SURT notes 1.2.4 p.89

(The idea that time isn't real is an obstacle to understanding God. We try to associate the Aristotelean unmoved mover with the Newtonian observer outside space and time, and we end up with an absurd, omni-God.)

Time is meaningless in a block universe, and is meaningless to an observer outside of time.

Devaluing time is tied to privileging mathematics as reality. The ideas that math is reality and that understanding universal laws will allow us to know all that is, was, and will be is not science. It is philosophy or metaphysical assumptions, and probably not sound, at that.

We do better to put the Newtonian paradigm in its place, to drop the block-universe picture of the universe, to recognize the reality of time all the way down, to dispense with the notion of a framework of natural laws outside time, to admit that the laws of nature may change, and to deflate the claims of mathematics to represent a uniquely privileged channel of insight into reality.

(Dropping the omni-God requires a lot less intellectual stretching and rationalization than maintaining it. We do have to let go of the false comfort of a God in control of everything. A God living in nature with us, however, matches our lived experience better. Saying we are of a substance with God is not the same as saying we know, or can comprehend, everything about God.)

The Big Bang broke the laws as they currently are. Our evidence is that many natural laws aren't constant in time.

We have accepted conceptual maneuvers that disguise contradictions in the cosmological narrative.:

1. Newtonian prediction from initial conditions and laws has been generalized too far, from systems where it applies to the whole universe.
2. Sometimes we assume current conditions in the universe apply throughout time (cosmological presentism). (This can be subtle, I think)
3. We have to have immutable natural laws to be able to do science.
4. Reductionism in cosmology--we can understand all of time and space by studying small parts and extrapolating.

"All of them are tainted . . . by circularity."

. . . consider what the cosmological discoveries of the last hundred years might . . . mean once we relinquish the impulse to reconcile them with the tenets of the time-denying and mathematics-worshipping tradition that we dispute.

The hypotheses of the book:

. . . time is real . . . everything changes . . .mathematics is useful . . . because it abstracts . . . , not because it affords us privileged insight into timeless truth.

According to the predominant view of theories attempting to unify gravity with the other three forces,

The structural explanation is much more likely to help explain the history of the universe than the history of the universe is to explain the present structure.

Accepting the opposite would turn physics into a more narrative science, like history and evolution and social sciences, than the purely theoretical science we have often imagined it to be.

There is better reason to believe today in a succession of causally connected universes than there is to believe in a plurality of causally unconnected universes.

Accepting the multiverse (causally unconnected) prevents the need to deal with the reality of time.

String theory deepens the problems of the unreality of time and the ascendancy of mathematics rather than resolving them.