God and Time

My answer to Question #1 (posted 12/29/20):

I believe that Time did exist before the Universe commenced some 14 billion years ago. If otherwise, our Universe would not exist and we wouldn’t either. This answer is inconsistent with the religious designation of God as “timeless” and Einstein’s concept of “spacetime,” so let me explain.

Time of course is more than the arbitrary units we have assigned to it. Looking at the bigger picture, Time is a measure of sequence and duration. Duration may be relevant only to events in our Universe, but sequence is very relevant to God’s existence before the Universe, unless He is 100% immutable or changeless. Why?

Time is a function of Change. It is the temporal matrix that organizes Change into a sequence of “before and after,” of “past, present, and future.” If nothing ever changed, there would be no Time. On the other hand, if any kind of change occurs, then Time necessarily exists. That’s just as true of God’s pre-Universe existence as it is of events in our physical Universe.

But if God is “eternally perfect” as some religions claim, doesn’t that mean that He never changes and therefore really is “timeless”? If that were true, it would mean that God is immutable – or stated another way, that His existence is totally static, which undermines the very idea of a “higher” power or being that is relevant to us. Moreover, we know for a fact that something did change when the Universe commenced 14 billion years ago. Unless one believes that God had nothing to do with that event and has no interest in or connection to the Universe today, the Big Bang represented a very dramatic change in God’s existence.

Atheists argue that the existence of our Universe does not prove or even suggest the hand of a pre-existing Creator because it could have materialized spontaneously out of nothing. But the profound complexity and organization of the Universe certainly indicates to me that it was more likely the product of what we call “thinking” rather than an unplanned singularity. That raises this question: If nothing existed before the Universe did, then who or what did that “thinking”? The existence of God of course is a matter of faith alone and not of proof (except for those who believe on the basis of faith that their chosen Revelation stories represent His actual words), but the analytical “thinking” required to produce such a magnificent Universe “proves” (according to Descartes) there was a Thinker. This leads to the conclusion that God, instead of immutable or inscrutable, is a Being who “thinks.”

Thinking of course implies a progression of different thoughts, a form of Change. And if any form of Change existed in God’s pre-Universe reality, so did Time.

I’ll wrap this up with a few related ideas that we’ll come back to later. If God can and does change, is it conceivable that He is “evolving” in some way? If He is evolving in a positive sense, does that diminish His grandeur or alleged perfection? Would it not make sense that we humans (as well as all other intelligent beings in the Universe) may be contributing something to His evolution? That would certainly explain why God chose to create a Universe that was capable of generating intelligent life. And perhaps there is even some kind of meaningful partnership between God and us. So many possibilities to ponder until next time.