I love Time Travel stories, especially when they involve convoluted paradoxes, and changes made in the past that affect the present. Ray Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder” is the quintessential time travel story, about a man that travels back in time to hunt dinosaurs, steps off the path and kills a butterfly, and then travels back to the present and finds changes, big and small all from a dead butterfly 66 million years ago.
My granddaughter and I watch the current TV show “Timeless” together, which is about a group that chases a rogue time traveler, trying to keep him from changing the past. As they return at the end of each show, little things have changed in the present due to their interacting with the past.
I often wonder if God can travel in time. It would explain how he can know the future! There is not a lot written in LDS theology about God and time. Going back over a hundred years, both Orson Pratt and B. H. Roberts affirmed that God is in time, and has a past, present and future. Pratt wrote: “The true God exists both in time and space. He has extension, and form, and dimensions, as well as man. He occupies space; has a body, parts, and passions; can go from place to place—can eat, drink, and talk, as well as man.” [1] Roberts said that God the son “became man,” that there was for him a “before and after,” and that “here there is a succession of time with God—a before and after; here is being and becoming.”[2]
More recently Apostle Neal A. Maxwell spoke of a different position: “Once the believer acknowledges that the past, present, and future are before God simultaneously—even though we do not understand how, then the doctrine of fore-ordination may be seen somewhat more clearly” (emphasis in original).[3] Elder Maxwell also suggested that God could not know what is in our future unless he is outside of time and knows all things simultaneously, so that God actually sees rather than foresees the future and is never surprised by what happens, although we often are. [4]
So what do you think? Is God outside of time, and able to travel to and fro through the eons? Can he drop in on any time in history, or is he governed by time like us mortals, with a before, present and future?
(Full disclosure: The idea for this post and references cited were taken from Line Upon Line, Essays on Mormon Doctrine, chapter six “Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and Omniscience in Mormon Theology” by Kent E. Robson)
[1] Orson Pratt, The Kingdom of God (Liverpool), 31 Oct. 1848, 48.
[2] B. H. Roberts, The Mormon Doctrine of Deity (Salt Lake City, 1903), 95-96.
[3] See Neal A. Maxwell, “A More Determined Discipleship,” Ensign 9 (Feb. 1979), 2:69-73; and All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1979).
[4] See Maxwell, “Discipleship,” 70-71; see also Maxwell, Experience, 37.
Alma 40:8: “All is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto man.”
I think God can see and interact in all of our time at once. But I also think that he is perhaps governed by his own time–that while all of our time is present before him, that he still has a future and a past that aren’t present before him. So, for example, all of earthly human existence would be present before him, but things long prior to the existence of the earth and things long after its destruction are not present before him.
One of main things that Ostler engages with in his book and podcast is God’s timelessness or lack thereof:
http://www.exploringmormonthought.com/search?updated-max=2017-07-23T23:46:00-07:00&max-results=11&start=25&by-date=false&m=1
I disagree with those who assert that God cannot be outside time.
If he is it allows him to be transfinite and infinite as far as we are concerned without requiring complex theocidy.
I’m okay with people having differing opinions on this question. None of us knows, we only speculate. I’m content with the propositions that time is measured to man, but not to God, and that all things, past, present, and future, are known to God. I make no projections of these propositions onto God himself.
As an agnostic, I’m open to contemplating the possibility of an existence/state/field outside of our human experience with time. I also think we as humans make far-reaching assumptions about what time actually is. Like life, it’s one of those things that becomes slippery when you try to exactly define it with no exceptions. Is time actually an existing thing? Or is it just our abstract attempt to describe an observable sequence of events and their apparent pace? For me, the notion of all things being before God reads as an attempt to describe what it’s like to be all-knowing, not an assertion that God time-travels.
The above said, I love the Doctor Who series. And I think Doctor Who expresses a desire in humans to be, or at least be blessed by, a powerful being not subject to time as we know it. It’s a rich question begging for our imaginations to weigh in.
I have a doubt about poly-omni-everything Gods. God can know what is knowable; but nothing that is not knowable. He can move that which is moveable, but cannot move that which is immoveable.
My belief in the power of decision requires that I be free to make decisions and that they will be effective. What sort of God would create 1/3 of the hosts of heaven knowing in advance they wouldn’t even experience mortality? Seems inefficient.
Is there a difference between knowing the future or engineering it? Not by observation I think. Isaac Asimov goes somewhat in that theory with his Foundation Trilogy. Forecasting the future is almost perfect, but when reality starts to drift a bit from prediction, a secret (until then) team of people make adjustments to keep reality on track with prediction.
I see the future as probabilities, and with sufficient present knowledge and behavior of things, pretty good predictions can be made. That’s not “seeing” the future, but predicting it based on probabilities.
Since many people feel strongly about their interpretations I tend not to delve into such things publicly.
I love Elder Maxwell, and usually agree with most things he puts forward, but think he was mistaken on this one. Space-time is one thing, so to say God/s can exist outside of time is to say they can exist outside of space, and I believe to exist outside of space would be to cease to exist at all, or at the very least you would not be embodied. So I think existing outside of space-time is a nonsensical notion.
Also on the subject of omniscience – it simply requires a deterministic universe (a universe that is fully based on cause and effect, as opposed to having true randomness in the equation). Any meaningful notion of free will can exist in either scenario since the agent must be able to cause their choice, whether or not other things are random in the universe. So the idea put forward by some religious thinkers, including some that are LDS, that free will is incompatible with a fixed future and past is a mistaken notion.
The conundrum for a lot of Christianity is viewing God as creating individuals/their will, because God would ultimately be responsible for all choice. Joseph Smith’s uncreated spirits/minds solves this dilemma.
For the LDS believer that believes in an omniscient embodied God, I think the most reasonable conclusion is that God exists within time and within a deterministic universe – and can therefore with knowledge of all the variables can ‘see’ the fixed future as well as the fixed past.
This is an interesting conflict for me.
On one hand, the Big Bang Theory posits a definite beginning to both space and time. If God exists within space and time, how could he orchestrate the creation of space and time from within the singularity that existed before space and time existed?
On the other hand, how can I conceive of a being that exists outside of the known universe?
Someone recently introduced me to Kolob Theorem stuff, where our God did not create the entire universe. Rather he is responsible for our galaxy and there is another God family over in the Andromeda galaxy and so on — each galaxy is a “familial creation subdivision. Of course, in this kind of thinking, who or what creates the universe in which all of these gods are making/organizing galaxies?
I was reminded of this statement by Blake Ostler in this essay (http://www.patheos.com/resources/additional-resources/2010/08/the-challenges-of-non-existent-mormon-theology ). “The primary task of Mormon theology for the foreseeable future is to assess its relationship to naturalism and the scientific worldview. Many Mormons view God as located within and limited by our “particular universe,” which began some fourteen billion years ago with the big bang and is thus subject to all of the limitations of natural law. Others see God as transcending the existing natural universe because God is the organizer not only of this universe, but of many others. God’s relationship to the natural universe, whether God had a beginning of his divinity, and whether God is at the mercy of limitations of natural laws, remain major issues for Mormon thinkers to work out.”
Steve, I not sure Mormons really believe that God is omniscient. Brother Brigham certainly taught that God is progressing. And there is the issue of eternal progression (Or, is God the exception?). If God is omniscient, it is only when compared to us. God may be embodied, but it’s a type of embodiment that we don’t understand.
And most Mormon’s aren’t deterministic. And I vote for randomness. My decisions matter and they have real repercussions. For example, we are co-creators of the Earth with God. The decisions we make move forward the evolution of the Earth.
God, if He understands the future, it is in general terms. He has no idea how you and I will turn out. He is more standoffish than most of us believe; He may not be up there stirring the pot.
Most people I know in the church believe God knows past, present, and future. Although I agree with you that most probably haven’t thought through the deterministic implications. The LDS cannon is full of consistent declarations of God’s omniscience, here are a few :
1 Nephi 9:6– “But the Lord knoweth all things from the beginning; wherefore, he prepareth a way to accomplish all his works among the children of men; for behold, he hath all power unto the fulfilling of all his words. And thus it is. Amen.”
2 Nephi 9:20– “O how great the holiness of our God! For he knoweth all things, and there is not anything save he knows it.”
Ether 3:25– “And when the Lord had said these words, he showed unto the brother of Jared all the inhabitants of the earth which had been, and also all that would be; and he withheld them not from his sight, even unto the ends of the earth.”
Moroni 7:22– “For behold, God knowing all things, being from everlasting to everlasting, behold, he sent angels to minister unto the children of men, to make manifest concerning the coming of Christ; and in Christ there should come every good thing.”
Abraham 2:8– “My name is Jehovah, and I know the end from the beginning; therefore my hand shall be over thee.”
Moses 1:6– “And I have a work for thee, Moses, my son; and thou art in the similitude of mine Only Begotten; and mine Only Begotten is and shall be the Savior, for he is full of grace and truth; but there is no God beside me, and all things are present with me, for I know them all.”
D&C 38:1-2– “Thus saith the Lord your God, even Jesus Christ, the Great I AM, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the same which looked upon the wide expanse of eternity, and all the seraphic hosts of heaven, before the world was made; The same which knoweth all things, for all things are present before mine eyes;”
D&C 130:6-7– “The angels do not reside on a planet like this earth; But they reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.”
I think it is pretty sound conclusion, as consistent as you’ll get in any scripture, that God does indeed know all things, at the very least from from some beginning to some end (which at the very least includes the history and future of this earth).
“My decisions matter and they have real repercussions.” I agree with this, and this is only possible in a deterministic equation. If your decisions are random, they are not truly chosen by you (in order to be random it cannot be influenced by any previous variable), and therefore don’t matter.
“For example, we are co-creators of the Earth with God. The decisions we make move forward the evolution of the Earth.” Also agree, and again only possible in a model that would be compatible with determinism. Our agency is one of the primary causes of what is and what the future will be.
“A rouge time traveler”? Does he go to different centuries to apply makeup?
I prefer the notion that time is more than one-dimensional. If it were three-dimensional, as space is, then God could actually see past and future. Try to wrap your head around that one. But the idea that God can focus on multiple things at once is evidence that time is not one-dimensional for him, as it is for us. We are limited by giving attention to one thing at a time, so each moment of time is empty for us. Only the unwinding sequence of moments allows us the illusion of “fullness.”
Great catch Wally, rouge vs rogue! (I fixed it!) This is one place Bill Gates really lets me down, when I choose the correct spelling of the wrong word! But, it wouldn’t be a Bishop Bill post without some spelling or grammar mistake!
I think that if the planet you live on becomes as a Urim and Thummim (sea of glass) for those in the Celestial Kingdom, then omniscience isn’t needed. The past, present, and future can be before you continually by that means. Think of it as a quantum supercomputer that all exalted beings tap into and that has it all figured out.
Another point to consider. What if you take a picture of a person every second for their entire life, cropping off / trimming away anything that isn’t the person, then stack those pictures on top of each other? A being outside of time with the past, present, and future before them continually would be able to see the whole evolution of that person from the beginning to the end, watching as the contour of the image changes from infancy to adulthood. They’d see periods of our life afflicted by sin, our growth as we live more fully the Gospel. We just see and experience a single snapshot at a time, but we are 4 dimensional beings that a being outside of time, whose gaze traverses all four dimensions, would fully see and comprehend.
Does God exist outside of our belief in Him? I say no.