There is a trap in language and thinking, which is to presume a negation is real. Knowing things, or believing you know them, it is tempting to think the mental act of negating this knowledge has pointed somewhere real or true. Instead (this takes sophistication), one should have the wherewithal to notice that a mental negation may have no bearing on the real, that you aren’t thinking of something new or real just by denying what you thought.
Theologians fall into this trap trying to think about nothing, or as in the present post, timelessness. Seeing objects a man thinks, “If these are gone, it would be nothing,” but this is not the case and this should be admitted freely today after the strange nature of the quantum realm has been partly explored. But more urgently from the theological perspective, when the objects are gone God remains, with His creative powers. And even more urgent for man, something he has not seen and has not cared about either, when the body is gone the soul remains. I don’t believe people who say they know what nothing is.
I think in the end trying to think about timelessness or what is beyond time, will be a completely fruitless endeavor for any embodied entity. As people try to discuss this they are merely offering empty words, as their minds undergo a false negation, also not really understanding what time is even with respect to their own mortality. In this respect theology has been spinning an airy nothing, or building a fantasy castle in the air. You can construct the sentences, God is beyond time, God is outside of time, God is all time and all space, and yet the mind is not pointing at anything real, instead a false negation.
From embodiment we cannot be divorced from time, even conceptually. And especially importantly, those who learn to see the soul begin to care about its eternal continuance. If God is outside of time or not, they want their own time to go on forever, and this becomes a core question to the Deity, whether He has the power and the intent to do this.
