The Divine Universe

Forever and ever - endless time. But what is time? We all know what time feels like, but we can’t really define it. Poets have described it as flowing like a river, but many philosophers and scientists believe that this is an illusion: it’s just the way our brain works. Our mental apparatus and our senses combine to generate a sense of a present, memory of a past and expectation of a future. But suppose past, present and future are simply constructs of our brain and senses. Suppose that the whole of time simply is, a dimension of an infinite universe.

Since Einstein’s theories of relativity were generally accepted, we no longer think of time as separate from space. Scientists and mathematicians see the universe as a four-dimensional continuum that they call space-time. The reason we separate space and time is because we perceive those dimensions with different physical and mental faculties. We measure space and time in very different ways. But, like time, the whole of infinite space simply is. When I talk about time, I am really talking about space-time: both the “where” and “when” of things.

The universe – the totality of existence in God – is, I believe, infinite, but we observe only a limited amount of it. By looking deep into space with the Hubble telescope astronomers can see about ten billion light-years. That is a measurement that combines space and time, and it’s the distance light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second in a year. That’s a long way.

When they look into distant space, astronomers are looking into the past because the light from what they see has taken time to get here. Even when we look at the sun we see it where it was about eight and a half minutes ago. So looking into space astronomers can see bits of the whole history of the universe for ten billion years. They see the most distant visible galaxies as they were ten billion years ago.

Einstein pointed out that it makes no sense to ask what those distant universes are like now. We can only say that their now is different from ours. There is no universal now. That ten billion-year-old universe is part of our now, so, in a sense, it still exists. The past continues to exist. We are, in fact, part of the Big Bang in extended time. The glowing embers are still visible to astronomers. They’re called the cosmic microwave background.

The dinosaurs are also still with us in the form of fossils. But that is not their past; it is their future! By deduction, we can also know something of our own future, and some of us may one day be dug up as fossils in someone else’s now.

But what about God? People often ask, “Does God know the future?” But, for God, there is no past, present and future; that is a human perception. For God there is the eternal, dynamic now. “But,” you will object, “If God knows our future then it is all fixed.” Not so. Nothing in the eternal now is fixed. It is a work in progress. It is God’s work: nurturing and bringing to perfection the eternal now.

God is working on what we call our future, but we need to say something about God’s way of working. The world we know seems at times so out of control, so dangerous and, at times, brutal. No human parent is as permissive as God. God has given the children he has born a quite terrifying degree of freedom.

I don’t only mean human free will. Last century scientists became increasingly interested in the subatomic world, and they discovered a disconcerting weirdness. The most basic ingredients of matter did not obey the normal rules of cause and effect. Things happened spontaneously, without any discoverable cause. They could only estimate the probability of some particle being at a particular place or having a certain motion. Quantum mechanics was invented as a branch of statistical mathematics that makes possible the creation of things like computers and mobile phones where things like electrons and photons have to be organized.

God knows the future, but he does not directly create it. He creates, gives birth to a self-creating universe. Like a loving and generous father, God gives his Son, in whom and through whom all things exist, complete freedom. In spite of the thousands of legends and experiences that suggest otherwise, I believe God is non-interventionist.

God’s passivity in the face of human disasters is often shocking and confusing to us, and the unexpected benevolence of nature is sometimes amazing. God does nothing to stop the carnage of war across the world, but a cancer unexpectedly and spontaneously goes into remission. God suffers in all such situations because everything is in God, but the power of his love is exercised at a deeper level than natural law. It is an influence to perfection, imperceptible in the short term, recognizable in the process of evolution and social development. I believe things can be loved into goodness and truth, and that that is what God is doing.

The dimension of time is essential in God’s chosen way of working. Loving his incarnate self, the Son, the cosmic Christ, happens in time. But we shouldn’t imagine God acting or reacting moment by moment as we do. God feels and loves the whole of time. He feels all the events of eternity. And we freely and voluntarily contribute our own little bit to those events.

We are helping to build what we think of as the future. In this mortal state we move through a small segment of the universal and eternal here and now. What we do generates joy and pain in a social and material environment – our small segment of space-time. And this is all in God and in God’s all-embracing and loving nature.

Paul told the Ephesians and the Colossians to live wisely, making the most of the time. In this life we are given a small section of eternity to care for and tend. In relative terms it is a very tiny segment, but it matters to God what we do with it, and the prophets and Jesus have all warned that it matters to us also. In this life we seem able to isolate ourselves from God’s feelings, even though we are in and of God. In eternity we will not, I suspect, be able to do that. And time is of the essence.