Under a timeless model of God, many LDS quote Doctrine and Covenants 93:24 as a statement of truth never changing as it is ‘knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.’ There are 24 conference references to this verse alone. Many of the references to this verse emphasize truths as never-ending facts that are timeless¹. Below are two examples from general conference that highlight how verse 24 is referenced.

President Joseph Fielding Smith in his ‘The Way to Eternal Life’ article has a representative quote concerning D&C 93:24. I like the phrase about ’enduring truth that makes us free.’ I do think that there are eternal constants ’that make us free’. In our Father’s kingdom, the eternal truth of His characteristics (especially love) and Christ’s redeeming power. Christ truly is the eternal ’light of Truth.’

And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come" [D&C 93:24]. In other words, truth is that which endures. All else must perish. This being true, it behooves us to search for truth—this truth the Savior spoke of that makes us free. President Joseph Fielding Smith, The Way to Eternal Life

Elder Bednar appears to be using these verses to help us realize that truth is about progression. That we can act now based on our historical knowledge of God’s love to change our future potential.

Brethren, I promise that if you and I will prayerfully ponder the pleas of these sisters, the Holy Ghost will help us to see ourselves as we really are (see D&C 93:24) and help us recognize the things we need to change and improve. And the time to act is now! Elder David A. Bednar, The Powers of Heaven

But what about the truth that acts for itself in verse 30?

I want to examine verse 24 in the context of the elements of truth described in verses 24-30 of section 93. These verses state;

And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come; And whatsoever is more or less than this is the spirit of that wicked one who was a liar from the beginning. The Spirit of truth is of God. I am the Spirit of truth, and John bore record of me, saying: He received a fulness of truth, yea, even of all truth; … Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.

It appears to me that truth has agency like intelligence. Optimally, we use agency so that we can progress towards God and, as Christ, receive the fullness of the Father. Does truth experience the same progression?² Does truth progress with time?

Science and Religion

In my last post, I cautioned the use of scientific metaphor as defining doctrine and belief. I wanted us to realize that we should be cautious using science as a special witness of enduring truth, but that science could be used as a metaphor to help us understand religious topics. In the light of scientific metaphor providing another way to think about religion, I want to use some references from Lee Smolin in his book titled, ’ Time Reborn’

Relational Truth

I think that we look at some aspects of science and religion as proposing eternal, unchanging truths. Physics wants to find timeless equations that define the truth of all the universe. The thought is that there are eternal truths out there and that man’s mind and math can work together to discover the perfect endless equations. Religion does not look to equations; we use prophets and revelation to guide our understanding. Unfortunately, many of faith think that revelation and prophets speak truths that are unchanging, like the great math equations. I have talked about these ideas in a few previous posts.³ In this post, I want to highlight that relational truth is not just a philosophical or theological idea. It is also an idea in science. In Time Reborn, Lee Smolin emphasizes the concept of time and how we can see time interacting with physics.

As Thomasina, the precocious heroine of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, explains to her tutor: “If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.”

I used to believe that my job as a theoretical physicist was to find that formula; I now see my faith in its existence as more mysticism than science.

Embracing time means believing that reality consists only of what’s real in each moment of time. This is a radical idea, for it denies any kind of timeless existence or truth—whether in the realm of science, morality, mathematics, or government. All those must be reconceptualized, to frame their truths within time. Embracing time also means that our basic assumptions about how the universe works at the most fundamental level are incomplete. When, in the pages that follow, I assert that time is real, what I’m saying is that:

• Whatever is real in our universe is real in a moment of time, which is one of a succession of moments.
• The past was real but is no longer real. We can, however, interpret and analyze the past, because we find evidence of past processes in the present.
• The future does not yet exist and is therefore open. We can reasonably infer some predictions, but we cannot predict the future completely. Indeed, the future can produce phenomena that are genuinely novel, in the sense that no knowledge of the past could have anticipated them.
• Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature. Laws are not timeless. Like everything else, they are features of the present, and they can evolve over time.

Lee proposes that understanding truths, as they relate to each other in time, is essential as we move forward in pondering physics. He wants to make clear that he is not proposing relativism. I am fascinated with the idea that laws, like agents, are based on their relationships with others.

Thinking in time is not relativism but a form of relationalism—a philosophy that asserts that the truest description of something consists of specifying its relationships to the other parts of the system it is part of. Truth can be both time-bound and objective when it’s about objects that exist once they’ve been invented, either by evolution or human thought.

Lee then quotes three big names in physics that proposed similar ideas.

Paul Dirac, who ranks with Einstein and Niels Bohr as one of the most consequential physicists of the 20th century, speculated: “At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus, we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time.”

John Archibald Wheeler, one of the great American physicists, also imagined that laws evolved. He proposed that the Big Bang was one of a series of events within which the laws of physics were reprocessed. He also wrote, “There is no law except the law that there is no law.”

Even Richard Feynman, another of the great American physicists and Wheeler’s student, once mused in an interview: “The only field which has not admitted any evolutionary question is physics. Here are the laws, we say, . . . but how did they get that way, in time? . . . So, it might turn out that they are not the same [laws] all the time and that there is a historical, evolutionary, question.”

Finally, he proposes some grand statements about the universe. Remember, he is writing this book as a respected physics researcher, not a theologian⁴.

Laws, then, are not imposed on the universe from outside it. No external entity, whether divine or mathematical, specifies in advance what the laws of nature are to be. Nor do the laws of nature wait, mute, outside of time for the universe to begin. Rather the laws of nature emerge from inside the universe and evolve in time with the universe they describe. It is even possible that, just as in biology, novel laws of physics may arise as regularities of new phenomena that emerge during the universe’s history. Some might see the disavowal of eternal laws as a retreat from the goals of science. But I see it as the jettisoning of excess metaphysical baggage that weighs down our search for truth.

I continue to believe that we discover Truth in relationships. Christ is the Truth, and He wants us to have a relationship with Him as He is in relation to the Father. Truth is temporally located. Could we read D&C 93:24 as saying that truth is independent in its sphere? That Truth can act and progress independently in the past, independently in the present, and independently in the future. By understanding truth’s independence in time, we can know the truth of all things or the reality that exists in all independent spheres.

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