OurAttitude toTime Eric Whittaker reflects on time, eternity and Einstein.
In our religious language we are still haunted by the concept of a three-decker universe. In the 1920s I was brought up to sing ‘there’ s a home for little children above the bright blue sky’, and although that hymn may have been superseded I still sing with gusto every Christmas ‘he came down to earth from heaven’. Of course we know that there is no spatial position in the physical universe where heaven could be located, but we get away with it most of the time by working with the concept of a parallel three-decker spiritual universe in which up and down do not refer to physical dimensions but rather to higher and lower moral or ethical concepts. Thus we can happily leave geographical and astronomical considerations to one side in our religious talk.
However I believe that this dual universe approach can lead us into problems in connection with the concept of time. It is fairly easy to free our spiritual three-decker universe from the constraints of spatial directions, but in most people’s minds it shares the time dimension with its physical counterpart.
However the legitimacy of such a sharing of the time dimension requires very careful consideration.
Our direct experience of time is rather like that portrayed by a digital clock which, instead of having a moving hand, displays a succession of present moments. Nowadays such clocks usually present a series of illuminated digits which change up every minute or every second to tell us the actual time. Of course we do not experience time in a precise numerical way like that. But the first digital clocks worked by turning over a series of flaps on which the numerals were written. If one imagines a clock like that but with blank flaps, then that is rather like our direct experience of time. A flap corresponding to a ‘present moment’ keeps flicking over in our consciousness – perhaps about ten of them every second, since that is about the smallest time interval that we can resolve in noticing changes in our environment. This experience of a sequence of moments is very closely tied up with our experience of consciousness itself.
Although we cannot count the ‘moments’ that flick through our experience, we can usually keep some track of the total of them while we are conscious, even though in extreme circumstances we ‘lose account of time’. Even when we are asleep and unconscious of the sequence of moments, we are often able (though not always) to keep some track of how much time has elapsed since we went to sleep, even to the extent of being able to pre-determine the time at which we shall wake up. However in deeper unconsciousness, as under anaesthesia, this ability is totally lost. Our obsession with time is perhaps closely associated with our innate desire to cling to consciousness, because only so can we feel assured of continuing to exist.
The next thing that we have to take into account is our distinction between past and future. The only point of time that we actually experience is the present moment, but we remember a long, long series of such moments that we call the past, and we expect there to be a further long series of such moments that we have not experienced ‘yet’. We expect these ‘future’ moments to exist whether we look forward to them in hope or with dread, or even if we do not expect to be conscious (or even alive) to experience them. But we never actually experience either the past or the future, only the present.
The concept of time in physical science is quite different. Here there is really no concept of a present moment, except in so far as an observer of events is concerned. In the classical approach derived from Newton, time is a dimension alongside the three dimensions of space, its value changes continuously, it is applicable everywhere, and it enables one to describe the motions of every object in space. Why then should we not equally apply it in our threedecker spiritual universe? The answer is because of Einstein. We have had Newton’s system for three hundred years and everyone regards it as normal, and although we have now had Einstein’s system for about a hundred years, and it is accepted as a fundamental part of physics, that is always applied and where it leads to significantly different results, in ordinary life such an application is very rare. As a result it has not fully entered our consciousness that the nature of time according to Einstein is vitally different. It is not a separate dimension alongside the three of space, but a constituent of a four-dimensional space-time.
The only point of time that we actually experience is the present moment.
Every observer experiences a dimension of time that is sequential, together with three dimensions of space, but the specific direction in the four dimensional space-time that different observers experience as time depends on their velocity. This leads to the so-called ‘twin paradox’. If one of a pair of twins goes on a long journey with a speed close enough to that of light, then when they are reunited he will have aged less than his stay-at-home brother, and this difference will apply to physical changes in their bodies, to the lengths of time in their memories, and the times recorded on their wristwatches. He will have experienced a shorter time than his brother because he will have experienced as space a component of what his brother experienced as time.
Because there is no such thing as a unique time applicable everywhere and to everything in the physical universe, we have not got such thing as a time that can be transferred to our three-decker spiritual universe. The latter must therefore be regarded as timeless.
The idea of a parallel three-decker spiritual universe alongside the physical one means that we are sort of amphibians living in both. The continuous time dimension of our physical side appears as a sequence of moments which are presumably irruptions from the spiritual world through our brain activity, which enable us to make choices and decisions. Such irruptions can only occur so long (in time) as our physical side exists, and that is a finite entity that ends with its death. The spiritual universe on the other hand is outside time and is eternal, which is the quality of not being temporal, not an infinitely long endurance. Now that we have freed our spiritual side from the limitations of time we can accept that it can have all the qualities that we really want, rest eternal and light perpetual, and be freed from the horror of lasting for an infinite number of years. This horror becomes apparent if we sing one of the verses of Amazing Grace:
When we’ve been there ten thousand years bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.
Although written in the eighteenth century this conclusion is a perfect statement of the ideas of modern mathematicians regarding infinite numbers.
Personally I would find starting my ten thousand and first year on that basis quite horrific. Having been forced by Einstein to put our three-decker spiritual world outside time, we have not only clarified the nature of our own existence, we have also potentially solved some major problems of theological thought, because we have also put God outside time – just as we have long realised that he is outside space. Of course there has always been a strong tendency to put God outside time:
A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday; Before Abraham was I am; The lamb slain before the foundation of the world.
But equally there has always been a resistance towards making a good job of it, perhaps because of a concern to maintain the idea that God is active in history. However since there is evidently a somewhat porous boundary between our spiritual three-decker universe and the world of time and space so far as we are concerned, it can be equally porous to God’s activity manifested at specific points in space-time.
But the important thing is that God is not located at those points, or indeed at any other points in time.
This means that there is no problem about freewill because there is no problem of God’s having foreknowledge of our decisions before we make them, as foreknowledge involves knowledge at an earlier point in time. When we read a novel we follow the characters in their time frame, and we are outside it. We can agonise with the characters in the decisions that they make, even if we have read the story many times before and know what will happen. We know the whole of it at once in our time, whereas they experience it sequentially in their time. We exercise our freewill sequentially within our time frame, and though God is aware of the whole story he is aware of it from outside that time frame.
EricWhittaker is a retired academic scientist and a member of St.John’ s Church,Kidlington.He attends the Oxford SoF group. 17 sofia 87 March 2008 Please send your letters to: