Don Page - How Does God Relate to Time？ (Part 2)

Don, in my struggle to understand whether there's a God, one of the things I've looked to is this relationship between God and time. Because the more you understand the nature of time in physics, and particularly in quantum physics and in cosmology, it has a variable quality to it, and sometimes you really don't know if it's real or not real. So how do we understand God in relationship to time? Because I think that could help clarify if there is such a thing as God that is the creator of everything, supposedly. Yes, well I believe that God is the creator of time as well as well as of everything else. So I believe that God is outside the time, certainly outside the time that he's created. Whether he has his own time, I don't know, but it may be he's, I tend to take the view that he's timeless, that he knows everything from his perspective, but his perspective is outside of time. So what does that mean if your perspective is outside of time? I've heard from philosophers, but from a physicist, what does that mean your perspective is outside of time? Because does God go through a sequence of events, or is this just this one instant apprehension of everything in its totality? I think in some sense it's more like an instant apprehension of reality. I mean, I think he's created the whole universe in what we might call block universe form. He's created the whole history of the universe. Well, it may be many histories in the multiverse, and he's created that whole thing. In fact, it's interesting that Augustine, many centuries ago, was wrestling with this problem, and he said that some people ask is what was God doing before the creation of the universe? And Augustine says, well, we must not answer as the wag does and say that God is creating hell for people who ask such questions. And he says, no, it's a serious question that deserves a serious answer. And Augustine went on to say, I can't quote it exactly even in the English translation, but to say roughly that by time is part of the created order, and therefore it didn't exist. There was no time before God created the universe. So the question in some sense becomes meaningless. What was God doing before the creation of the universe? There just was not a before. It's unfortunate that many people remember only what the wag says and they attribute to Augustine. In fact, that even happened at the conference, that somebody was wrongly quoting Augustine as saying that God was creating hell for people who ask such questions. And I very strenuously objected to that at the meeting this time. Okay. So as a quantum physicist, when you look at the so-called beginning of the universe, when time and space came into existence, whether they're emergent, what does that say about time? What does relativity say about time? What does quantum theory say about time? Some people talk about the beginning of the universe either kind of coming into existence or time being very fuzzy so that the universe could have been eternal in some way. Yes. Well, in some sense, of course, the first major modification of the Newtonian concept of time came from Einstein's special relativity and then general relativity that still had time, but in some sense it was what we might say a many fingered time. It would be a time for each possible observer or each possible world line. And time and space were related to each other. You could do transformations from one to the other. And furthermore, in Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is his theory of gravity, the time and space are dynamic. In some sense, the rate at which time runs depends on where you are and so on. Quantum mechanics, it's even more radical. In some sense, space-time itself, when you apply quantum mechanics to space-time itself, it seems that things become more fuzzy. And it might be, as Carlo Rovelli was speaking at the conference, that time doesn't exist and space doesn't exist. So I think in some sense, they're probably more emergent concepts and they're good approximate concepts in our present part of the universe, but in the very early universe, they become fuzzy. And it may even become fuzzy as to whether there was an absolute beginning to the universe or whether there was perhaps a bounce within maybe an infinite period of contraction before a bounce to the present expansion. Well, if you have infinities in our kind of time, the way you're saying now, doesn't that take away from God as the creator of time? Well, I think God could create infinity. I mean, I do believe God is infinite, but in some sense, his infinity transcends all of the infinities that he might have created within our universe. I don't know for certain whether our universe is infinite, but it does seem to be a rather simple hypothesis. So I tend to suspect that in some senses, our universe is infinite, but I'm not sure about that. But I don't think even if it were, I don't think it takes away from God's infinity because God's infinity in some sense is a higher infinity. The flexibility of time that we've now seen in relativity and the uncertainty of time or the emergence of time, the quantum mechanics, does that give even greater possibility that that's something that indeed can be created as opposed to the pre-special relativity thinking that time was this invariant background that sort of exists permanently and is invariant and really nothing can change it? Well, I think, I guess my view is that whichever universe there is that exists, I think God would have created it. So, I mean, who knows? Maybe he's created some classical universe somewhere else. It's just Minkowski space-time. It just has some, well, at least in a certain reference frame has a very definite time and so on. Well, the only thing was that God himself was in sort of a Minkowski or a simple time. And I think nobody would agree with that. And indeed, the new sciences of a century old of relativity and quantum theory gives time a different characteristic now. Right. So, I think the fact that our theories show it's more dynamical, it makes it easier to understand how it could be something created if you believe in creation. But of course, you know, the background you might believe it wasn't. I remember my kids many years ago, I said, well, you know, did God create this food? Yes. Did God create the table? Yes. Did he create the grass? Yes. Did he create the air? Oh, it's just there. So, they thought of air as being the background thing that didn't have to be. It didn't have to be created. And I think maybe many people have similar views about time and space. If God has sequences of events and that God did something before something else in some, not necessarily in a tense sense, but in an order sense. Okay. Could that happen without time? Well, there could be, of course, a time associated with God. I mean, completely agnostic as to whether there is, I tend to be doubtful that it's similar. But there could be a sense in which maybe God decided first, maybe he decided first he was going to create humans. And he decided to create humans, but then later he decided, well, I'll do it through having something like a Big Bang. And so, you might say he decided first to do what within our universe is later. And then later he decided to do something that's, you know, in our earlier part. But I tend to think that he was really aware of the whole thing. And just he considered all the possibilities and he chose the best possible universe to maximize the optimal. But these words consider, chose, they imply some kind of a sequence. And I'm just wondering how can God have a sequence without having time? Well, I think for us that it does. And maybe it's kind of an answer, but more so when we say it considered, I mean, we use verbs that do have this tense to them. Whereas I might think that God, he's just aware of all these different possibilities and he created, you know, a particular one. And it's very hard because when we create things, it's all, you know, it's within time. And so it's very hard to sort of think how could this happen, you know, outside of time. But I tend to think of it as a causal relationship, but it doesn't have to be a causal relationship within time. So I think God can create even if God is totally timeless, he can create a universe in which time is just part of the created universe, but it's a time that God's not within.