More than once in the last year, I have encountered a space-time explanation from friends when we are discussing the topic of God and timelessness. In almost every instance, there is a phrase, something like, “Time is just another dimension. God can just step outside of it. Like in the book Flatland.” Often, they leverage time as a human construct that does not relate to God because one of our leaders talks about timelessness¹ and Einstein taught us about space-time. I decided to dive into some light reading on physics and time. I recently read Time Reborn by Lee Smolin to see one respected physicist’s views on time’s importance². I will quote his views on time in some upcoming posts. In this post, I want to highlight how science and religion are so intertwined that we should be careful how we use science to testify of faith beliefs. Scientific metaphors can help explain religious topics, but they cannot be held up as ‘scripture’ or evidence solely on society’s belief that the science is ’true.’

Where is Heaven and Hell?

Lee Smolin provided context for why we think hell is down;

The division of the world into an earthly realm and heavenly spheres was codified in Aristotelian physics. Everything in the earthly realm was composed of mixtures of four [temporal] elements: earth, air, fire, and water. … Aether was a fifth element … which made up the heavenly realm and the objects that moved across it. This division was the origin of the connection of elevation with transcendence. God, the heavens, perfection—these are above us, while we are trapped here below. … Long after science has moved on from the cosmos of the ancients, its basic shape influences everyday speech and metaphor. … We look upward for inspiration. Whereas to fall … means to surrender to loss of control. … Heaven is above us, hell is below.

It is interesting how we have placed heaven and hell in their locations. Before Aristotle, the Greeks and the Romans saw hell as below³, But older views didn’t necessarily place hell below.³ I think his point is that science and religion are very intertwined and that they can reinforce beliefs. The reinforcement can be for good but can also enhance incorrect views like the one in the quote above. Aristotle’s science set the earth at the center of the universe and pushed the Catholic church over the next century to dogmatize that fact.

The Circles in Heaven

I think Lee Smolin makes his most persuasive point about reality, religion, mathematics, and physics with the story of the Ptolemaic model. This physics model assumed the earth was at the center of the universe and that all planets in the sky moved in perfect circles. Starting with these two assumptions, they built a very functional model that was the assumed truth for over a thousand years. Lee explains;

Galileo destroyed the divinity of the sky when he discovered that heavenly perfection was a lie. He did not invent the telescope, and he may not have been the only one who used the new invention to look at the heavens. But his unique perspective and talents led him to make a fuss about what he saw there, which was imperfection. The moon is not a perfect sphere of quintessence; it has mountains, just like Earth. The planets move along the ecliptic, but they are not seen to move consistently. They all move in the same direction, but occasionally pause and reverse themselves, moving backward for a while. This retrograde motion was a great mystery to the ancients. … Its retrograde motion is simply an effect of Earth’s motion, but the ancients couldn’t see it that way, because they were stuck with the false idea that the Earth is at rest at the center of the universe. Since Earth is still, the perceived motion of the planets must be their real motion; hence the ancient astronomers had to explain the retrograde motions as if they were caused by the planets’ intrinsic motion.

To do so, they imagined an awkward arrangement involving two kinds of circles, in which each planet was attached to a small circle rotating around a point that itself moved on a bigger circle around the Earth. The epicycles, as these mini-circles were called, rotated with a period of one Earth year … Other adjustments required still more circles; it took fifty-five circles to get it all to work. By assigning the right periods to each of the big circles, the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy calibrated the model to a remarkable degree of accuracy. … Ptolemy’s model was beautiful mathematically, and its success convinced astronomers and theologians for more than a millennium that its premises were correct. And how could they be wrong? After all, the model had been confirmed by observation. There’s a lesson here, which is that neither mathematical beauty nor agreement with experiment can guarantee that the ideas a theory is based on bear the slightest relation to reality.

When Galileo attempted to move the earth out of the center of the universe. Science and religion had become so intertwined that the Catholic church found him a heretic and condemned him to house arrest until his death. I have a feeling that the church’s beliefs wrapped up with the mathematical precision of the Ptolemaic model empowered them to fight so vigorously against Galileo. Will we allow the reality of time to destroy our historical perceptions of timelessness and perfection?

I agree with Lee, the mathematics that corroborate our lived experiences or the facts we know does not make math the definer of reality. It is merely the story that explains all the known facts. Much like archeologists, need to retell their story when finding new bones of a new species, the math model changes as well.

Is space-time theory related to reality?

I know that Lee Smolin is not a standard voice among physicists. But he is respected² and has others in his camp⁴. I also know that much of the religious literature that exists holds God as timeless. However, I don’t think the timelessness of modern physics or religious thought works with the theology that Joseph Smith penned. I don’t think it works with the experience of our lives or the prophets of scripture.

We believe that God has a physical body that places Him in a location. God having a physical location in space is a radical belief of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It breaks apart most of the logic of traditional Christianity’s ‘omni’ attributes. Added to our belief in the physicality of God, we believe that eternity can be divided⁵ and that God lives in a place where something like our time exists⁶. Einstein’s space-time theories do not allow time to exist. They necessitate a timeless state of the universe⁴ and motivate Einstein to say, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”⁷

Conclusion

I am a big fan of philosophy, theology, and mathematics, as this blog and my profession would support. However, I see all three as tools that help me think about our lived lives. They cannot define our lived lives. We can get so wrapped up at the top of our logical towers that we can’t see the reality of the life being lived below. Lee Smolin provides a great concluding thought on this point.

John Archibald Wheeler used to write physics equations on the blackboard, stand back, and say, “Now I’ll clap my hands and a universe will spring into existence.” Of course, it didn’t. Stephen Hawking asked in A Brief History of Time, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Such utterances reveal the absurdity of the view that mathematics is prior to nature. Math, in reality, comes after nature. It has no generative power. Another way to say this is that in mathematics conclusions are forced by logical implication, whereas in nature events are generated by causal processes acting in time. This is not the same thing; logical implications can model aspects of causal processes, but they’re not identical to causal processes. Logic is not the mirror of causality.

So one of the most important lessons that follow once we grasp the reality of time is that nature cannot be captured in any single logical or mathematical system. The universe simply is - or better yet, happens. It is unique. It happens once, as does each event - each unique event - that nature comprises.

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