So you do not agree with the theologian, that time is a measurement of change? Did you read my quote?
“Let us look a little more closely at what is implied by change. It means that the being which is subject to it is never at any moment the whole of itself: it possesses its being successively, as the philosophers say. You, for instance, are never at any moment the whole of yourself. What you were last year, what you will be next year, all belongs to the totality called you. But last year has gone, and next year has not arrived. It is obviously an overwhelming limitation that one never wholly possesses one’s self, that one possesses one’s being in successive moments and not simply in one act of being, that one is never wholly there. There is no such limitation in God. He possesses Himself wholly in one act of being. This is what we call His eternity. Thus eternity does’ not mean time open at both ends, time stretching away back into the past with no beginning, stretching away forward into the future with no ending. In fact we are back at our earlier principle: that infinity means not only the absence of external limits, but of internal divisions as well. Just as space has parts lying alongside one another, time has parts following one another. The Infinite has no parts, of either (or any other conceivable) sort. Eternity is not time, however much we may try to glorify the concept of time. The philosophic definition of eternity is in two Latin words, tota simul,1 which may be roughly translated as “all at once”. God’s eternity means that He possesses the totality of what He is, not in successive acts as we do, but in one single act.”
I had not read the quote until now.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be insulting but it is simply nonsense. It's all a bunch of self-contradictory conclusions based on premises which all beg the question. The past does not exist nor does the future. All that exists, exists now. And even that is a redundancy because there is no "now" either. "Now" is a time word. As such, it is a concept. It is an idea that exists in a thinking mind and nowhere else. Thus, it is most properly stated simply, and in the present tense, that, "All that exists, exists." That might sound like a tautology but it isn't. It is just another form of the first law of reason, the law of identity. What is, is. A is A. It is the concept upon which all knowledge and intelligible discourse is based. Any attempt to undermine it makes use of it and is thus self-defeating nonsense.
The only reason anyone who calls themselves a Christian believes a syllable of that quotation is because of Aristotle's philosophy which was imported into Christian doctrine by Augustine of Hippo. It has nothing to do with anything the bible teaches nor with plain reason. All of that sort of talk is predicated on, and serves as a rescue devise for, the doctrine that says that God cannot change in any way whatsoever (i.e. Classical Immutability). And, by the way, the irony of Aristotle being the one given credit for coming up with the laws of reason is not lost on me but he didn't invent the laws of reason, he merely understood them and wrote them down. A feat of philosophy so awesome that it dwarfs into obscurity all the fast quantity of nonsense that he spewed either prior to it or afterward.
And to answer your question directly, no, time is not accurately defined as "a measurement of change". What if something doesn't change? Can one not still ask, "How long has it stayed the same?" Conversely, if something changes, one might ask, "When did it change?"
In short, change implies the concept of time. Thus, to use it as the basis for it's definition would be to get the cart before the horse and employ circular reasoning. Further, since change implies time, to talk about any sort of change (or even the lack thereof) outside of time is to commit a stolen concept fallacy (i.e. to contradict yourself).
I didn't expect it to come up so quickly but this is the sort of thing I was referring to when I said it is helpful to included the concept of duration in the definition I've offered. Any event, including both change
and the lack thereof is covered by my definition.
Clete
