There were blue flames burning the sheets of his bed. He ran through the flames toward the only two people he loved… but they were gone.
Einstein presented what is referred to as the “block universe” – the notion that all times exist equally. So, what you see just depends on what you set t to in any given equation. “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent,” the genius of relativity mused. He was so clear about the illusory nature of time that the thought even provided him with comfort in the face of death.
But the block universe, and the notion of God’s timelessness, have been challenged by scientists who also work on the relationship between science and religion. I’m thinking here of two physicists who are also well known as theologians, John Polkinghorne and Ian Barbour. Their questioning of the classical idea of God’s timeless nature presents an enormous challenge to received ideas about God. Interestingly, it’s a challenge that stems from both scientific and theological concerns. (…)
Scientifically, time is an oddity. Relativity theory treats it as one dimension of reality. Time is tantamount to the movement of mass in spacetime. So, time reversal, or retrocausality, has been proposed as a way to interpret antimatter — a positron being an electron that’s traveling backwards in time. Also, at a theoretical level, the equations that govern electromagnetic radiation don’t distinguish between time going forwards or backwards. And yet, in the macro-world of the everyday, we clearly can’t move temporally backwards, but only forwards. So how can this existential difference be reconciled?
