Posted on 07/11/2007 8:00:31 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
When you think of God, what comes to mind? A.W. Tozer once said, “We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.” If our ideas about God are coming from the wrong places, then our God will be too small. God’s Word, His Son, and creation give us ideas about the Creator. In Romans 1, Paul tells us that creation reveals God’s glory, but men have suppressed this knowledge.
In her latest book, Time Peace, my friend and colleague Ellen Vaughn has come up with a wonderful way to blast our too-small conceptions of God out of the water—and that is to contemplate time and light, two very complex elements of the created order.
While I can hardly do justice to her arguments in the space of a short commentary, I can say that Ellen shows us how scientific findings can enlarge our perspective of God. And she does this in an easy-to-read manner that doesn’t make the average reader’s head spin.
Ellen starts with Albert Einstein upsetting time’s applecart. As she says, “His discoveries showed us that the rate of time’s passage is not fixed, but is in fact relative to contextual elements like velocity or gravity.” Ellen tells us how in Einstein’s famous formula—E=mc²—m, that is mass, and e, that is energy, are really just two forms of the same thing. Energy is matter that has been freed. Matter is energy waiting for liberation. As she says in her down-to-earth style, “The amount of energy available in any given bit of matter—a Tootsie Roll, a stone, an atom—is the matter’s mass multiplied by the fastest velocity imaginable. That would be the speed of light or c squared.”
That means if somehow we had two twins and we were able to send one around the world at the speed of light and the other one stayed home, the one who went jet-setting around the planet would actually come back younger than the one who stayed home. Or to put it another way, if both those twins were wearing watches, the one who had been traveling at light speed would actually have a time that read earlier than the one who did not leave planet Earth.
If all this is mind-bending and perplexing, you’re not alone. But it just begins to scratch the surface of how big our God is. After all, if a being could move at the speed of light, for that kind of being, time would not move. Scriptures tell us, “God is light, in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).
As Vaughn says, “Is God light? Surely we can’t pin down the nature of God Himself, as if He can be analyzed, calibrated, or clocked. God is not an object.” She’s right. But I agree with her premise—the more we understand light and time, the more humbled and in awe we will be when we read how these biblical images are used to describe God.
Time Peace has certainly made me think more deeply about the way I think about God. I hope that as you read the book, you will discover where your ideas of God have been too small—and where your view of the time God has given you may be stunted, too.
I recommend this book. Not only is it a good read, it is also a powerful apologetic for the existence of God.
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BreakPoint/Chuck Colson Ping!
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mega ping to article
Do you know this book?
$10.19 plus shipping at Amazon.com
That is one of the few things likely to be true.
And one side of the universe would seem like it is right next to the opposite side.
An excerpt can be found at http://www.zondervan.com/media/samples/pdf/0310267269_samptxt.pdf
Exellent NOVA tape on the universe talks about mathmaticians attempting to come up with the universal laws that apply to small particles and huge astronomical bodies. Example the mathematical equations relating radiation, gravity and etc observed on planetary bodies should be the same with small atomic particles. Experiments and observations show that they are very similiar but slightly different, meaning the scientists are still missing something in their observations and measurement. Mathmeticians attempt to come up with the fudge factor and determined that the universe has 14 plus dimensions (humans can sense only 4 (length, width, height and time)). God in theory should be able to sense all 14 plus, meaning he can move, sense and do things that we mortal humans cannot because we are confined to 4. Believe or not, the longer astromoners and particle pychicists are involved with this academic exercise the more amazed they are of the orderliness and finesity of the world concluding the possibility of an intelligent designer or God.
Thanks for the ping! And, no, I haven’t read this book ... yet.
This is an awesome yet true concept, yet I disagree that if someone were slowed down to around the speed of light, then went faster than the speed of light, actually, in theory you could travel to the future, but never to “the past”-The past is a physical impossibility for physical beings such as mankind!
String theory is “bunk” and not Einstienian at all..its a way to try to explain the universe as “accidental” and not created specially by God, it delves waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much into theory for me, and not enough in true scientific methodology.
God is limitless - something our natural mind cannot conceive.
Thanks for your testimony, and thank God for His love.
BTT
Please put me on the Colson ping list. I’m in the middle of reading Colson’s “God and Government” - it’s really good so far.
I need to read this book.
I have discuused these things with pretty smart people. One claimed that Genesis is just another creation myth along side things like the sun being such and such god’s chariot traveling through the sky or that the earth sits on the back of a large turtle, etc.
My response is typically: how about you start with the simple stuff? Explain gravity, space, light, and time to me. Then let’s delve into creation. It is a very effective argument. The greatest minds on the planet have never ironed it all out. It helps the individual to accept that maybe it is a tad beyond them to bluster about the creation of all that is.
Though God doesn't preclude us searching. M-Theory, growing out of superstrings, is a "beautiful" guess, though the energies to test it are currently outside our means.
The physicist Paul Dirac even once said, "It is more important to have beauty in ones's equations than to have them fit experiment." His knowing full well, I think, that they should "fit" together.
He believed in God too.
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