Testing the Cathedral’s Foundations: A Formal Analysis of Temporal Fission Theory’s Resolution of Augustine’s Aporias of Time

This companion paper subjects Temporal Fission Theory (TFT; Boether, 2025) to formal logical and quasi-mathematical scrutiny. TFT claims that the phenomenological present emerges through the dynamic collision of past and future temporal potentialities, resolving three aporias identified in Augustine’s Confessions XI: the ontological status of the present, the phenomenological–cosmological divide, and the mechanism of temporal constitution. The paper proceeds in three phases. First, it constructs two adversarial proofs: Proof A formalizes TFT’s core propositions and demonstrates their internal consistency and explanatory power; Proof B attempts to defeat TFT by identifying circularity, explanatory gaps, and ontological inflation. Initial weighted evaluation across seven criteria yields a score of 4.25/5.00 for Proof A against 3.25/5.00 for Proof B, with two critical vulnerabilities: a circularity problem in TFT’s definition of temporal potentialities and the metaphorical status of its central mechanism. Second—and constituting this paper’s principal original contribution—the analysis completes TFT’s formalization by grounding temporal potentialities in McTaggart’s (1908) B-series ordering relations, thereby defeating the circularity objection through a formal Non-Circularity Theorem, and by specifying the emergence function through an axiomatic framework satisfied by two independent candidate formalizations: a measure-theoretic model and an information-theoretic model. Third, the revised evaluation demonstrates that TFT’s formalized version scores 4.60/5.00, resolving the two principal objections while generating a novel claim: that A-series temporal properties emerge from B-series structure through the interaction kernel that consciousness provides—a result that, if correct, addresses the central problem that has divided the philosophy of time since McTaggart.