is only a part of the framework brought by consciousness. And if time is absorbed into the subject, then the distinction between knower and known collapses.

What remains is not objective discovery; it is merely coherence within a totalizing system of experience.

Premise: If time is not in the world, nothing remains outside us to correct us.

Conclusion: The Return to Discovery

The problem is not that physics struggles to describe time. The problem is what we do with that struggle.

We can acknowledge the limits of our models, our epistemology, without redefining reality in our own image. We can recognize that our experience of time is rich, complex and structured without concluding that time itself belongs to us.

Science lives by discovery, and discovery requires a world that exists without our permission. It requires time, not merely as a feature of awareness, but as part of the order of being we seek to understand.

If the distinction between knower and known is not restored, not merely as a matter of method but as a feature of reality itself, then science will continue its retreat inward, from objects to perspectives, from reality to experience, from time to consciousness.

And in that retreat, the world is not deepened.

It disappears.

Conclusion: We must choose between a science of Hegel’s Spirit, where time is a figment of the subject, and a rigorous empirical science, where time is an ordinance of the Creator.

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[1] Such as Hegel. His system is at least logically coherent, which cannot be said of materialist science married to dialectical logic.

[2] Western theism is the paradigmatic example here. The Creator stands outside the creation – transcendence, and there are two distinct orders of creation, the spiritual and the physical – dualism.

[3] In one sense it was always a chimera, as it was never exclusively materialist. The idealist dialectical logic was “smuggled in” by uniformitarian geologists and Darwin from the start. Claiming to “cleanse” mind from matter, they projected their own mind into matter, mistaking epistemology for ontology – the very move we are documenting in this two-part series.

[4] We see this same impulse throughout evolutionary science. When empirical “reality” (objectivity) resists the preferred timeline or mechanism, it is increasingly compressed to fit the narrative (subjectivity). In the modern laboratory, the subjective reigns, and the objective is forced to follow.

Will the scientific community “see” this in themselves? Rarely. Their collective identity is anchored in a self-concept of being exclusively data-driven, empirical, and materialist. To them, that is what science is. It is not easy to see beyond the dogma into which one has been trained.

However, I have always advocated for this procedural discovery principle: if you want to know what a person actually believes, watch what they do rather than listen to what they say. The chasm between the materialist profession and the idealist practice in modern secular science has become impossible to ignore.

[5] Professor of Philosophy at Linköping University, Sweden, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University.

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John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.