Earlier this year, I addressed a reader question about time and how God relates to it. Talking about time can be tricky, because our subjective experience of the passing of time is so fundamental that it’s difficult to get any distance for a new perspective. We just know that time advances continuously from the past into the future at 1 second per second, and everything exists and happens in the liminal present between the two. So it’s only natural to imagine God must have some kind of similar experience, at the very least by virtue of having been incarnated. At the same time, our understanding of time from physics suggests that time itself is part of creation. Thus we want to say that the Creator exists outside (?) or maybe before (?) or at least independent of time. These two ideas appear difficult to reconcile.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Down the Rabbit-Wormhole
relativity
Science in Review: Is God Outside of Time?
Housekeeping: This is my final response to the reader question on time (earlier responses here, here, and here). A follow-up to Kevin Birth’s reflections on time and Lent is forthcoming.
HC asks:
How would you describe time? How do you make sense of God as a being that is outside of time, and yet has created it, interacts with his creations that are confined to it, and at one specific point in history entered into time in the person of Jesus?
God is frequently described as “outside of time.” Growing up in Christian circles, I certainly heard the phrase often. Picturing God outside of time makes it easy to understand how he knows the future. Time becomes a sort of movie strip; we can only live in one frame of film at a time–the one we call ‘now’–but God can see all of the frames at once. This God is the great auteur of our lives and we simply have to act out our appointed roles.
[Read more…] about Science in Review: Is God Outside of Time?
Science Reader Question: What’s a Few Minutes Between Friends?
HC asks:
How would you describe time?
Last week I went a bit esoteric, musing that time is the feature of the universe that makes forgiveness necessary. Now let’s try something a bit more basic. Time is the feature of the universe that we measure with clocks. As banal as that statement may be, it is possibly the only statement about time one can make with certainty. Time allows us to decide which events come before which other events and how rapidly or slowly the second followed after the first. And since time is associated with measurement, it’s tempting to measure ourselves with it. Did we spend our time well? Are we managing it as efficiently as possible? But if we measure our worth with time, what happens if not everyone agrees on the same measurement?
[Read more…] about Science Reader Question: What’s a Few Minutes Between Friends?