Revelation Space is not found in the New Testament. It’s actually a “hard science fiction” novel which is the first in a wonderful series written by Alastair Reynolds. In the novel, there are a class of spacefarers that travel the vast distances between the stars in ships that travel within a fraction of the speed of light. Interesting things happen. Because the ships travel near the speed of light, a journey to a star 8 light-years away might take 9-10 years. But for the people on planets around the star they are going to (or from), many decades pass. Because of this, many of these travelers are hundreds of years old from the point of view of people living on the planets, while they may just be decades old physiologically.
This is certainly outside the realm of our normal experience. For millennia, people assumed that the universe all moved together in “lock-step” – that time passed equally for everyone. Einstein first suggested that time changed depending on the observer through some famous thought experiments involving people on trains. His equations have been shown to be accurate to extreme accuracy. Strange things happen to atomic particles sped up to near the speed of light. Strange things happen near black holes. The astronauts who orbit the earth are just a tiny bit younger than the rest of us. It’s fascinating.
Another interesting thing about time is what happens if we consider it as another dimension. To understand this, go back to the Flatland example we covered in a previous post. Imagine a circle moving around in Flatland, going here and there as he chose. Now imagine that time is the third dimension – the flat world moving upward – like a deck of cards. If someone was outside this and could look at it, the circle would look like a sausage. When it was born, it would be small. It would grow and move around. And then it would die, and it’s particles would gradually fall apart and be used in another being. From the outside, past, present and future would all be there in front of the “observer”.
There are many more cool things about time, including directionality (can an event now affect the past?), discreteness (with all past states contained in Now), quantum time, etc. But we’ll stop there for now.
So what does religion have to say about this? First of all, we know that time is different for God. We read in 2 Peter 3:8, “…that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”. Joseph Smith also described this in Abraham, including the facsimile, where the time for Kolob is one day equals 1000 years. It also talks about this same concept in Islam where “verily a day in the sight of thy Lord is like a thousand years of your reckoning.” (Surah 22:47). So the concept of time being measured differently is certainly within religious teachings.
But is God beyond time? We read that God is endless and eternal. In Abraham, the one day equals a thousand years is given as the time for Kolob, which is “closest” to God so potentially NOT exactly God’s time if God were at a singularity where the measurement of time broke down. If God were outside our “mortal” time, He might be like the observer of Flatland. All things, past, present and future, would be before God. Maybe there is NO time for God?
But, this can lead to problems too. Assuming that God is NOT bound by our mortal time, according to LDS theology, there must be some sort of time where God exists. Why? When we read descriptions of heaven, we are told that people talk there, that angels sing praises to God, that we progress, etc. All of these things require time to exist. Speech requires one sound to be made before another one. Singing requires one note before another. And progress suggests to different states with different attributes of each state. So, maybe there IS time for God.
This is just a very brief overview about some of the cool things concerning time, but I’ll leave it at that for the sake of not boring everyone to death. It is interesting to me that the Bible and the Qu’ran talked about different rates of time centuries before Einstein. It is also interesting to me that, if God were outside our time, he would see the past, present and future all before Him. Perhaps we will explore some of the other religious implications of the directionality of time, quantum time, etc. in future posts. But for now…
Questions:
- Do you think that God can SEE (ie. He knows absolutely) our past, present and future literally? Or do you jus think that He can “predict” what we are going to do?
- If God can “see” the future, what does that say about our free will? Are we still free to choose?
- Do you think time exists where God lives? If not, how do we eat, talk, sing, and progress?
- How literally do you take the descriptions of time in the scriptures? Did people in the Old Testament literally live centuries? Was the earth created in 6 days? Or 6000 years?
- Even if you feel that the times in the Old Testament were potentially the result of translations, etc, how do you reconcile D&C 77:6 with science suggesting an antiquity of the earth (it states: “…the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence”) This scripture was revealed directly into English, with no intermediary translation steps.
(NOTE: This is post #11 in a multi-part series exploring science and religion. For previous posts, click on Mike S in the Authors section to the right.)
Wheat & Tares 
One more relevant LDS scripture is Alma 40:8:
This seems to support the idea that LDS doctrine agrees with Catholic doctrine, namely, that God exists outside of anything we understand as “time.”
“we know that time is different for God.”
So much in the scriptures is figurative or metaphorical. I think the scriptures you cite (“one day is with the Lord as a thousand years” etc.) can easily be read as such. Maybe they just intend to illustrate that God is not flighty or impatient in his judgments.
So no, I wouldn’t agree that we know that time passes differently for God.
Thomas:
If God exists outside of what we understand as “time” (with which I agree), does He have a different time, or no time?
BrianJ:
I agree that we don’t necessarily “know” what or how time passes for God. I do think it is different, however. Theoretically, everything in the scriptures could be metaphorical.
D&C 77:6 is a rhetorical flourish.
1. Do you think that God can SEE (ie. He knows absolutely) our past, present and future literally? Or do you jus think that He can “predict” what we are going to do?
If there is a God, then he or she can SEE our past, present and future. How can you be all knowing without knowing all?
2. If God can “see” the future, what does that say about our free will? Are we still free to choose?
Sure. God just knows what choice you’re gonna make because you already made it, even though you haven’t made it yet.
3. Do you think time exists where God lives? If not, how do we eat, talk, sing, and progress?
Ah now you have uncovered a paradox (even worse than #2) In order for God to see all, he/she must be outside our dimension (which includes time) making him/her outside of time…yet the whole speak/sing thing.
4. How literally do you take the descriptions of time in the scriptures?
See below:
4a. Did people in the Old Testament literally live centuries?
No.
4b. Was the earth created in 6 days?
No.
4c. Or 6000 years?
No.
5. Even if you feel that the times in the Old Testament were potentially the result of translations, etc, how do you reconcile D&C 77:6 with science suggesting an antiquity of the earth (it states: “…the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence”) This scripture was revealed directly into English, with no intermediary translation steps.
Easy…it is false.
Brian J:
The time dilation effect (with the reference to the Revelation Space novel) comes from special relativity even if the scripture was metaphorical. It says that time depends on how fast you go. General relativity, in addition, says that time depends on how strong gravity is — in other words, on WHERE you are.
Time, or some meta-time, is definitely a check on whether our concepts of God are tenable.
BR:
Mathematical quibble; your answer to 3 eliminates God being inside time. It allows God being outside (as in panentheism) or coincident with any boundary of time, or with the totality of time, as in pantheism. The latter is my vote.
FT:
Then you dispute the paradox?
Bruce Webster has a blog post that investigates this line of thought:
http://adventures-in-mormonism.com/2007/06/03/some-thoughts-on-higher-dimensional-realms/
from a paper he co-wrote in 1980. I like it very much. It also reminds me of current astrophysics/cosmology theories about how our universe is just one of many in a larger multiverse.
Multiverse makes sense on many levels.
Explains the singularity.
I think we need a major revamp of our cosmology in the Restoration. I think Mormon theology is in a lot better shape to deal with modern cosmology than is mainstream Christianity. It has assumptions about time and space built into its theology that came from flat earth days.
I’m actually working on a future post that talks about the difference between “time” and “causality” and how it is the latter, not the former, that is emerging as fundamental.
I think “time” and any “meta-time” in the spiritual realm are related in a very complex way, that will NOT be paradoxical, but will NOT be quickly sorted out because we don’t even have a good handle on what time itself is.
Mike S: “Theoretically, everything in the scriptures could be metaphorical.”
Yep, so we have to find out what is and what isn’t metaphor (metonymy, actually). I think this “1 day = 1000 years” is clearly just a phrase—similar to how we often say “I told you a million times,” when in fact we really just mean that “I told you more than enough times; four times to be precise.”
FireTag: “The time dilation effect…”
Meh. That argument works just as well to suggest that time moves slower for God than for us; we have no idea how fast he moves or what gravity he is subject to. Hence my statement that “I wouldn’t agree that we know that time passes differently for God.”
The other part of my point was to reject the idea that God exists outside of time. Even if he lives on a planet traveling at 10,000 times faster than ours, he still lives within time.
#10: Bookslinger
Thanks for that reference. It talks about many of the things we’ve discussed in earlier posts in this series, but obviously predates this by 30+ years.
It is interesting that many of the descriptions of “spiritual” things could actually be defined quite naturally if we accept higher dimensions – rather than some supernatural event, it’s just a natural use of a higher law.
Also, according to one of the first posts in this series, my underlying assumption is that science is getting “closer” to the truth overall. It does appear that multiverses and higher dimensions in things like string theory best describe the universe around us.
Stephen M / BR:
If we accept that D&C 77 is a rhetorical flourish, or just plain false, where does it stop? How do we decide which things in our canonized scriptures are “true”? And who gets to decide?
(I agree with you BTW, but just posing the question)
BrianJ:
I think it would be hard to suggest that time travels much SLOWER for God than us. At the speeds that the earth travels (and the sun), relativistic effects are fairly minimal. Even if something were absolutely “stationary” relative to us (which is actually hard to define) the difference in time is fairly small.
As far as God living on a planet/star traveling faster than us, it might be hard to find a candidate. At the center of the Milky Way, the latest theories suggest a supermassive black hole, nearly the size of Mercury’s orbit, with the mass of approximately 4 million suns.
Over the past few decades, scientists have tracked stars which orbit this. While our sun takes approximately 200-250 million years to orbit once around the galactic center, these stars orbit in 10-20 years. They reach speeds of over 13,000,000 miles per hour (or roughly 0.2% of the speed of light)
Despite these incredibly fast speeds, the change in time is only about 2% (ie. 1 day = 1 day 29 minutes). This is orders of magnitude different from 1 day = 1000 years.
Mike S, 16: I agree with that.
Mike S [15]
Once we realize that scriptures were written by men, not God, it no longer matters. We just read them and take out the good and ignore the bad.
Although don’t you then just get to the same regression problem as Dawkins et al. say you do with God, i.e., what caused the multiverse?
At some point, you have to posit some First Cause existing outside of anything that we are capable of conceiving as existence, whether it be God, or the laws of probability and quantum mechanics.
Brian:
There is no absolute time in special relativity. I observe anything moving relative to me in space — including you — to be moving through time with a slight “sideways” angle in time. The angle grows as the relative speed rises and reaches a perpendicular “90 degree” angle at light speed. You’re moving perpendicularly in time to me, and I’m moving perpendicularly in time to you. Everything seems normal to each of us, except the other appears to be frozen in time, and shrunken to zero in length.
Thomas: The First Cause is obviously an issue with pretty much any theory – whether multiverse, etc.
In LDS theology, we taught at one point a form of “cosmic evolution” – that God was once a man and that we can become like God, and that mortality was just a step in the process. It seems that this has been deemphasized in recent years, including by Hinckley and Church manuals.
If this theology still holds, then God’s father is our cosmic “grandfather”, and so on. I think a multiverse model and extradimensions could fit in this – when we are God’s, we each get our own little universe to “play with”.
This doesn’t solve the First Cause problem, however. Perhaps it does stretch infinitely back, although I can’t really conceive of this. Perhaps it is like evolution here on earth – given enough time and enough universes, it is inevitable that a “God” would pop up at least once at some point. And once a god develops, he may find a process by which his children can also become gods. And so it begins.
Given an essentially infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of universes, it is nearly certain that a being like God would appear.
This doesn’t really explain it, as it’s essentially an unknowable problem, but it’s just a theory.
What causes the givens? (Not Terryl’s family, I mean.)
One of Joseph Smith’s themes I’d like to learn more about, is his concept of existence as “one eternal round.” My father the astrophysicist finds this an interesting fit with Hawking’s idea of evaporating black holes setting off new Big Bangs and creating new universes. But to get all the way to “one eternal round” — an actual circle of cause and effect — you have to have universes giving rise to universes that somehow then give rise to the universe that caused them. Kind of like an astronomical version of the song “I Am My Own Grandpa.”
In other words, “one eternal round” means that it’s possible for something to reach back into its own past, and be its own ultimate cause.
I can’t conceive of how this would work.
On the other hand, I once argued a motion in front of a judge who could: He couldn’t wrap his mind around what seemed to me the common-sense notion that a person can’t rely to his detriment on a misrepresentation that doesn’t get made until three months after his supposed act in reliance.
At the time, I would have thought the judge was dumb as a post, if not for the ethical considerations. But maybe he was just a mystic with a better grasp of the eternal principles of causation.
#22: Thomas
…a person can’t rely to his detriment on a misrepresentation that doesn’t get made until three months after his supposed act in reliance.
And this is why I could never be a lawyer. I can understand a fourth dimension and/or string theory better than I can understand this 🙂
Mike S. and Thomas:
I myself prefer the notion that consciousness is a property of reality no less fundamental than space, time, energy, information, or anything else, as I wrote about in one of my earliest W&T posts:
http://www.wheatandtares.org/2010/10/08/the-spirit-of-the-earth/
However, for the closest thing to the “random appearance of God” idea, google “Boltzmann brains”.
#22:
Regarding the “givens”, there isn’t a “cause”. In any given system, if there is an option of remaining “as is” vs some action that changes the system, it could take essentially an infinite amount of time because it’s not really defined.
It’s much like the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve could have theoretically remained in one state for one day, one month, one year, or a billion years. As long as they were immortal and “couldn’t die”, it is essentially undefined how long it was. The eating of the apple essentially set a baseline for mortality.
In a similar fashion, if there was a system that just was, it doesn’t matter how long it lasted. And if universes were popping into and out of existence (even if “popping” was on a time-scale of tens of billions of years), it doesn’t really matter how long or how much things seethed. All it takes is some random fluctuation somewhere/somewhen to be enough to allow an intelligence to organize. Even if the chance of this happening is terribly small (ie 1 in 10^-100) or something nearly improbable, if there are 10^100 or 10^1000 or a near infinite “chances” for it to happen, then it will likely happen.
And if this intelligence organizes enough and progresses enough to be able to come up with a system whereby it/he/she can start to self-replicate this process, to being others to its level, that would be enough. Subsequent generations might be God to the generation below. And there we are.
One unique thing about LDS theology is the idea that God was once like us – ie. he was just a formless “intelligence” which was formed into a spirit, which received a body, which became resurrected, which became God. This sounds a lot like the theory of evolution, just on a much grander scale.
Quick and totally self-indulgent explanation:
To successfully sue someone for fraud, you need to prove, not only that someone knowingly (more or less) made a false statement, but also that you believed it, and did something as a result of believing it that caused you harm.
For instance, you believed the guy who was selling you the Brooklyn Bridge actually owned it, so you paid him lots of money.
I had a case years ago where I thought I’d struck gold: The plaintiff was claiming to have done something, in August of 1999, because he believed my client’s (supposedly) false statement.
But the statement in question was not made until October of 1999.
In other words, how could the guy have, in August, believed, and acted upon, a statement that wouldn’t be made for another two months?
Time warps, that’s how. Or so apparently the judge would have thought, if he’d been listening to me.
I was young and trusting in the Great Repository of Sound Judgment That Is The American Judiciary. And so maybe I didn’t spend as much time in my brief explaining this rather obvious fact as I could have. And it was near the end of the calendar, and the old judge probably just wanted to go home, so he just tuned out of my increasingly loud oral argument.
Still turned out OK in the end, but it was a surreal experience.
Well, why isn’t the chance of something randomly fluctuating ex nihilo into existence, infinitely improbable?
Whatever something there is that causes the odds that random fluctuations in the Great Whatever will cause Existence to pop into existence to be greater than zero, that something is the first cause of existence. “To which everyone gives the name of God.”
It’s still “turtles all the way down,” no matter how many turtles back into the multiverse you go through.
“I don’t know that we teach it.”
Really, I don’t. I wonder if the doctrine “As man now is, God once was,” might refer to any number of things — from God the Father experiencing mortality vicariously through the experience of God the Son (with whom the Father is said to be completely one), or possibly even the Father having experienced mortality in the same way as Christ did, perhaps a long time ago in a galaxy far away. The other interpretation — that God was just a slob like one of us — is really, really hard to square with the plethora (<i<Jefe, what is a plethora?) of scriptures that describe God as being eternal, everlasting, always having been God, etc.
I’ve always regarded D&C 77:6 to refer to the time from the Fall of Adam (approx 4000 BC) through the end of the Millennium (approx AD 3000) I don’t think it has anything to do with the time span of the earth’s creation or the length of time between the creation and the fall.
Regarding singing, sequence shows relativety, not absolutism. The guys in the spaceship traveling near the speed of light could sing and talk, but it wasn’t in the same timeframe as those on the planets they visited.
And how does sound travel if the speaker is moving at light speed? The Doppler effect wouldn’t even apply…
FireTag, 20: The fact that I don’t see your point in telling me that makes me think that you also don’t see my point.
Thomas:
There are a plethora of scriptures describing God as eternal, etc. but this is the easiest of all of these issues to reconcile.
Assuming God exists outside the universe (since at one point the universe didn’t exist according to Big Bang theory – at least this version of the universe), God has ALWAYS been God as long as this universe existed. Hence, eternal, everlasting, etc. make perfect sense. God could ALWAYS have been God of this universe.
This doesn’t mean, however, that God didn’t go through an experience similar to ours in a DIFFERENT universe. In a similar fashion, were we to “become Gods”, if we were God over a portion of this universe, we would NOT be God seen eternal. However, if we were to progress to the point where we became God over our own universe (in a multiverse of universes), for THAT UNIVERSE, we, too, would be God eternally, everlasting, and forever…
The Other Clark:
Whether relative or absolute, singing still requires time to be present. One word has to exist before another one as seen from the point-of-view of the singer and/or the listener. If there was NO time, and all of the notes for “eternity” existed simultaneously, would it really be singing?
Also, when you ask how sound travels at the speed of light, it is all relative as well. Past around 700 mph (depending on atmospheric conditions) you are traveling faster than sound anyway, so it can’t propagate forward ahead of the source of the sound.
When you talk about “sound traveling at the speed of light”, I would assume you are talking about inside a spaceship or on a planet or something like that. In this case, while the “object” may be traveling quickly, a sound being transmitted through air, for example, is in air at relative rest.
FireTag:
I actually think there is much to be said about “consciousness” being a fundamental property of the universe. I remember reading your post, and in looking back, actually commented on it at the time.
This starts to drift very much into Eastern religions, where “consciousness” exists and is continually reborn/reorganized into new forms (ie. reincarnation). This is much the same process whereby the atoms in my body used to be in someone else’s body and so on.
I think there is a profound truth to this and believe much of it. There are a lot of implications of this that have played a profound role in my personal life. However, because it is somewhat contradictory to traditional LDS teachings, I try not to bring it up too much on this website.
Also, regarding D&C 77 and Adam’s beginning around 4000 BC, there are a few posts coming up in the near future about: 1)the timing of Adam with what science suggests about when man was on the earth, 2) how we think Adam actually got her/was created, 3) evolution, etc. It’s going to get interesting…
Tied into all this is our own perception of time. Not only don’t we know what it is, we really don’t know how we perceive it, apart from memory, I suppose. Which raises an interesting question of how our perception of time and our memories are intertwined.
Mike S.:
Well, those of us “born in apostasy” anyway can be more freewheeling in trying to reconcile what JS saw with what modern science now says. 😀
Thomas [19]
“Although don’t you then just get to the same regression problem as Dawkins et al. say you do with God, i.e., what caused the multiverse?”
Sure, but each time to go beyond one more layer, its a victory.
Except with the “multiverse,” you’re in the same territory as you are with God — hypothesizing something you have no possible way of testing.
Thomas:
True. It’s all theory when you get that deep. Hopefully, the LHC will help with a few more clues.
At the current rate of information, I wouldn’t be surprised if we go one more layer in my lifetime. Hell, we might even be able to prove/disprove God with a mathematical equation.