Introduction - From Cosmic Time to Relational Becoming
The essays collected in this index span nearly two decades of inquiry into time, cosmology, process, and becoming. They began largely through questions raised by Stephen Hawking, quantum cosmology, the Big Bang, indeterminacy, multiverses, and the possible origin of time. They subsequently moved through entropy and temporal direction, primordial time, Einstein and Bergson, Whitehead and process philosophy, and eventually toward relational and generative accounts of reality.
Its resulting intellectual genealogy may be expressed simply:
Cosmic Time → Quantum Possibility → Primordial Time → Entropy and Irreversibility → Processual Time → Relational Time → Temporality and Becoming → Generative Relational Reality
The older essays should not be understood as already containing the conclusions of Generative Relational Realism which was recently derived in the Reality & Metaphysics series. Some of the essays reflect scientific, philosophical, and theological assumptions belonging to the periods in which they were written and will require reconsideration in light of the progress of contemporary scholarship.
Nevertheless, their continuing importance lies elsewhere. They preserve the questions through which original inquiries developed and have transitioned over time to this present moment. Questions such as:
Did time have a beginning?
What does “before” mean if spacetime itself has an origin?
Why does time possess a direction?
Is the future determined, merely unknown, or genuinely unrealized?
How does possibility become actuality?
How can anything persist while continually changing?
Does becoming occur within time, or does becoming participate in constituting temporality?
How does temporal reality eventually become remembered, anticipated, interpreted, and consciously lived?
These questions will now become the subject of sustained examination in Reality & Metaphysics, Section IX - "The Temporal Structure of Becoming." Here, we'll examine the sequence:
How Time brought us to becoming →
How Becoming brought us to relation →
How Relation returns us to time →
So that the question remains open:
What kind of reality must there be if reality is never finished becoming?
Hawking and Cosmic Time → Quantum Possibility → Origin of Time → Arrow and Entropy → Processual Time → Relational Time → Temporality and Becoming → GRR
April 26 - Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design of God and the Cosmos
Cosmic origins, natural law, creation, determinism, Hawking, and The Grand Design. This essay begins a sustained engagement with Hawking's cosmology and its implications for theology, indeterminacy, and the character of the universe.
May 24 - Stephen Hawking, Multi-Universes, and God's Grander Design
Multiverse cosmology, cosmic possibility, alternative universes, and the theological implications of a universe containing multiple possible histories.
May 30 - Stephen Hawking, Indeterminacy, God & Quantum Physics
Quantum indeterminacy, determinism, possibility, divine action, and the openness of physical reality.
June 27 - Stephen Hawking: The Strangeness of Quantum Physics and Cosmic Indeterminacy
Alternative histories, probability, quantum cosmology, multiverses, and cosmic openness. The June essay explicitly identifies itself as a continuation of the preceding engagement with Hawking's The Grand Design and lists the earlier Hawking essays. The four articles therefore constitute a recognizable Hawking sequence within Relevancy22.
Historical movement:
cosmic origins → multiverse → indeterminacy → alternative histories → cosmic possibility
The earlier cosmological questions now begin turning explicitly toward the nature and origin of time itself.
Where Does Space and Time Come From?
God and Time: The (Quantum) Physics of Time (background)
What Is Time? And How Does It Relate to God?
God and Time: God is Not Eternal
God and Time: The Mystery of the Incarnate God Eternal (research/background)
These essays and research materials are preserved together in the Relevancy22 Process Sciences index:
February 12 - The Paradox of Quantum SpaceTime for Emergent Theology Today
An early sustained attempt to consider time in relation to origin, causality, connection, necessity, quantum theory, and the possibility that ordinary spacetime may not be metaphysically fundamental.
November - The Science Behind “Creatio Continua” versus “Creatio Ex Nihilo” (Process v. Classical Thought)
An important additional precursor. Although primarily concerned with creation, process, and cosmology, the essay contains an early attempt to think about primordial reality, the emergence of ordinary temporal structure, and a universe understood dynamically rather than as a completed creation.
Historical movement:
cosmology → origin of time → nature of time → primordial temporality → theological temporality
March 8 - R.E. Slater - The Quantum Universe We Live In
A return to Hawking and quantum cosmology in light of subsequent scientific discussion, including the scale and structure of the universe, inflation, cosmic origins, and the limits of ordinary spatial and temporal language.
Questions of Time: Is the Source to Time's Arrow Based on Entropy or Gravitation?
A research-oriented investigation of the physical source of temporal directionality.
June 15 - Science / Philosophy - Why Time Travel IS NOT Possible
A significant original essay connecting the physical arrow of time with process philosophy. The argument begins moving beyond time as measurement toward time as irreversible becoming within an unfinished reality.
Does God Live Outside of Time? Can There Be Such a Concept? (research/background)
June 22 - Can God Live Outside of Time? Why Would This NOT Be Important?
A sustained theological and philosophical treatment of primordial time, divine temporality, process, and the possibility that time belongs intrinsically to becoming rather than functioning merely as an external container.
What Happened Before the Big Bang?
A return to primordial cosmology, including the Hawking/no-boundary question and whether “before” remains meaningful if ordinary spacetime itself has an origin.
These essays mark a decisive movement toward:
irreversibility → temporal direction → primordial time → open futurity → processual becoming
May 18 - Time is an Entropic System - To Go Back In Time is to Reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics
A physical treatment of clocks, entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, and temporal directionality.
This material becomes important background for the future R&M essay The Arrow of Time and the Direction of Becoming.
January 24 - COSMOLOGY - What Is Processual Primordial Time before the Big Bang?
A major development in the genealogy. Time is now being investigated explicitly through process philosophy and primordial cosmology, including the possibility that ordinary spacetime is not the most fundamental temporal reality.
February 15 - Time & the Primordial Universe - Einstein vs. Bergson, by Campo & Gozzano
An unusually rich research collection spanning Einstein, Bergson, Rovelli, Whitehead, processuality, human and cosmic time, metaphysics, neuroscience, biology, and cosmology.
February - COSMOLOGY - The Philosophy of MetaPhysical Cosmology
A broader philosophical examination of cosmology and its unavoidable metaphysical questions, including the nature of time and the relationship between physics and philosophy.
February 23 - How Process Philosophy & Theology Connects Scientific Evolution & Cosmology to God
Connects process cosmology, evolutionary reality, temporality, and theology while explicitly referring readers back to the primordial-time essay.
Historical movement:
physical time → primordial time → Bergsonian duration → Whiteheadian process → philosophical temporality
December 27 - Processual Becoming Across Relational Worlds: Relationality across Quantum Physics and a Becoming Cosmos
Relational Time and Emergent Geometry: From Quantum Information to Process Ontology
A major bridge into the present Reality & Metaphysics project. The essay brings quantum physics, relational physics, Whitehead, Bergson, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, spacetime, causal order, and process ontology into a common conversation.
Its central intuition marks an important development:
Time is not the stage on which reality acts.
Time is the trace reality leaves as it becomes.
★ MAJOR PRECURSOR TO R&M SECTION IX
January 24 - What Is Reality? Theories and Their Limits (5)
Contains the major discussion “Temporality and Becoming,” asking whether time is illusion, coordinate, emergent structure, or constitutive feature of reality itself.
January - Why Process Is Metaphysically Necessary (6)
Moves the inquiry from comparison toward ontology. Temporality becomes part of the argument that reality possesses genuine history: events occur, consequences accumulate, possibilities are foreclosed, and what becomes conditions what may become next.
August 20 - Relational Freedom and Agency (29)
Develops the relationship among inherited conditions, constraint, openness, responsiveness, alternative possibility, agency, and becoming otherwise. The temporal question has now become inseparable from futurity:
Can reality genuinely become otherwise?
A. What Is Time?
Where Does Space and Time Come From?
God and Time: The (Quantum) Physics of Time
What Is Time? And How Does It Relate to God?
The Paradox of Quantum SpaceTime for Emergent Theology Today
What Is Reality? Theories and Their Limits (5)
Why Process Is Metaphysically Necessary (6)
Future R&M: Time and Becoming
B. Cosmic Origins and the Emergence of Time
Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design of God and the Cosmos
What Happened Before the Big Bang?
COSMOLOGY - What Is Processual Primordial Time before the Big Bang?
The Quantum Universe We Live In
The Paradox of Quantum SpaceTime for Emergent Theology Today
The Science Behind “Creatio Continua” versus “Creatio Ex Nihilo”
Future R&M: The Origin and Emergence of Time
C. Competing Conceptions of Time
Time & the Primordial Universe - Einstein vs. Bergson, by Campo & Gozzano
Processual Becoming Across Relational Worlds
These collections introduce or engage Bergson, Einstein, Whitehead, Rovelli, process philosophy, relational physics, phenomenology, and competing conceptions of physical and experienced time.
Future R&M: Relational Time Among the Alternatives
D. Entropy, Irreversibility, and the Arrow of Time
Questions of Time: Is the Source to Time's Arrow Based on Entropy or Gravitation?
Science / Philosophy - Why Time Travel IS NOT Possible
Time is an Entropic System - To Go Back In Time is to Reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Relevant portions of Why Process Is Metaphysically Necessary
Future R&M: The Arrow of Time and the Direction of Becoming
E. Persistence, History, and Identity
Why Process Is Metaphysically Necessary
What If Process Comes Before Relation?
Processual Becoming Across Relational Worlds
These writings increasingly treat persistence not as immunity from change but as continuity achieved through change. They also introduce the important question of temporal scale: what appears as an event at one scale may constitute a process at another.
Future R&M: Memory, Persistence, and Identity
F. Quantum Possibility, Novelty, and Futurity
Stephen Hawking, Multi-Universes, and God's Grander Design
Stephen Hawking, Indeterminacy, God & Quantum Physics
Stephen Hawking: The Strangeness of Quantum Physics and Cosmic Indeterminacy
The Quantum Universe We Live In
These early writings raise a question that later becomes central to GRR: whether possibility belongs merely to what observers do not yet know or whether reality itself possesses genuinely unrealized possibilities.
Future R&M: Novelty, Possibility, and Futurity
G. Freedom and Agency
Stephen Hawking, Indeterminacy, God & Quantum Physics
Relational Freedom and Agency (29)
Relevant GRR essays on generative agency and responsible participation. The mature question is no longer simply whether reality contains indeterminacy. It becomes:
How does openness become responsiveness, and how does sufficiently organized responsiveness become agency?
Future R&M: Freedom and Participatory Agency
H. Possibility and the Open Future
The 2012 Hawking indeterminacy sequence:
Science / Philosophy - Why Time Travel IS NOT Possible
Why Process Is Metaphysically Necessary
The developing question is whether the future is merely unknown or whether it is genuinely not-yet-actual.
Future R&M: Possibility, Hope, and an Open Future
I. Consciousness and Experienced Time
Time & the Primordial Universe - Einstein vs. Bergson
Processual Becoming Across Relational Worlds
The 2022 collection already opens the discussion toward human and cosmic time, neuroscience, biology, Bergsonian duration, and Whiteheadian process, while the later relational work expands the conversation toward phenomenology and embodied experience.
This category establishes an important distinction for future inquiry:
physical temporality ≠ ontological temporality ≠ experienced temporality
Future R&M: Consciousness and Temporality
J. God, Eternity, and Divine Temporality
God and Time: The (Quantum) Physics of Time
What Is Time? And How Does It Relate to God?
God and Time: God is Not Eternal
God and Time: The Mystery of the Incarnate God Eternal
Does God Live Outside of Time? Can There Be Such a Concept?
Can God Live Outside of Time? Why Would This NOT Be Important?
These writings preserve an important part of the intellectual genealogy. Before temporality became a sustained metaphysical problem within Reality & Metaphysics, it had already emerged through theological questions concerning eternity, divine action, creation, primordial reality, and whether God should be conceived as outside time or participating within an intrinsically temporal reality.
This material need not require a separate essay in R&M Section IX. It can remain an important historical archive and later provide source material for the development of Relational Theology.
👉 These essays explore the temporal structure of relational reality, moving from the physical and metaphysical questions of time, its possible origin or emergence, and its apparent directionality toward inheritance, persistence, futurity, agency, consciousness, interpretation, and finite existence. Together they ask whether time is fundamental to becoming, emergent from it, or constituted through a more complex relation with it; why becoming appears consequential and irreversible; what it means for reality to possess a consequential past while remaining open toward unrealized possibility; and how temporality becomes consciously experienced, interpreted, and lived by participants within an unfinished world.
