Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Temporal Mercies and Eternal Being: Using the Science of Time to Understand God’s Nature and Our Own
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Temporal Mercies and Eternal Being: Using the Science of Time to Understand God’s Nature and Our Own
[Page 1]Abstract: How does God relate to time? How do we? Modern science and revelation offer distinctive and fascinating perspectives to these questions. Specifically, the physical mechanisms underlying time have doctrinal parallels, they appear to be operative at the Fall, and they correlate with several phenomena that make God’s mercy possible.
Time is clearly not our natural dimension … Whereas the bird is at home in the air, we are clearly not at home in time — because we belong to eternity! Time, as much as any one thing, whispers to us that we are strangers here. – Elder Neal A. Maxwell1
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. – Albert Einstein2
Questions about time arise as soon as you begin reading the standard works. From the very first sentence, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen 1:1), we may ask, what is this beginning? If it was the moment of this earth’s creation, how could the “evening and the morning” be called the “first day” if the bodies by which “days” are defined, wouldn’t even be organized for four days (see Moses 2:14–19)? If, instead, this beginning refers to the singular event of the Big Bang, [Page 2]which is presumed to have created not only the universe but time itself, can it have a cause? Can causality — and with it, law, rationality, truth, or freewill — exist apart from time? And if these did have a beginning, must they have an end?3
Should these questions be settled, deeper theological ones appear. Specifically, how does God relate to time? The traditional view sees him as “infinite and eternal, from everlasting to everlasting … unchangeable” (D&C 20:17); “self-existent”;4 and without even a “shadow of changing” (Mormon 9:9–10). His power is “without beginning of days or end of years” (D&C 84:17) and is dispensed according to his “foreknowledge of all things” (Alma 13:7–9). Yet almost in flat contradiction to this, we are told that God’s power is also wielded by faith,5 which Alma defines as “not to have a perfect knowledge of things” (Alma 32:21). Not only does this incompleteness require the temporalizing virtue of patience (see Ether 12:6), it lays bare the curious tension implied in God’s aim to “to bring to pass” our “eternal life,” as if constancy is founded on fundamental change (see Moses 1:39,
View all episodes
By PDF feed of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship
5
11 ratings
[Page 1]Abstract: How does God relate to time? How do we? Modern science and revelation offer distinctive and fascinating perspectives to these questions. Specifically, the physical mechanisms underlying time have doctrinal parallels, they appear to be operative at the Fall, and they correlate with several phenomena that make God’s mercy possible.
Time is clearly not our natural dimension … Whereas the bird is at home in the air, we are clearly not at home in time — because we belong to eternity! Time, as much as any one thing, whispers to us that we are strangers here. – Elder Neal A. Maxwell1
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. – Albert Einstein2
Questions about time arise as soon as you begin reading the standard works. From the very first sentence, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen 1:1), we may ask, what is this beginning? If it was the moment of this earth’s creation, how could the “evening and the morning” be called the “first day” if the bodies by which “days” are defined, wouldn’t even be organized for four days (see Moses 2:14–19)? If, instead, this beginning refers to the singular event of the Big Bang, [Page 2]which is presumed to have created not only the universe but time itself, can it have a cause? Can causality — and with it, law, rationality, truth, or freewill — exist apart from time? And if these did have a beginning, must they have an end?3
Should these questions be settled, deeper theological ones appear. Specifically, how does God relate to time? The traditional view sees him as “infinite and eternal, from everlasting to everlasting … unchangeable” (D&C 20:17); “self-existent”;4 and without even a “shadow of changing” (Mormon 9:9–10). His power is “without beginning of days or end of years” (D&C 84:17) and is dispensed according to his “foreknowledge of all things” (Alma 13:7–9). Yet almost in flat contradiction to this, we are told that God’s power is also wielded by faith,5 which Alma defines as “not to have a perfect knowledge of things” (Alma 32:21). Not only does this incompleteness require the temporalizing virtue of patience (see Ether 12:6), it lays bare the curious tension implied in God’s aim to “to bring to pass” our “eternal life,” as if constancy is founded on fundamental change (see Moses 1:39,