Addendum: We human beings have great difficulty thinking even about the more simplistic aspects of time. Consider these corrections to two other popular misconceptions.
Misconception 1: Measurement of time equals time itself. Simply pointing out this nearly ubiquitous error should suffice to correct it. Secular folks and believers alike frequently assume this non sequitur with Christians suggesting that there could be no time prior to the Earth's orbit or it's rotation, with their confusion resulting from an assumption that if man possessed no scale then there could be no mass, or no ruler then there could be no length, or no speedometer then there could be no velocity, or no clock then there could be no time. The measurement of something does not equate to the thing itself, and neither does the ability or lack of ability to measure something equate to that thing.
Misconception 2: Time flows from the past into the future. It is often claimed that "Time's arrow points from the past into the future and the current of time flows forward." Yes of course this is a metaphor, yet the widespread metaphor is unintentionally exactly backward when compared to reality. The truth is the reverse, for in whatever way we may speak of time flowing, then time flows backwards. The current of time brings the future into the present and then to the past. Tomorrow's date, suspended perfectly in the flow of time, will eventually arrive at the present, and recede into the past. Incorrectly men assume that, "the current of time sweeps us from birth to death." But more accurately, the current of time sweeps our entire earthly lives into the past. Time does not carry our birth forward into the future, nor (as it might if time flowed forward) does it forever postpone our death nudging it later and later. Rather, "I" am like a floating buoy anchored to the river bed bobbing and resisting the flow of time. Contrariwise, the "events" that I experience are not similarly anchored and so being vulnerable to the flow of time, as sediment suspended in a river current, they are whisked into the past.
