God and Time

This is the final chapter of a three part exploration into the relation between science and God. In Part One we looked into the beginnings of the universe. In Part Two we saw God in the process of evolution and complexity of micro-biology. Now let us examine the relation between God and time.

Throughout this inquiry, we have seen how science leads us to a point where it can no longer answer its own questions. Science shows itself this riddle in the uncertainty principal inherent in the study of quantum physics. Most frustrating is the limits of science in the subjects covered in each of the three preceding chapters: regarding the origin of life, the beginning of the universe, and the very fact that there is something rather than nothing—the problem of sum.

When taking the time to fully examine the workings of science in the evolution of life and the Big Bang, science reaches its limit just as we realize that chance could not have been the efficient cause. And the answer to the question of sum, is the love of God.

Now that we have admitted that there is a cause outside our understanding of science, we cannot fall into the trap of attempting to explain God with our laws, the lesson learned at the end of the last chapter. For human knowledge is not large enough to contain the truths of God.

In order to allow our minds to separate the rules we know through our experience, especially the laws of science and logic, we must do away with some of our most basic assumptions. Otherwise we will never begin to grasp science’s place as the language of God, nor see how God and science are really not at odds.

One of our first problems is that of time. We touched on this in Part One, stating that using a word like “before” when speaking of the Big Bang verges on nonsense. What we have learned regarding time in the last Century can be extremely helpful in understanding God and the way he interacts with our universe.

Until Aristotle, the common belief of the philosophers was that the world was on an infinite time-line. The implications of Aristotle’s teachings on cause and effect, which we discussed in some detail in Chapter Two, was that this could not be the case. Effects could not follow causes back ad infinitum, and therefore, time could not go backward to infinity either. Aristotle did not himself explicitly connect his principle of cause and effect to time. This teaching had to wait until St. Augustine, who first named time as a property of God. “What times should there be,” he asked, “which were not made by thee?” (Confessions, XI, 15) St. Augustine almost predicts the science of the Big Bang when he declares that before the creation, time was not. And while God is eternal, no time is co-eternal with God (ibid. 40), in other words, time cannot be infinite. Aristotle’s teaching of first cause is finally reconciled with our observation of passing time, which seems to suggest a prior infinity. It had been a paradox which only the insertion of a force unbound by time could answer.

St. Augustine addresses his argument to those who ask what God did before he made the universe:

“If the roving thought of anyone should wander through the images of bygone time, and wonder why Thou, the God Almighty, and All-creating, and All-sustaining, the Architect of heaven and earth, didst for innumberable ages refrain from so great a work before Thou wouldst make it, let him awake and consider that he wonders at false things. For whence could innumerable ages pass by which Thou didst not make, since Thou art the Author and Creator of all ages?… Thou art the Creator of all times… nor could times pass by before Thou madest times.” (ibid. 15)

He then addresses the very issue we were discussing in the previous chapter, the futility of measuring God with the laws of this earth.

“Those who say these things do not as yet understand Thee, O Thou Wisdom of God, Thou light of souls; not as yet do they understand how these things be made which are made by and in Thee. They even endeavor to comprehend things eternal; but as yet their heart flieth about in the past and future motions of things, and is still wavering… Who will hold the heart of man, that it may stand still and see how the still-standing Eternity, itself neither future nor past, uttereth the times future and past?” (ibid. 13)

God is eternal, and his present contains not only our present, but our future and our past. God’s reach extends to all time that ever was and ever shall be. This is very difficult for our minds to comprehend, but it is God’s nature to be incomprehensible. Thus, Augustine says, “If we could understand him, he would not be God.” (De Trinitate )

In all our dealings with the Divine, we must recall our limits of understanding. As human intelligence grows, we really come no closer to answering the fundamental questions without allowing faith to enter the equation. Yet the temptation exists to become cavalier with our knowledge and, in either science or philosophy, present a partial and imperfect view as the complete reading of all reality. This, Pope John Paul II calls “philosophical pride,” endangering us to forget the primacy of enquiry, which always reminds us what we don’t know, along with what we do. (Fides et Ratio, 4)

Discarding the notion of absolute time opens up a vastness to our perception of God. We can see how he watches us, guards us, and hears our prayers intimately, each as if we were his only child. We no longer ask “how does God have time to hear all our prayers?” Nor “How can God know everything?” God is vast enough to contain all ages and locations within his intimate present. There was no “before” God created, for creation is a constant act of unending love. As we saw in Chapter One, God’s love was so great that what we call existence sprung out of him. With our law of time, we can rightly say that creation happened at a moment, as measured by our location in the cosmos, and that a certain amount of time has passed since that moment. But from God’s perspective, the first creation is always in the now.

God’s love is the first efficient cause, what Aristotle calls “the first principle,” and time is merely one of his effects. Aquinas says, “Everything that is outside God is from God as from its first principle. Therefore, besides God nothing can be infinite.” (Summa Theologica, I Q.7 A.2) This conclusion applies not only to time, but to all the laws of science, and especially to our knowledge, which cannot have the kind of infinity we may attribute to God.
Augustine saw no paradox in our observations of time and its limitations of past, present and future. God cannot be thought of in such terms, for his presence, his love, and his creation are always in the now. St. Augustine’s insight was truly ahead of his time, yet his teaching was considered purely theological. The scientific implications were not fully considered for another fifteen hundred years.

In 1905, an unknown twenty-six year old physicist wrote a paper showing that the speed of light, which until a few decades before had been thought to be instantaneous, was actually a constant velocity, and the fastest speed by which anything can actually or theoretically travel. Further, all motion of matter can only be defined, relative to other matter. These conclusions lead to the famous formula, E=mc2, showing the relation of mass to energy, and space to time. The young physicist, of course, was Albert Einstein, and the paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” led to the theory of special relativity. It has been proven that no matter can actually reach the speed of light. Only energy particles (such as photons) can travel at light speed. As matter particles are sped up to very close to light speed, their mass increases. At this speed, time also slows down. The effect on time is not seen until particles come very close to the speed of light, so it is not a phenomenon we can observe in our actual experience, but it has been proven, nonetheless. Therefore, time, even within the limits of our universe and our science, is not a constant. Time travel has become theoretically quite possible. If we were to travel into space at close to light speed, and then return to earth, we would return at a much later date. One year could have passed for us in our space ship while ten years had passed on earth. When we gaze at the stars in the sky we see them as they shone thousands or even millions of years ago. When we see a shooting star we are actually witnessing an event of the distant past.

What Einstein teaches is that time must no longer be a limitation to our understanding, for it only exists in relation to space, and might be described differently by two bodies in varying states of motion. Even the progression of time might have variation. It is not necessarily a constant and straight line. St. Augustine would undoubtedly have been very excited by Einstein’s work, which has opened up a whole new understanding of science in the last century.

The actual working of special relativity was further clarified by the discovery of the Big Bang, for it shows the way bodies, specifically, planets, stars and galaxies, are moving in relation to one another. The universe is expanding at a measurable rate, from a predictable beginning, about fifteen and a half or sixteen billion years ago as measured by time on earth. (This last point: “as measured by time on earth” is very important, as we shall soon see.) The Big Bang initiated space, which has been expanding ever since, and motion, which is the act of expansion. Time only exists in relation to these two. Aristotle believed that “there must always be motion without intermission, and thus there must necessarily be something eternal, a unity or plurality that first imparted motion, and this first movent must be unmoved… the first movent must be one and eternal.” (Physics, 258b10) Aristotle is proven correct by the Big Bang.

The picture now arises of God in the center of the universe. He, the first mover of whom Aristotle spoke, who is one and eternal, hurled out the firmaments in a Big Bang, setting them in a motion which has continued ever since. Time is our method of measuring the space traveled by the matter of which we are a part. We seek to solve the puzzle of the cosmos, measuring it with our telescopes and radio equipment, and have been successful at observing the universe as it was at a very young age. We have been able to reconstruct the history of the universe for almost the entirety of its roughly sixteen billion year history. This is how old we believe the universe to be as measured from here. But Einstein has shown that time may be different for two bodies in varying states of motion. How might the universe be measured from God’s perspective, from the vantage-point of one who had not moved since the Big Bang? Christians frequently try to argue proven scientific theory because they believe it contradicts the Bible. Ultimately, they usually end up looking quite foolish. Examples include Copernicus’ and Galileo’s teachings on the Earth’s place in the universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and recent discoveries on the age and growth of the universe. Genesis describes the creation of the earth having taken place in six days. Many Christians do not want to hear any science regarding a longer development. Typically I do not take the time to address such arguments, for it belittles science and takes the beautiful creation poem of Genesis woefully out of context. Genesis was written over three thousand years ago from an oral tradition carried by the Israelites since the time of Moses. It must be read from the historical and scientific perspective of the time. Yet it is fascinating to observe how special relativity unites Genesis to modern science, and eliminates the debate of six days versus sixteen billion years. Let us follow this idea to its conclusion.

The universe is expanding at a much slower rate now than it was just after the Big Bang. In the early moments everything moved at just under light speed. It has been gradually slowing down ever since. Now time slows down for an object approaching light speed. Though earth did not yet exist, let us suppose that we had a clock to measure time ever since the Big Bang, which was now with us on earth. Though our clock has been ticking steadily ever since the beginning, as the motion of the universe has slowed, the clock will be ticking slower in relation to an unmoving object still at the center of the universe, watching earth move away from it. In the early moments, the clock would have been ticking much faster, meaning that for the stationary object at the center, much less time would have passed than on our moving clock. From our perspective on earth, time was always steady. But from the perspective of one standing at the beginning point, things would have seemed to be going very fast. Indeed, if seen by the stationary being, the earth clock would have been ticking many times faster than his own clock.

Throughout all the empty space in our universe there is an observable radio frequency (called the “Cosmic Background Radiation”) which is literally left-over heat from the Big Bang. Through it and through our lab experiments which duplicate some of conditions shortly afterwards, physicists have managed to predict the relation between present earth time, and time as it passed in those early moments. The formulas are complex and I do not want to weigh down this writing with intricate science and mathematics. But These formulae allow us to predict how much time has passed from earth perspective, and how much time would have passed for an observer from the central point.

Gerald Schroeder, the Israeli scientist who I referenced extensively in our discussion of biological evolution, has created a model to compare time as measured on earth, with time as it stood from the perspective of one still standing at the moment of the Big Bang. (“The Science of God” chap. 4) This stationary being, of course, is God, the first mover. With the Big Bang, God created the universe and began the line of time. Proven physics tells us that by the time one day had passed from this perspective, eight billion years would have passed on our moving clock measuring earth time. But as the rate of expansion slows down, so does our moving clock. So by the time the second twenty-four hours had passed for God at the center, four billion years would have passed on our clock. On God’s third day, two billion years would have passed on the earth clock. On God’s fourth day, one billion years would pass. On God’s fifth day, five hundred million years would pass. On God’s sixth day, two hundred and fifty million years would pass. Thus, after six days for God, fifteen and three quarter billion years would have passed on our earth clock. “For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night.” (Psalm 90:4)

The old Ussher calendar, which some Christians guard so fiercely, describes the history of the world in approximately six thousand years, plus the six days of creation. The physics of the expanding universe and the Big Bang predicts that the universe is approximately sixteen billion years old. Through Einstein’s law of special relativity, we see that the two time-lines agree almost exactly.

What about the Bible’s description of what happened on those six days of creation and science’s account of what took sixteen billion years? Schroeder goes on to make this comparison (ibid. p. 67) and the correlation is almost spooky. The writer of Genesis actually got the science right! The following is based on Schroedr’s model, comparing the days of Genesis with the corresponding stretch of time as indicated above, along with my own interpretations of the verses of scripture in the context of science.

Genesis 1:3: “Then God said, ‘let there be light.’ And there was light.” Gloriously so! This is the moment of the Big Bang. It further says “the earth was a formless void.” (Gen 1:2) Indeed matter did not yet have form and there was no earth. “And God separated the light from the darkness.” (Gen 1:4) As matter formed out of energy, indeed, dark space appeared, separated from the continued light that permeated all at the very beginning. By the end of the first eight billion years, galaxies had formed. This was the first day.

Genesis 1:6: “And God said, “Let there be a dome in the sky, to separate the waters.” A lot happened on the second day, the next four billion years. The sun and earth are born. And indeed, at the end of this period, liquid water forms.

Genesis 1:12: “And the earth brought forth life.” As soon as the earth cooled enough for water to appear, the first forms of life arose. Bacteria and primitive algaes began to grow in the waters. This was the third day.

Genesis 1:14, 16: “And God said, ‘let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night,’ the greater to rule the day, and the lesser to rule the night.” During the one billion year span of the fourth day, the earth’s atmosphere became transparent so that the sun and moon could produce light on the earth. Through photo-synthesis, oxygen develops in the atmosphere.

Genesis 1:20: “And God said, ‘let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures.’” Based on our comparison of cosmic clocks, and time as it is passing on earth compared to God’s time, God’s creation of “swarms” of living creatures lines up exactly with the Cambrian explosion! The fossil record shows this immediate abundance of life which Genesis tells us happened on the fifth day.

Genesis 1:24,26: “Then God said, ‘let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind,” and finally, “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” According to the Bible, these happen on the same day, day six. And the fossil record agrees. It was about two hundred and fifty million years ago that animals first lived on dry land, and finally, the homo sapien appeared.

The way the two accounts (scripture and science) line up is startling. Not only does Genesis get the order of events exactly right, but describes the times of their occurrence correctly as well. Did the writer get lucky? Is it an accident that the Bible predicts science so well with an account that has been often relegated to myth? Rather, we must appreciate, as Schroeder says, that “the Bible is eerily true and filled with wisdom,” which in the case just outlined, could not have been known at the time it was written. (ibid. p.70)

We have now been able to go beyond St. Augustine, who said that God could not be described by time. Now we can describe God by time—a relative time through which science, long thought to disprove creation, now actually helps to prove the truth of Genesis!
To conclude this topic, we see in the relativity of time, just as we saw in the Big Bang and through evolution, the work of God’s love in every phenomena of the universe. St. Augustine told us that time is a tool of God. Einstein showed us how this tool works and relates to our place in the cosmos. Our understanding of things divine will always fall short, but through science we come ever closer, though however much we discover, God’s knowledge remains ineffably above ours. Aquinas says “God’s act of understanding is measured by eternity, and since eternity is without succession, comprehending all time, the present glance of God extends over all time, and to all things which exist in any time, as to subjects present to him.” (Summa Theologica, I Q.14 A.9)