Jeepers, I have sooo many objections to this article. You asked for specificity, so let me begin by saying that the author has subordinated God to the physical laws, in particular space/time and cause/effect. Science does not draw such limitations in the physical sense, so I find it very troubling that anyone would suggest such limitations on God in a spiritual sense.
The author said:
Time must be linear. Once God thinks a certain thought He cannot somehow go back in succession.
Has anyone here ever wondered why the term space/time is rarely broken into "space" v "time"? It’s because the two terms are interrelated. For an introduction with graphics: Postulates of Special Relativity and for more detail on this specific issue of transformation Lorentz Transformation
If Einstein’s Relativity (the geometry of space/time) were not true, we would not be able to do space exploration. The theory has held up repeatedly over these many years.
What all of this means in layspeak is that time is a dimension.
If you were to draw a line and try to describe a point on that line you would use a coordinate, a number x, relative to some point 0 on the line, e.g. –3, 4. If you were to draw another line perpendicular to that line, it would take two coordinates, an x for the first line and a y for the second.
Visualize the two lines laying on a plane, and draw another intersection line at a right angle and you’d need three coordinates. To describe a point is such an imaginary cube, you’d need x,y and z.
But our universe is moving, continually, so there is yet another coordinate for time, t.
Where anything is in the universe is specified by those four coordinates, x,y,z,t.
We must remember that the “world” we perceive is limited to three spatial dimensions and one of time. But there may indeed be many more spatial dimensions and there may also be extra time dimensions. These dimensions are expected to exist – just like Einstein’s space/time – because they mathematically resolve a multitude of observed phenomenon in the universe.
But the key question we ought to all be asking here is why our vision and our minds are limited to only four dimension? If there are many spatial and temporal dimensions, why this particular choice of coordinates?
This article, on the curse of dimensionality explains that if we could see in four dimensions we would be able to see the inside of a box without opening it. If our minds – our mental construct of reality – could deal with it, we could remove the content of the box.
IOW, we have been designed so that we can only “see darkly” even in a physical sense!
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these [is] charity. – I Corinthians 13:9-13
Not only that, but the one time dimension we actually can perceive with our vision and our mind is known to have a beginning. This is a mathematically unavoidable determination. Scientists no longer argue for a steady state universe, which they would prefer, because the fact of a beginning is a theological statement. It is after all the first words in the Scripture:
Finally, the author insists that time must be linear, that God must abide by the rules of cause and effect. Scientists truly would prefer that were the case, but there is no such requirement.
Specifically, if you were existing in an extra time dimension, time would be a plane not a line. It would explain how photons move faster than the speed of light (superluminal) which they do: Non-locality gets more real. The cause/effect relationship could be reversed to effect/cause. Past, present and future would be all equally accessible. Schrodinger’s cat would be both alive and dead (superposition) in the extra dimension though it would be only one or another by the choice of 4 coordinates (3 spatial, 1 time).
Moreover, if you could stretch your mind outside of space/time altogether (regardless of dimensions) here’s how things would look:
A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime--the bird perspective--these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti. If the frog sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix. To the frog, the world is described by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta--a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds to a cluster of particles that store and process information. Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds.
IMHO, this is the mechanism of our free will. It’s not that we can accomplish anything as corporeal existents. It is the soul of man which God breathed into Adam (neshama) which makes us different from ordinary wildlife.
BTW, the Tegmark article is not at all theological. He is looking at multi-verse from a mathematician’s point of view in a materialistic science article. But the very nature of math is significant:
The view [Platonism] as pointed out earlier is this: Mathematics exists. It transcends the human creative process, and is out there to be discovered. Pi as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is just as true and real here on Earth as it is on the other side of the galaxy. Hence the book's title Pi in the Sky. This is why it is thought that mathematics is the universal language of intelligent creatures everywhere....
Barrow goes on to discuss Platonic views in detail. The most interesting idea is what Platonist mathematics has to say about Artificial Intelligence (it does not think it is really possible). The final conclusion of Platonism is one of near mysticism. Barrow writes:
Alamo-Girl, your reply #34 is simply outstanding! I have it bookmarked! I agree with you: There is absolutely no way for God to be in time, or constrained in any way to linear time, or any other concept of time.
I'm still working away at that metaxy piece. I've had a few distractions crop up, but I hope too finish it over the weekend. Working title: Cosmology, Ancient and Modern. Hope to post it soon!
Thank you so much for this outstanding essay!