If God does operate in the equivalent of at least one extra dimension of time, what does this tell us about God’s capabilities beyond creating the universe and us? What we have seen so far has laid a foundation to answer some mystifying questions about God raised by children and scholars alike.
Whatever campus I visit, from grade school to graduate school, two questions come up more frequently than any others. The first is: If God created us, who created God? Children ask this question with obvious sincerity as they seek to affirm their emerging comprehension of time and cause and effect. Skeptical scholars sometimes ask without listening for an answer. They raise the question as an impossible stumper, as justification for their agnostic stance.
For anyone willing to stretch his or her mind a little, an answer is available, one that represents both the truth of Scripture and the facts of nature. Both sources affirm that the universe, with everything it contains, is confined to a single time line (or dimension) and is further confined to moving in one direction along that line. Even if we were to experience the stretching, or dilation, of time by moving at velocities approaching the speed of light, we could neither stop nor reverse time’s arrow. The question of God’s beginning reflects our understanding of these principles: Whatever exists has a starting point along the line of time and was caused by something or someone with an earlier starting point. In other words, any entity confined to a single line of time, in which time cannot be stopped or reversed, must have a moment of beginning or creation.
An uncaused effect, a beginningless anything or anyone, contradicts our experiential knowledge of reality—but not reality itself. For both the Bible and scientific investigation present us with the reality of a Being who has the capacity to create our time dimension and fix its direction, a Being who possesses apparently unlimited time capacities.
For our limited imagination’s sake, however, we can consider what is possible for Him in a two-dimensional time frame, which would constitute a time plane. Just how many time dimensions, or their equivalent, God accesses we do not know, but we do have theoretical, observational, and theological proofs for these two dimensions. As figure 7.1 (page 74) shows, a plane of time offers the possibility of an infinite number of time lines running in an infinite number of directions. God has the capacity, thus, to move and operate backwards and forwards along an infinitely long time line, or along as many time lines, infinite or otherwise, as He chooses. He can operate, if He desires, on a time line parallel to our time line or on one intersecting our time line, but He is not compelled to do either. Thus, God has the capacity to cause effects for infinite time on innumerable time lines that never intersect or touch our time line. As such, we could point to no beginning and no end for Him. Since beginnings only make sense where time in some way is linear, God must be a beginningless Being. He has always existed and will always remain. He never had a creation event.
This illustration helps us to picture more clearly how the words of John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16-17 can be true. Just this one extra time dimension releases Him from the necessity of a beginning—and an ending, for that matter. As these verses declare, He and He alone was not created.
Among the world’s "holy" books, these statements are unique to the Bible. They could only be true of a Being with access to the equivalent of two or more time dimensions. They could only be inspired by a Being whose experience is not limited to a single dimension of time.
Tuning in to Simultaneous Prayers
Anyone who has tried to listen to two or three conversations at once will guess what the second question is: How can God hear and respond to my prayers while millions or even billions of other people are praying at the same moment around the world? Again, our experience with time and attention tells us that no one can tune in to billions of voices at the same moment, much less respond to them all. As one third-grader stated the situation, a billion simultaneous calls would jam up God’s phone line.
Because of our confinement to a single, unidirectional, unstoppable time line, we humans are forced to communicate with other individuals (or groups) sequentially. But God does not live with such confinement. In a two-dimensional time plane such as the one described above, His capacity to communicate with any number of individuals simultaneously can be demonstrated. In this plane, God can extend a time line perpendicularly, or at a right angle, to our time line at any given moment along our time line. On this perpendicular line, God can give individual, undivided attention to any number of prayers simultaneously. None of us have any need to worry that our communication with Him will be drowned out by the communication of others.
Operating in a time plane is one provable way God could give individual attention to six billion simultaneous prayers. But, as the Master and Creator of at least ten space-time dimensions, He obviously would have many more options.
This simple illustration goes far in reassuring us that God really is attentive to us at every moment, in every situation. It gives new meaning to King David’s expression of joy and wonder:
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains
of sand.1
Timefulness Versus Timelessness
My choice of the word timeful to describe God’s time-related capacities deliberately contradicts a notion that much of the church has held and taught for many centuries, the notion of a "timeless" eternity as the realm where God lives and where we will live someday also. Timelessness seems to contradict both biblical and scientific evidences for the reality beyond our universe.
Plato first introduced the concept.2 He reasoned that since all time-dependent phenomena are temporal, then to some degree they must be illusory and valueless, for only what is timeless, unchanging, and eternal retains ultimate reality and value.
Eight hundred years later, Saint Augustine incorporated Plato’s concept into his interpretation of Christian doctrine.3 Augustine noted that the Bible teaches God’s independent, transcendent existence; that is, God lives apart from and beyond the limits of His creation. Since time is a component of the physical universe (the creation), Augustine correctly positioned the Creator outside the universe’s time frame. To Augustine, this positioning meant God lives outside of time altogether, that is, in timelessness.
Eight centuries later, Saint Thomas Aquinas expanded on Augustine’s interpretation of God’s transcendence.4 God’s transcendence, he claimed, demanded the attributes of perfection, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, spacelessness, and timelessness.
In the centuries since, Augustine and Aquinas’s teachings have so dominated centers of theological scholarship that rare indeed is the student or professor who dares to challenge the doctrine of God’s dwelling in a timeless eternity. Ironically, the notion of spacelessness is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Some scholars see this doctrine of God’s timelessness as an essential element of orthodoxy. What many of these scholars have failed to grasp is that time as understood by most people today, or its equivalent, could exist in something other than the time dimension of the cosmos.
The difficulty arose, and still arises, from a limited perspective on what time in the scientific age means. Time and causality are inextricably intertwined. Time typically is defined by the operation of cause-and-effect phenomena. It does not necessarily follow, however, that all causation occurs within the arena of a time coordinate as we humans experience it. Again, God may possess super-dimensions, capacities, or attributes that permit causation just as a time coordinate does. Attributing complete timelessness to God, though, means to most modern-day people that God exists where causes and effects do not happen, and this idea contradicts biblical teachings. To be fair, Augustine and Aquinas probably did not see the connection between time and cause and effect to the degree that people in contemporary society do. These philosophers probably would be shocked to discover that for many today timelessness connotes perfect inactivity and infinite boredom. Perhaps we can see from this connotation why so many people, both children and adults, have difficulty not only picturing but also anticipating heaven. That God is there and that we will dwell with Him in person helps stir our desire to be there, but beyond that, timelessness suggests a kind of motionlessness that strikes us as less than compelling or inviting.
We all like to be in neutral once in a while, but only to refuel our engines for jumping back into action. Personally, I can hardly wait to discover what multiple time dimensional type of action God has in store for our unendingly timeful life with Him in the equivalent of multiple time dimensions.
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