Real-Time Part One

     I have spent a lot of time thinking about time in the past year. Ever since I began studying how you can prove the existence of God as a metaphysical reality without appealing to faith, I have spent many moments pondering time. The connection may seem loose at the moment, but it all has to do with the nature of God.
     God is an eternal being, and the supreme being for that matter, who created all things. Time is one of those creatures. Additionally, we only exist because God wills us to, as Saint Luke says, "In Him we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:28)
     Now, many would say that time is unraveled like a time line on the table in front of God, but I struggle with this concept. Not that I doubt the infinity of God, but because I don't think that there is any substance to the past and the future. I propose that the present is the only aspect of time with substance; therefore, any notion of time travel introduced into science fiction ruins the story for me because I find it not only unrealistic, but unrealizable. I can't even bring myself to imagine it just for the sake of the story. (Basically, Star Trek IV and Star Trek: First Contact were impoverished by the time travel plot.)
     To say the future is unraveled before God would imply that it has substance already, but it doesn't exist yet even if God knows what we are going to choose and how it all ends beforehand. Since God, being eternal, is outside of time and has no beginning or end, how does time, which has a beginning and continues to unravel unto an end, intersect with that eternity? That remains a great mystery to me, at least for the moment.