"Behold, I answer to him who asks, 'What was God doing before He made heaven and earth?" with both a rejection of the joking reply and a profound reflection on time and creation.

And this is a key quotation: "Behold, I answer to him who asks, 'What was God doing before He made heaven and earth?' I answer not, as a certain person is reported to have done facetiously… 'He was preparing hell for those who pry into mysteries.' … More willingly would I have answered, 'I know not what I know not,' than that I should make him a laughing stock who asketh deep things… But I say that Thou, our God, art the Creator of every creature… Before God made heaven and earth, He made not anything."

He continues by explaining that time itself is part of creation, so the question "What was God doing then?" is misguided: "If before heaven and earth there was no time, why is it asked, What didst Thou then? For there was no 'then' when time was not."

This St Augustine's view, all complicated and esoteric.

My Old_Man says that St Augustine here rejects the humorous answer ("preparing hell for the curious") and that he insists that God created all things, and nothing existed before creation. Most importantly, time began with creation, so there was no 'before' in which God could be said to be doing anything.

Throughout the history, both, Philosophers and Theologians explained away all complicated events and phenomena by divine intervention. Invocation of God was a common practice. Thus, Gods perceived Gods' intervention explained the gaps in our knowledge and our in understanding of phenomena. Let us call it: The Gods of the Gaps.

Long before St Augastine, the philosophers have defined time is strikingly different ways: Greco Roman philosophers did not offer a single, unified definition of time; instead, they developed several influential and sometimes competing accounts. The core understanding is that Greek and Roman thinkers treated time either as a cosmic structure, a physical phenomenon, a linguistic category, or a narrative/historical structure, depending on their respective philosophical school.

Principal Views Across Major Schools

For Aristotle time is "the number of motion in respect of before and after." Time depends on change; without motion, time would not exist.

For Stoics time is a physical, extended continuum, not a series of discrete instants. They argued that the present is not a point but a stretch, and treated time as a corporeal entity accompanying cosmic motion.

For Epicureans (Lucretius) time is not an independent substance but an accident or property of events. Lucretius uses the term aetas to describe temporality as emerging from the motions and transformations of matter.

For Early Greek Historians (Herodotus, etc.) time is understood through linguistic markers of pastness, emphasizing how narrative structures shape temporal understanding.

For Roman Political Thought (saeculum) time is conceptualised as a cultural and political cycle, used to support imperial legitimacy and renewal.

In Summary Greco Roman philosophers defined time variously as:
A measure of motion (Aristotle);
A physical continuum (Stoics);
An emergent property of events (Epicureans);
A narrative and linguistic construct (historians, poets);
and a political age or epoch (Roman saeculum).

These definitions must coexist because ancient thought treated time as multi-featured phenomena, not as a single metaphysical category.


Other philosophers at other times have defined time in yet more different ways. Here are some of the most influential conceptions:

For Isaac Newton (17th century)time as absolute: a universal, independent flow that exists whether or not events occur in it. Time passes uniformly throughout the universe.

For Immanuel Kant (18th century) time is not a property of the external world itself. Rather, it is an a priori form of human intuition, a framework our minds use to organize experience. We experience everything through time.

For Henri Bergson (19th-20th century) the real time is not a sequence of measurable units but a continuous unfolding of consciousness.

For McTaggart (20th century) time is unreal. He distinguished: A) The A-series: past, present, future; B)the B-series: earlier than, later than. He also claimed the A-series is contradictory, and since genuine time requires it, time itself cannot be real.

For Presentism, only the present moment exists. The past no longer exists, and the future does not yet exist.

For Eternalism Past, present, and future are equally real. Time is more like a landscape than a flowing river; all moments exist within a larger space-time structure.

In Summary: Aristotle, Measure of change
Augustine, Structure of conscious experience
Newton, Absolute, universal flow
Kant, Mental framework for experience
Bergson, Lived duration
McTaggart, Ultimately unreal
Presentism, Only the present exists
Eternalism, All moments equally exist

An apparent and fascinating pattern is that philosophical definitions of time generally fall into three camps: time as change (Aristotle), time as consciousness (Augustine, Bergson), and time as an objective structure of reality (Newton, eternalism).