Time and Eternity – #6 Our Limited Timescapes

A brief human timescape.

From the perspective of eternity, God views all of time, from beginning to end, in a unified present instant.  People can only look at the timescape, and themselves, from within the severely limited and constantly changing perspective of their present moments.

People seek to remember and preserve the past through reunions, monuments, and mementos, but these eventually fade.  They try to live for the present with gusto, but the present moment keeps slipping from their grasp.  As quickly as they reach for satisfaction or fulfillment, wealth or pleasure, understanding or security, in the present moment, their hard won gains are wrenched from their grasp by the irresistible progression (better said, “direction”) of time.

There is nothing in the present that can be secured, because the present moment is ever receding beyond our reach into the vast archive of the inaccessible past.  We seek to plan and control our future, but are surprised when our best-laid plans unpredictably go awry.  There is nothing permanent in our materialistic world of time.  This realization undoubtedly accounts for recurring science fiction fantasies about time travel.

If the past is irretrievable and the future is intangible, then today is a gift, which we call the present.  But it is a gift that we cannot keep, a gift so ephemeral that men erect monuments to perceived historical moments and persons and then expend great effort preserving them.  But ultimately even the monuments are eroded and forgotten in the sands of time

Because we are confined in time, and because time is the only environment we have ever known, it is not surprising that we assume a temporal view.  But God has a different perspective—the eternal view.  God sees the entire created timescape from outside of time, like an artist who views his or her landscape painting from outside the canvas, or an actual physical landscape from some high vantage point, such as standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon.  If this seems a little overwhelming to your temporal perspective, it may be helpful to look at a more limited example of a timescape.

A limited timescape – the temporal view

Figure 3 portrays the timescape of a week in my own life, a small and limited block of space-time.  In this illustration only two dimensions in space and one in time are shown, since it is difficult for me to draw four dimensions on a plane surface.  It can be seen that time has a direction, or flow, if you insist.  Time also has a dimension that we do not know.  How long is all of time?  Furthermore, time’s dimension/direction cannot be reversed.  And time has the familiar components of past, present, and future to a person in the present moment. The view from within time is the ordinary human temporal perspective in which time flows, and only the present moment (dashed lines wedge in Figure 3) is real and accessible.  This is the temporal perspective.

Within this block of space and time there are various spatial coordinates.  For me one set of coordinates is my home.  Another set is my work place at the hospital.  And yet another set is one of my favorite places on earth—the Grand Canyon.  My position may be graphed in the four dimensions of space-time by adding temporal coordinates.  You can find me precisely at any instant by knowing my spatial and temporal coordinates.  I am found at home in the evenings and at the hospital during the day Monday through Friday.  But on Saturday and Sunday I may go on an excursion to the Grand Canyon, where my spatial coordinates are likely to have some ups and downs.  Ultimately, my time at the Grand Canyon comes to an end, and I must return home to begin the process all over again.

In viewing this illustration, it may be asked how the “dimension” of time can be unidirectional.  After all, don’t we measure every linear dimension in two directions, like up and down or back and forth?  For instance, when I measure the height of a building I may measure from bottom to top, or from top to bottom.  The one-way dimension of time is like a one way street.  All movement on the street is unidirectional, by law.  Similarly, progression (or “direction”) in time is one way, by the natural law of God’s created order.

In this particular illustration my present moment is represented by the dashed line triangle slice of time between Thursday night and Friday morning.  My view is limited and constrained within the box of time in this timescape.  But you, the reader, are not so limited.  You are outside the box of time in this particular illustration, and you can see everything about my week in time from your vantage point outside the box (off the page of this book).  My view from within the box is constrained, but your view from outside the box is god-like and comprehensive.

Even if I were able to travel at 99.999 percent the speed of light, I would still be confined within this prison of time, although the amount of time I would have in that prison would be greatly increased by a factor of approximately 223.  Hence, if I were to live my entire normal life expectancy at a velocity 99.999% the speed of light, I would live over 17,000 years!

But even at that enormous velocity, my time would come to an end, and I would eventually cycle my last week.  Only if I could move at the speed of light would I escape the prison of the present moment and enter a timeless realm.  But such an escape is quite impossible according to the laws of physics.  This is because to achieve such light velocity would require more energy than emerged from the Big Bang in the creation of the entire cosmos.  As defined by Einstein, such a feat would require infinite energy, and the word infinite, though in the human vocabulary, is not in the human capacity.  The end result is that no one can escape the bars of this space-time prison under their own power or even with all the energy in the cosmos at their disposal.

My perspective is from within time, and only from the present moment can I describe this block of space-time.  Thus trapped in the prison of time, moving inexorably toward closure of my time, I have my view.  And this is the view that is common to all of us, the ordinary common sense view that time flows inexorably on and that only the present is real and accessible, however flimsy and fleeting it may be.  We cannot hold on to the present, because it is constantly departing from us into the past.

So all I really have is the evanescent changing present, and from that position I spin my theories about where I came from and where I am going.  This terribly transient existence is the temporal view, and my purpose is to convince you that there is another view of reality—the eternal view.  The short-term temporal view dominates thinking in our culture and theology.  It is this temporal dominance that produces seeming contradiction and confusion that can not be resolved, except by recognizing the complementary eternal perspective.  This complementarity of the eternal with the temporal is the genius of God’s word, the Bible, but it has been largely unrecognized.

Only from within time, and only from the present moment, can a person describe such a block of space-time.  Only in the present moment can anyone touch and impact reality.  The past is fixed and irretrievable, and the future is intangible and indeterminate for us pilgrims in time.  Although what is done in the present will influence the future, the nature of this influence is uncertain and inconsistent.  We cannot reach into the future to touch and change it directly; there are a myriad of present moments impacting and influencing the future.  Thus trapped in the prison of time, progressing inexorably toward closure, we all have the same view—the temporal perspective of the present moment.  This is human kind’s common sense view—time’s progression is irreversible, and as we progress into our ever diminishing future, only the present moment is real and accessible.

A limited timescape – the eternal view

The temporal perspective is one of two ways of looking at reality, and it is the way which dominates human thinking and reason.  But according to the Bible, there is another perspective, and we would be clueless regarding the eternal perspective, if the Bible did not uniquely disclose it to us.  The eternal perspective may be illustrated by a modification of my personal timescape in figure 4.  God sees, as you may realize in this limited illustration, my whole week all at once, from a perspective outside my week.  God sees my whole physical life in time from outside the temporal confines of my physical life, in similar manner as you appreciate a week in my life by viewing this limited illustration at a glance.

Figure 4 shows the same small timescape viewed from outside of time—the eternal perspective.  All present moments are simultaneously included in the eternal perspective.

God’s eternal view is not exclusive, any more than the temporal view is exclusive, though people may presume it to be so.  God’s eternal view incorporates and complements the temporal view and is accepted by people of biblical faith.  This eternal view provides no contradiction to the temporal, but expands upon it.  It cannot help but do so, because God is larger than his creation.  God encompasses his creation.  The creation does not encompass God.  Eternity surrounds cosmic time like an ocean surrounds an island, and eternity is God’s real estate.

This eternal view does not violate reason, but is supra-rational.  The eternal perspective incorporates and complements temporal reason, in a manner analogous to the way that the apparent wave-particle “contradictions” of quantum theory led to Bohr’s proposal that waves and particles are complementary understandings of the theory rather than exclusive or contradictory realities. According to quantum mechanics, light is made up of two seemingly contradictory natures–waves and particles.

Since the God of the Bible God encourages people to come and reason together with him (Isaiah 1:18a), his eternal word does not contradict the temporal perspective, but contains and fulfills it in complementary manner.  The eternal perspective counters the temporal despair of death with the eternal reality of life for people who are willing to trust their Creator and who, by the divine image God creates within them, are able to imagine and yearn for eternity even if they cannot achieve it under their own power.  They are quarantined in time, but God has put eternity in their hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11).