Picture a Globe in your mind. Time is marching happily along following the equator. God, sitting on His Throne at the North Pole. At any given instant He can see every moment in our history, all in the present in His view. Just as we can trace multiple lines of longitude on a globe at the same time. In God’s eye, the past – present – future are all “now” to Him.
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TxnMA: A-G & bb: It appears that, in Petruchio, we have another participant in our discussions of God’s “Universal Now”... :-)
Indeed, dear brother in Christ! Definitely Petruchio seems interested in the relativistic aspects of the “time problem….” Still I doubt that his observer sitting on a throne at the North Pole is God. God doesn’t have to sit at the North Pole to know what He knows, from Eternity. This observer merely seems to have a more favorable vantage point of observation than the observer at the equator, relativistically speaking, in regard to answering a particular question.
We have been speaking of the “Eternal Now,” and how it can be conceived by the human mind. I have some impressions, but cannot construct a coherent description. Indeed, this may be entirely beyond my powers.
However, the impressions (clues?):
(1) We have to ask what “eternity” is. Traditionally, eternity has been regarded as synonymous with timelessness. Yet as Wolfhart Pannenberg has pointed out, “If eternity means the divine mode of being, then it is directly concerned with the question of how the reality of God is related to the spatio-temporal universe.” The difficulty of the problem is that God is not “in” time, making Him absolutely immune to direct observation by time-bound human beings.If we say that eternity means “timelessness,” then its relation to the “time” we humans experience would appear to be a negative, mutually-exclusive one. This point is relevant for eschatology: “[T]he Christian hope for resurrection … does not aim at a completely different life replacing the present one. Rather, it aims at a transformation of this present life to let it participate in the divine glory. Salvation cannot mean pure negation and annihilation of this present life, of this creation of God. Therefore in a Christian perspective time and eternity must have some positive relation. This is also implied in the doctrine of the incarnation, since that means a togetherness of the human and the divine in the person and life of Jesus Christ.”
(2) The normal time sense recognized by human beings can be described as the irreversible series of “punctiliar” moments moving linearly, “horizontally,” from past to present to future. In this model, the future is effectively determined by moments in the past.
Certainly God, one of whose divine attributes is Eternity, does not experience “time” in this way.
As a very great poet, T. S. Eliot put it, “Man lives at the intersection of time and timelessness [eternity].”
To me, the perfect symbol of this is the Holy Cross on which our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified…. The horizontal beam stands for the human conception of time as consisting of serial, irreversible moments, with all natural causation arising from the past; the vertical beam stands for the human extension unto the Eternal Now in this life, which draws all unto itself from the future….
It has been suggested that the Eternal Now is the sounding together of all the spatio-temporal moments that ever have or ever could occur, as the single instantaneous “sounding” of the “all that there is,” as in, for instance, a symphony orchestra…. This is what God knows, from “where” He IS — “outside” of Time and Space altogether.
(3) It might be useful to give a thought to what is meant by “the Creation.” The Holy Bible tells us the Creation was made “in the Beginning.” Instantly I suppose many readers of the Holy Book will refer to their own “normal” time sense, and conclude that the Creation was a one-time, one-off, unrepeatable event.
But what if the true meaning of the Creation is that it is a continuous process unfolding at every moment of time, as human beings experience time?
That is to say, the Creation was not an “event.” It is a process that continues, eternally.
There may be some support from the maths for this view. Pannenberg points to the recent work of a German mathematician, Gunter Ewald of the University of Bochum. Ewald’s theory is based “on the notion of a field, just as the theory of relativity conceives of the spatiotemporal universe as a single field.”
“According to Ewald, this notion can be expanded to include complex numbers [jeepers, we’ve already been there recently!]. Since in the level of complex numbers no linear sequence occurs, the transition from complex numbers to real numbers can be interpreted as a transition into spatiotemporal existence. Generally the field of complex numbers in its relation to real numbers can provide a model of the relation of eternity to spatiotemporal events.” [Itals added.]Something for afficianados of number theory to contemplate further!
Anyhoot, what this all boils down to, to me: I’m looking for the “hypersurface” of mathematics, which to the physicist probably translates as a “field,” that from a transcendent position WRT the immanent Creation, “informs” and “guides” the Creation in its spatiotemporal unfoldment — but which never positively “determines” it.
Isaac Newton had a helpful name for this field: He called it sensorium Dei. I gather he imagined this as the very interface of divine eternity and the Creator's time-bound (as humans see it) Creation; i.e., as God's relation to the natural world of finite human experience.
Or so it seems to me. Just some thoughts, FWTW.
Thank you so very much, dear TxnMA, for your splendid essay/post — and for the link to the glorious celestial display!