Confusing the Biblical God of Time with the Greek God of Time: Classic Theism & Divine Timelessness - What It Is and Isn't from a Non-Process Point of View

An Example of Unwarranted Theological Speculation: Divine Timelessness

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by Roger Olson

[comments by R.E. Slater]

February 19, 2015

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“The God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

And it can have negative consequences for Christian practices such as prayer.

- Roger Olson

In my immediately preceding post [see next article below]  I argued that far too much Christian theology includes unwarranted speculation—especially about God. Under pressure from Greek ontology traditional, “classical theism” has generally agreed that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (the Yahweh of the Bible) is somehow (i.e., differently expressed) “outside of time” such that temporal sequence, the passage of past into present into future (or future into present into past) is known to God but not experienced by God.

Put in other words, for this classical theistic view, God’s eternity means (in relation to time) “simultaneity with all times.” In other words, in this view, explained best (most scholars agree) by Boethius, God exists in an “eternal now.” For him, our future has already happened. In other words, this is not just a claim about God’s foreknowledge; it is a claim about God’s being. It is not merely epistemological; it is ontological.

I have taught Christian theology on both the undergraduate and graduate levels for thirty-four years. I can say without hesitation that the vast majority of my students think this is biblical theology and orthodoxy. They think this view of God’s eternity, timelessness, being “outside of time,” is part-and-parcel of Christianity, the Christian faith, even the gospel itself. Try questioning it and you will (I have) experience(d) strenuous push back.

I suspect many people think two things about this traditional view of God’s eternity and time:

1 - First, it is necessary for God’s transcendence; if God is somehow “within time” or if time is “real for God,” then (God forbid!) God must be limited.

2 - Second, it undermines God’s power and sovereignty and makes God unreliable. The future, scary to us, becomes scary to God, too. As one theologian expressed it, denial of the classical view makes God a “pathetic, hand wringing God who has to wait fearfully to see what will happen.”

And yet…

Nowhere does the biblical story of God, the biblical narrative that identifies God for us, and upon which classical Christian theology claims to be based, say or even hint that God is “outside of time” or “timeless” or that all times are “simultaneously before the eyes of God.”

• This view of God’s eternity entered into Christian theology from Greek philosophy which regarded time as imperfection.

• Greek philosophy was notoriously negative with regard to time. Hebrew thought was not; it regarded time and history as the framework for God’s action.

Many Christian theologians, not all liberal, began to see this especially in the nineteenth century and began to deconstruct the Greek influences in Christian theology insofar as they were extra-biblical and tended to de-personalize God.

Among the earliest to begin this deconstruction project were Richard Watson (Methodist), I. A. Dorner (Lutheran-Reformed), and even Karl Barth (Reformed). (Barth’s belief about God’s relation to time was complex and ultimately ambiguous, but there can be no denying that he incorporated time into God even if he called God’s time “divine temporality.”) (Many conservative theologians “blame” liberal Adolph Harnack for this de-Hellenizing project, but he was not alone.)

And yet…

As Christian philosophers Nicholas Wolterstorff and Keith Ward (among others) have strenuously pointed out, a “timeless being” cannot interact with temporal beings. In fact, such a being, freed entirely of the flow of time, cannot “act” in time at all. In fact, he cannot even know that “today is February 18, 2015.” But most importantly, as Christian philosopher Dallas Willard pointed out most emphatically in The Divine Conspiracy, such a God cannot be affected by our prayers.

So how to preserve God’s transcendence together with denial of God’s timeless eternity?

This has been answered many times by many philosophers and theologians. The answer is “creation as kenosis.” This is explained in many books but is especially clear in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis edited by theologian-scientist John Polkinghorne (Eerdmans, 2001). Polkinghorne’s own contribution to the book is best: “Kenotic Creation and Divine Action.” The point is that God’s entry into time with us (T. F. Torrance in Space, Time, and Incarnation) is voluntary.

Why would God do this? Out of love for the sake of having real relationships with temporal creatures made in his own image and likeness. A “timeless” God who is not temporal cannot be affected by anything temporal beings do. The great medieval scholastic theologians knew this and described all God’s relations with temporal creatures as external, not internal. In other words, God remains unchanged, unaltered in every way [sic, divine impassibility]. They drew the natural, reasonable conclusion that an eternal God, one for whom our past, present and future are all “now,” must be immutable and even impassible in the strongest senses possible. He can act but not react. (Whether he can even act within time is strongly questioned by Wolterstorff and Ward and other Christian philosophers.)

God’s transcendence lies in the fact that he remains self-sufficient in his eternal nature and character; time does not erode or add to God’s being. And the voluntarily temporal God remains omnipotent and everlasting. Time does not limit or threaten his being or power.

The conclusion of many modern Christian thinkers (and here I am excluding process theologians such as Nelson Pike whose 1970 book God and Timelessness is a devastating logical critique of the traditional view) is that the classical view of God’s eternity (“outside of time,” “eternal now-ness”) is pure philosophical-theological speculation unrelated to the God of the Bible and alien to any religion that values an interactive God. It tends to make God remote, uninvolved, inaccessible and non-relational (except within himself).

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I often wonder about the possible connection between this classical view of God’s eternity (viz., “outside of time”) and many Christians’ view of prayer. When I ask my students if they have heard the saying that “Prayer doesn’t change things; it changes me” almost all confess that they heard it in church or home or somewhere among Christians. That prayer changes me is not contested; that prayer can change the mind of God is clearly biblical. To say otherwise is to reduce numerous passages of Scripture to mere imagery, “anthropomorphism,” and guts petitionary prayer [into a nothingness, meaningless, worrisome task]. I suspect that the idea of God as “outside of time,” “eternal now,” “non-temporal,” contributes to and supports that false idea of prayer.

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So why did this traditional view of God’s eternity (“timelessness”) invade Christian theology which claims to be based on the Bible or at least governed by the Bible? I suspect the Greek “logic of perfection” contributed to it—the idea that God is perfect, time is imperfect, therefore God must be timeless.

A more biblical way of looking at the subject would be that God is perfect, love is perfect, love between God and created beings requires freedom-in-and-for relationship, freedom-in-and-for relationship (between God and created beings) requires time, it is more perfect for God to enter into time than to remain outside time.

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At this point in a conversation about this subject many Christians will ask “Why can’t God enter into time and be outside of time also?” But think about that language. How can a non-temporal being “enter into time” while also remaining outside of time? If what has been said is true, then only “part of God” would be in real relationship with free creatures. There would still be “part of God” for whom the future has already happened. If the future has already happened at all, for anyone, even for a “part of God,” then history’s unfolding including our ability to affect God (e.g., with prayer) is a charade. The idea that this problem can be solved by positing that God both enters into time and remains outside of time is simply another way of saying God is timeless. It doesn’t solve anything.

But more importantly, the logic of the Bible, the flow of the biblical narrative, God’s story with us, never says or even hints that God is “outside of time.” It only says that God is everlasting and hints (very strongly) that God is the Lord of time. All that the biblical narrative requires is that God be omnipotent within time and able to guarantee his victory over whatever forces oppose him.

If there is some aspect of God that remains above or outside of time, I do not know how to speak of that, how even to imagine that, how to make that consistent with God within time (and God in real relation with creatures in time). Therefore, I leave that aside, simply lay it down, and ignore it. It doesn’t function in a truly biblical theology except as a metaphysical compliment some people feel compelled to pay to God. But I don’t feel so compelled by the Bible or by reason.

I realize that the temporal view of God goes against the bulk of Christian tradition, but the traditional, classical view is derived from alien [(non-biblical, non-Jewish)] sources. It is a foreign body within biblical theology. “The God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” And it can have negative consequences for Christian practices such as prayer.

Theologian Robert Jenson is widely considered one of the most astute contemporary Christian theologians. Many of his books (such as God after God: The God of the Past and the Future as Seen in the Work of Karl Barth [1969] and The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel [1982]) strongly point toward a temporal view of God. Page 4 of The Triune Identity powerfully expresses what I (and other non-process theologians who embrace a temporal view of God) believe:

“God may be God because in him all that will be is already realized,

so that the novelties of the future are only apparent and its threats

therefore not overwhelming. Or God may be God because in him

all that has been is opened to transformation, so that the guilts of

the past and immobilities of the present are rightly to be

 interpreted as opportunities of creation.”

 - Robert Jenson

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Theology and Speculation

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by Roger Olson

February 17, 2015

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The issue here is the legitimacy of speculation in theology. What is speculation? In this context, if not in all contexts, “speculation” is making truth claims without clear warrant—reasonable grounding in relevant data. In theology “relevant data” are revelation/Scripture, tradition, reason (logic) and experience. “Experience” is intersubjective experience, not private experience.

Some years ago I came to the conclusion that much Christian theology, truth claims made by Christian theologians, is speculation—as opposed to clear exegesis of Scripture and tradition using reason and experience as guidance mechanisms and tools of interpretation.

Now I need to give examples. It seems to me that calling the Holy Spirit “the bond of love between Father and Son” in the immanent Trinity (like much talk about the immanent Trinity) is speculation. And yet, probably due to the influence of Augustine (De Trinitate) it has become commonplace in especially Western Christian theology.

Another example is theories of atonement: how exactly Christ’s death on the cross made possible human salvation. All theories of the atonement seem speculative to me.

Of course, my examples reveal that I think much “tradition” is itself speculative compared with Scripture itself. Most Protestants, anyway, claim to believe that Scripture trumps tradition and where tradition departs from Scripture it is to be held more lightly and with less authority.

Over the years I have gotten in the habit of reading every book of theology with a kind of critical principle about speculation: “Is this truth claim made by this theologian actually warranted by revelation/Scripture?”

I would guess that as much as half or more of all that I read in books of theology is speculation.

Now, having said all that, let me also say that speculation is not always bad. The human mind seeks answers and it is naturally for theologians to guess at possible answers when revelation/Scripture is not clear. I don’t blame theologians for attempting to answer the question “Why did Jesus have to die in order for us to be saved?” but I recognize much of most theological answers as speculation.

Some years ago I was at a banquet honoring a world class theologian’s sixtieth birthday. During his talk after the toasts he reminisced about his life and career and specifically referred to a falling out he had with another theologian who was present. He said directly to the other theologian “Let’s all just remember: It’s only guesswork anyway.”

Naturally I was a bit shocked as I had spent much time and effort studying that theologian’s work. And yet I was somewhat relieved at the same time because I had come to suspect that much of his theology was, indeed, “guesswork” or what I am calling here speculation.

Again, to me that does not nullify the value of that theologian’s contributions to theology. I only wish he and others labeled their prescriptive truth claims “speculation” rather than putting them forward as “truth.”

As I said, speculation is not bad or wrong, but it should not carry the weight, authority, that truth grounded directly in revelation/Scripture carries. And yet what often happens is people adopt an entire theological project as truth and are reluctant or unwilling to recognize much of it as speculation when, in fact, that is what it is.

Theologians (and others) should be more open and transparent about this. They should label their truth claims with degrees of speculation—from that which is closer to the data (“justified speculation”) to that which is farther from the data (“guesswork only”). My own reading of Christian theology has led me to believe that most theologians (other than fundamentalists) actually know these differences between truth claims but, for whatever reasons, are reluctant to label them.

What difference does all this make? Well, it should be obvious to people involved in theological work. It is very common for graduate students, for example, to latch on to a theologian and his or her system and treat it as truth itself. Arguments break out and people are demeaned, insulted, marginalized, even excluded because they don’t buy into the “truth system” that, in fact, is half or more speculation.

The twentieth century saw a renaissance of the doctrine of the Trinity in Christian theology—from Barth to Boff theologians (almost) all piled on the Trinity bandwagon offering their own contributions. I have read much of that literature and concluded that at least half of what is said about the Trinity in those numerous tomes of modern theology is speculation. Some of it I would consider warranted speculation but much of it is sheer guesswork. Who can really know the inner workings of the Trinity?

Now don’t get me wrong; I love theological speculation. I’m sure I do it! But a greater degree of humility ought to accompany speculation in theology (than is usually the case).

A case in point is the debates about the so-called “decrees of God.” Supralapsarians, infralapsarians, Amyrauldians, Arminians. So much of what went on in Protestant scholasticism was sheer speculation and yet it led to numerous divisions among Christians. Another case is, as already mentioned, theories of the atonement. The Bible overflows with images and metaphors. Attempting to develop a model that explains why Jesus had to die is natural, but elevating one model to dogma or rejecting others as wrong amounts to elevating to speculation to timeless truth.

There are minds attracted to speculation. When a theological question seems important to someone (or a group) and yet revelation/Scripture is not as clear as they wish it were (often the case) they often look around for a “Bible teacher” or theologian who “has the answer” and then latch onto that person as if he or she thought God’s thoughts after him. They then treat that Bible teacher’s or theologian’s “teachings” as God’s truth itself. They do not want to hear “This is my opinion,” or “This is how it seems to me.” So often the favored Bible teacher or theologian treats his or her doctrinal formulations just like the proverbial fundamentalist preacher who pounds the pulpit saying “The Bible saaaayyyys…” when, in fact, the Bible doesn’t say that at all!

These people have trouble distinguishing between revelation/Scripture and a theologian’s speculative answers to their pressing questions. I have seen this happen with students (and theologians) enamored with the theology of Karl Barth; they become upset when anyone questions Barth’s veracity on a subject. “That’s just Barth’s speculation” invites a glare and an argument—as if Barth’s Church Dogmatics were dropped down out of heaven. I have seen the same happen with people devoted to Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology.

In fact, both Barth and Tillich were prone to speculation. I suspect they knew it. But too often they did not couch their truth claims in such a way as to indicate “this is speculation.”

I favor theological works that admit speculation is just that—speculation. Unfortunately, they are too few.

Debating Christianity's Traditional Creational Explanation - "Creatio ex nihilo" or "Creatio ex continua"?

By way of a disclaimer here at Relevancy22 my overall premise is that (1) God is dependent upon nothing and (2) God is Creator of all - even if it is "nothing". This is my philosophical Christian position more commonly described as "creatio ex nihilo" - creation from nothing. It is also a widely held traditional position of Christian orthodoxy.

However, in physics - and especially in quantum physics - there is no such thing as "nothing." And so my creational position would go on to say that "nothing cannot be created out of nothing unless that nothing really isn't nothing but actually held something within its composition." This is the "creatio ex continua" position - creation from something which is a less widely accepted position but nonetheless orthodox teaching of Christianity as well.

The problem here is that one cannot be the other. Either it is or it isn't. And if we continue to define these positions in dualistic categories than we may miss the essence of each position as separately understood.

But before I go on to explain what I mean here I want the reader to know that "creatio ex continua" is not strictly a panentheistic position as some would like to read into it. But a more modified relational process theological position stating the ontological linkage between our Redeemer-Creator with His creation. That is, though God created from nothing philosophically speaking (for argument's sake) God is still uniquely linked to His creation even as a quantum singularity is linked to its point of origin.

As such, I am not describing an ontological interdependency between God and the world (sic, classic panentheism in the liberal process sense) but in another sense - in the more conservative sense of process theology - God and His creation are indeed uniquely linked creationally.

This then is the process side of God's creatorship without the antecental panentheistic elements that have been philosophically attached to it by a more liberal process theology which I take liberty to prohibit through a more conservative relational interpretation of process theology.

Now, let me return to my earlier thought. Within the realm of physics there is always "something" inside of "nothing" - whether it be a vacuum of space which really isn't a "vacuum of nothingness." Or tightly-wound inter-dimensional spaces which appear empty but aren't. Or even the primordial soup of the Big Bang itself which then consisted of a "nothing" composed perhaps of an intense (or blinding) darkness (or light) of "energy and force" intertwined with one other.

And remember, under intense gravitational forces, light cannot escape. Thus my supposition of a "darkness or void" as versus a "blinding light" per se.... But who knows, in the realm of poetry maybe all this primordial soup was very light itself with no darkness at all since space itself did not exist as we know and experience it today.

Nor did time before the eruption of the Big Bang. Why? Because time could not have begun having become overwhelmed in the spatial soup of gravity's forces and liquefied into 2 or 1-dimensional space itself.

And so, space was limited to 2 dimensions, or perhaps 1 dimension, and time was without existence so that in a sense you could describe these physical conditions of our early universe as a kind of "eternality" without presence, form, or prior antecedence. Moreover, creation's beginning point - as the science of quantum physics understands it - is known as a "singularity" of the space-time event.

Therefore, what traditional Christianity would call "nothing" - which played off the older Greek idea of "nothing" - is actually not "nothing" but something. Something quantumtative. But then again, how would the non-scientific church have known about this physical absurdity if quantum physics hadn't yet been discovered?

Too, it wasn't until the mid-20th century that these quantum scientific discoveries were known. And lest of all by traditional Christianity which historically runs decades, if not centuries, behind the academic curve of knowledge because of its religious belief structures so resistant to change. Let alone supposing that more ancient cosmologies (sic, Wikipedia) would be helpful in explaining this kind of singular discussion. Why? Because quantum physics is not yet a 100 years old. Till then the world never knew of early creation's physical description in these scientific terms.

And don't suppose the bible would either. It was written by ancient cultures thus immediately dating its resources of human knowledge. Which is both the beauty of the Bible and the frustration of its interpreters. Some would read into its pages more than it is saying thus overlaying personal dogmas with personal interpretations to orthodox doctrines. Whereas other readers would more properly hold back in granting too much interpretative license and when doing so gain the beauty of God's written revelation by its silence. And for many of us, the silence of Scripture is as helpful as its pointedness of salvific revelation. For by it we may think more creatively, more expansively, with the newer academic findings at hand across as many inter/intra-disciplinary fields as possible without the Scriptural inhibition of forbidding or detraction.

And so, to press the point a bit further - and in a kind of equivocal argument - the concept of "nothing" could be equivocated with the concept of "zero" - which in mathematics and science is the most infinite of numbers one can rest a theory upon (sic, Wikipedia again). Meaning that "zero isn't necessarily zero" and neither is "nothing necessarily nothing."

Hence, this blog site here leans to the philosophical grounds of traditional Christianity's "creatio ex nihilo" premises but posits that in the actuality of our current universe the alternate teaching of "creatio ex continua" may perhaps be the better physical explanation even as "creatio ex nihilo" is perhaps the better philosophical argument (cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg here and here and here).

My last thought is that the theological historian Dr. Olson makes "creatio ex nihilo" foundational for God's Transcendence, Grace, and Separateness from evil. However, we have demonstrated many times that this traditional Christian dogma (or blik) is not necessary in upholding this linkage in order to retain those foundational ontological, relational, and metaphysical arguments.

Lastly, if you're confused, then please read the traditional article below by Roger Olson and then look up all the "creatio ex continua" articles here on this site starting with the first several linked immediately above including the index given at the bottom of this post. Hopefully what I am doing here is not positing something new in a sense, but rather attempting to update the oldness of traditional Christianity with the newness of our technological age without grossly exceeding interpretive bounds with more pertinent and relevant questions.

When doing this it seems everything changes - and perhaps well it should! But in the changes we must attempt to neither bind the Scriptures nor our Lord in the process. Whether it be by our insistence upon adhering to the older doctrines of the church or by turning a blind eye to what newer discoveries are telling us about ourselves, the universe, and God Himself through the narrative of church history and human event as they provide greater depth to our reading of the Bible.

And yet, in all things, may all honor and glory be given to our glorious Redeemer God in the unity of the church bound in the great mystery of the Son and Spirit.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

February 2, 2015

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Why I Believe in “Creatio ex nihilo” (Creation out of Nothing)

(Even Though the Bible Doesn’t Directly Teach It)

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by Roger Olson

January 30, 2015

Comments

Every once in a while I meet someone who, while exhibiting every sign of being a true Christian, denies the traditional Christian doctrine of “creatio ex nihilo”—creation out of nothing. This belief, the “prior actuality of God” (Austin Farrer’s term), combined with the idea that God created in the beginning out of nothing (not “Nothingness”—Greek philosophy’s me-ōn), is not directly taught in Scripture. However, the early church fathers, especially (but not only) the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil of Caeasarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzus), insisted on it against Greek philosophy and Roman religious myths. Gradually it was raised to the status of dogma by most branches of Christianity even if rarely, if ever, explicitly stated as such in creeds or confessions of faith.

Why?

Creation out of nothing is the only alternative to four alternative beliefs about creation that are absolutely untenable for Christian thought:

1 - One is pantheism or panentheism—belief that God and the world are either identical or interdependent. In either case the world is part of God or so inextricably united with God eternally that God is dependent on it. (Here “world” refer to creation, the universe, finite reality.)

2- Another alternative belief about creation is that God created the world out of some pre-existing matter that he did not himself create. In that view God “created” by organizing an eternal something that was chaotic and stood over against him.

3 - Yet another alternative belief is that God created the world out of himself in which case the world is made of “God stuff”—God’s own substance.

4 - Finally, a mostly modern, secular view is that some world (or substance, energy) has always existed and God, if he exists at all, has nothing to do with its origin or development.

If there is a fifth possibility, alternative to creation out of nothing, I am not aware of it. All that I have considered “boil down” to one of those four.

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Many Christians, to say nothing of non-Christians, embrace one of the alternative beliefs about creation, for whatever reasons, and feel permitted to do so because neither Scripture nor creedal orthodoxy explicitly requires creation out of nothing. (Some Christian denominations may require it, but most do not explicitly say so.)

So is creation out of nothing just speculation on the part of orthodox Christian theologians? Why has this idea been so prominent and defended so strongly by traditional Christian theologians if Scripture and creeds do not explicitly require it? Why do I believe in it while admitting it is not explicitly taught in Scripture and points to an impenetrable mystery?

Creation out of nothing is not mere speculation; it is based on other beliefs that are explicitly taught in Scripture and that are part and parcel of traditional, orthodox, classical “Great Tradition” Christianity.

Here is where I think many modern Christians, both conservative and progressive, across that spectrum, fail to realize there are necessary Christian beliefs that are not explicitly taught in Scripture. Yes, admittedly, they are “man-made doctrines” and are more part of Christian philosophy, Christian presuppositions underlying explicit dogmas about Christ, the Trinity, and salvation, than confessional, systematic theology itself. (This is a somewhat artificial distinction but I find it helpful at times and this is one such “time” or instance. Some would call it “the Christian worldview”—the set of basic perspectives, “blik” [to borrow a term from philosophy R. M. Hare], that underlie Christian dogmas about God, Christ, and salvation.)

Creation out of nothing is part of what Emil Brunner called “Christian ontology”—derived from revelation but not explicitly revealed. Without it certain revealed truths cannot be maintained or defended; they slip away without this ontological, metaphysical foundation.

Creation out of nothing (in the beginning, not moment-by-moment as Jonathan Edwards speculated) is necessary, as I said, because without it one will believe in one of the alternative views mentioned above and will eventually find crucial gospel tenets dissolving. It is the only alternative to those views of creation and alone supports and defends the revealed gospel of truth about God, Christ, and salvation.

Now, I find it necessary to warn not to attempt to provide an alternative to creation out of nothing by saying God created “out of love.” That is not an alternative to creation out of nothing; it is simply speaking of God’s motive or disposition behind and for creation—not the what out of which God created. It is completely compatible with creation out of nothing and does not replace it. When someone says God created “out of love” they are not expressing an alternative to creation out of nothing.

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All of the above is to say that there is a Christian ontology, a Christian metaphysical worldview, perspective about reality, that is not itself explicitly revealed but is established because it is the only support for what is revealed and expressed in classical, orthodox Christianity. Often its support is that alternative views are simply untenable in light of revealed truth and, if held, lead inexorably to distortions of the gospel itself.

So what revealed truths, held and taught by all branches of catholic and orthodox Christianity (including the Reformers) make creation out of nothing necessary in spite of its impenetrable mysteriousness?

First is the transcendence of God, God’s holiness, wholly otherness, majesty, power, glory and freedom. Throughout Scripture God is revealed as not dependent on anything in creation for his actuality. Do you need a proof text? Paul to the Athenians in Acts 17:22-31: God does not need anything and gives life and breath to all mortals. Some may point to another portion of Paul’s soliloquy in Athens—that we “live and move and have our being” in God and are “God’s offspring.” None of that undermines and indeed must be interpreted in light of God does not need anything. That is a constant theme throughout Scripture: That God is “above” creation and does not need anything outside of himself to be God. A God who needs the world for anything is not the God of the Bible. “Without the world, God is not God” is Hegel’s heresy, the root of all panentheism, and it undercuts and undermines God’s holy transcendence. This is “another God,” not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Isaiah, Jesus and Paul.

Second is the gratuity of grace, the revealed truth that redemption is solely gift and that grace for salvation cannot be forced or necessary. It also cannot be presumed as if God owed it to himself or anyone or anything. This belief is integral to Christian soteriology and arises out of biblical revelation and out of the very meaning of grace itself: “For by grace are you saved…and that not of yourselves….” (Ephesians 2:8-9) If creation out of nothing is not firmly held and defended, the freedom of God in redemption and salvation, grace itself as sheer gift, slips away.

Third, finally, is the reality of evil and God’s non-involvement in and non-participation in evil. Creation out of nothing protects the reality of evil from being reduced to illusion (our not-yet-knowing of our own divinity) or necessity (in which case it is not really evil).

These three Christian ideas, derived from revelation itself, if not directly revealed, depend on creation out of nothing. One or more of them completely undercuts and undermines all the alternative perspectives on reality. Only creation out of nothing protects God’s holy freedom and wholly otherness, the gratuity of redemption, and the reality of creaturely opposition to God as evil/sin.

In other words, even though creation out of nothing is not explicitly revealed or normally stated in creeds and confessions of Christian denominations and churches, it inevitably appears as we bore down to inspect and think about the presuppositional pillars that uphold ecumenical Christian belief and experience. It is an aspect of Christian ontology which is just as important as Christian doctrine. The line between the two is admittedly blurry, not absolutely distinct, but we might say that Christian ontology appears not so much directly out of revelation as out of close inspection of Christian beliefs based on revelation in light of alternative religions, philosophies and worldviews in culture. Creation out of nothing was discovered, not invented, by the church fathers as they examined the worldviews, religions and philosophies around them in Hellenistic culture. So today we need to rediscover it and embrace and defend it as we examine modern and postmodern secular and pagan worldviews, religions and philosophies in and among which the same alternative beliefs about God and creation arise (as in Hellenistic culture).

In other words, we can no longer take creation out of nothing for granted; alternative beliefs about God and the world are seeping and creeping into Christian churches. We need to find spaces for teaching Christian ontology (under whatever name). We need to correct Christians who are confused about God and creation, especially those who are coming to believe that creation (e.g., our souls) are “part of God” or that God “did his best with what he had” in creation which is the explanation for evil.

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Note: This is an opening to a conversation among Christians. I don’t expect non-Christians to believe in creation out of nothing (although some might). If you choose to comment or question, please keep that in mind. If you are not a catholic-orthodox and/or evangelical Christian (concerned for biblical revelation and basic Christian orthodoxy) you are free to ask questions about Christian belief including creation out of nothing, but please do not misuse this blog to promote your alternative belief system or worldview (or metaphysical/ontological skepticism). If you perceive yourself to be a catholic-orthodox and/or evangelical Christian and choose to respond negatively (with disagreement) state whether you agree with the three basic Christian dogmas/doctrines I stated that I argue require (together) belief in creation out of nothing. In any case, keep in mind that the purpose here is dialogue. Keep it civil.

continue to -

Critique of Aquinas' View of God's Activity in the World

Index to past articles on "Particle Physics, Quantum Science, and the Universe"

Questions of Time: Is the Source to Time's Aarow based on Entropy or Gravitation?

2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2-futures-can-explain-time-s-mysterious-past/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

by Lee Billings

December 8, 2014

New theories suggest the big bang was not the beginning,

and that we may live in the past of a parallel universe

In the evolution of cosmic structure, is entropy or gravity the more dominant force? The answer to this question has deep implications for the universe's future, as well as its past.

Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team

Physicists have a problem with time.

Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward.

Of course the world we experience is entirely different. The universe is expanding, not contracting. Stars emit light rather than absorb it, and radioactive atoms decay rather than reassemble. Omelets don’t transform back to unbroken eggs and cigarettes never coalesce from smoke and ashes. We remember the past, not the future, and we grow old and decrepit, not young and rejuvenated. For us, time has a clear and irreversible direction. It flies forward like a missile, equations be damned.

For more than a century, the standard explanation for “time’s arrow,” as the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington first called it in 1927, has been that it is an emergent property of thermodynamics, as first laid out in the work of the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In this view what we perceive as the arrow of time is really just the inexorable rearrangement of highly ordered states into random, useless configurations, a product of the universal tendency for all things to settle toward equilibrium with one another.

Informally speaking, the crux of this idea is that “things fall apart,” but more formally, it is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which Boltzmann helped devise. The law states that in any closed system (like the universe itself), entropy—disorder—can only increase. Increasing entropy is a cosmic certainty because there are always a great many more disordered states than orderly ones for any given system, similar to how there are many more ways to scatter papers across a desk than to stack them neatly in a single pile.

The thermodynamic arrow of time suggests our observable universe began in an exceptionally special state of high order and low entropy, like a pristine cosmic egg materializing at the beginning of time to be broken and scrambled for all eternity. From Boltzmann’s era onward, scientists allergic to the notion of such an immaculate conception have been grappling with this conundrum.

Boltzmann, believing the universe to be eternal in accordance with Newton’s laws, thought that eternity could explain a low-entropy origin for time’s arrow. Given enough time—endless time, in fact—anything that can happen will happen, including the emergence of a large region of very low entropy as a statistical fluctuation from an ageless, high-entropy universe in a state of near-equilibrium. Boltzmann mused that we might live in such an improbable region, with an arrow of time set by the region’s long, slow entropic slide back into equilibrium.

Today’s cosmologists have a tougher task, because the universe as we now know it isn’t ageless and unmoving: They have to explain the emergence of time’s arrow within a dynamic, relativistic universe that apparently began some 14 billion years ago in the fiery conflagration of the big bang. More often than not the explanation involves ‘fine-tuning’—the careful and arbitrary tweaking of a theory’s parameters to accord with observations.

Many of the modern explanations for a low-entropy arrow of time involve a theory called inflation—the idea that a strange burst of antigravity ballooned the primordial universe to an astronomically larger size, smoothing it out into what corresponds to a very low-entropy state from which subsequent cosmic structures could emerge. But explaining inflation itself seems to require even more fine-tuning. One of the problems is that once begun, inflation tends to continue unstoppably. This “eternal inflation” would spawn infinitudes of baby universes about which predictions and observations are, at best, elusive. Whether this is an undesirable bug or a wonderful feature of the theory is a matter of fierce debate; for the time being it seems that inflation’s extreme flexibility and explanatory power are both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

For all these reasons, some scientists seeking a low-entropy origin for time’s arrow find explanations relying on inflation slightly unsatisfying. “There are many researchers now trying to show in some natural way why it’s reasonable to expect the initial entropy of the universe to be very low,” says David Albert, a philosopher and physicist at Columbia University. “There are even some who think that the entropy being low at the beginning of the universe should just be added as a new law of physics.”

That latter idea is tantamount to despairing cosmologists simply throwing in the towel. Fortunately, there may be another way.

Tentative new work from Julian Barbour of the University of Oxford, Tim Koslowski of the University of New Brunswick and Flavio Mercati of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics suggests that perhaps the arrow of time doesn’t really require a fine-tuned, low-entropy initial state at all but is instead the inevitable product of the fundamental laws of physics. Barbour and his colleagues argue that it is gravity, rather than thermodynamics, that draws the bowstring to let time’s arrow fly. Their findings were published in October in Physical Review Letters.

The team’s conclusions come from studying an exceedingly simple proxy for our universe, a computer simulation of 1,000 pointlike particles interacting under the influence of Newtonian gravity. They investigated the dynamic behavior of the system using a measure of its "complexity," which corresponds to the ratio of the distance between the system’s closest pair of particles and the distance between the most widely separated particle pair. The system’s complexity is at its lowest when all the particles come together in a densely packed cloud, a state of minimum size and maximum uniformity roughly analogous to the big bang. The team’s analysis showed that essentially every configuration of particles, regardless of their number and scale, would evolve into this low-complexity state. Thus, the sheer force of gravity sets the stage for the system’s expansion and the origin of time’s arrow, all without any delicate fine-tuning to first establish a low-entropy initial condition.

From that low-complexity state, the system of particles then expands outward in both temporal directions, creating two distinct, symmetric and opposite arrows of time. Along each of the two temporal paths, gravity then pulls the particles into larger, more ordered and complex structures—the model’s equivalent of galaxy clusters, stars and planetary systems. From there, the standard thermodynamic passage of time can manifest and unfold on each of the two divergent paths. In other words, the model has one past but two futures. As hinted by the time-indifferent laws of physics, time’s arrow may in a sense move in two directions, although any observer can only see and experience one. “It is the nature of gravity to pull the universe out of its primordial chaos and create structure, order and complexity,” Mercati says. “All the solutions break into two epochs, which go on forever in the two time directions, divided by this central state which has very characteristic properties.”

Although the model is crude, and does not incorporate either quantum mechanics or general relativity, its potential implications are vast. If it holds true for our actual universe, then the big bang could no longer be considered a cosmic beginning but rather only a phase in an effectively timeless and eternal universe. More prosaically, a two-branched arrow of time would lead to curious incongruities for observers on opposite sides. “This two-futures situation would exhibit a single, chaotic past in both directions, meaning that there would be essentially two universes, one on either side of this central state,” Barbour says. “If they were complicated enough, both sides could sustain observers who would perceive time going in opposite directions. Any intelligent beings there would define their arrow of time as moving away from this central state. They would think we now live in their deepest past.”

What’s more, Barbour says, if gravitation does prove to be fundamental to the arrow of time, this could sooner or later generate testable predictions and potentially lead to a less “ad hoc” explanation than inflation for the history and structure of our observable universe.

This is not the first rigorous two-futures solution for time’s arrow. Most notably, California Institute of Technology cosmologist Sean Carroll and a graduate student, Jennifer Chen, produced their own branching model in 2004, one that sought to explain the low-entropy origin of time’s arrow in the context of cosmic inflation and the creation of baby universes. They attribute the arrow of time’s emergence in their model not so much to entropy being very low in the past but rather to entropy being so much higher in both futures, increased by the inflation-driven creation of baby universes.

A decade on, Carroll is just as bullish about the prospect that increasing entropy alone is the source for time’s arrow, rather than other influences such as gravity. “Everything that happens in the universe to distinguish the past from the future is ultimately because the entropy is lower in one direction and higher in the other,” Carroll says. “This paper by Barbour, Koslowski and Mercati is good because they roll up their sleeves and do the calculations for their specific model of particles interacting via gravity, but I don’t think it’s the model that is interesting—it’s the model’s behavior being analyzed carefully…. I think basically any time you have a finite collection of particles in a really big space you’ll get this kind of generic behavior they describe. The real question is, is our universe like that? That’s the hard part.”

Together with Alan Guth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cosmologist who pioneered the theory of inflation, Carroll is now working on a thermodynamic response of sorts to the new claims for a gravitational arrow of time: Another exceedingly simple particle-based model universe that also naturally gives rise to time’s arrow, but without the addition of gravity or any other forces. The thermodynamic secret to the model’s success, they say, is assuming that the universe has an unlimited capacity for entropy.

“If we assume there is no maximum possible entropy for the universe, then any state can be a state of low entropy,” Guth says. “That may sound dumb, but I think it really works, and I also think it’s the secret of the Barbour et al construction. If there’s no limit to how big the entropy can get, then you can start anywhere, and from that starting point you’d expect entropy to rise as the system moves to explore larger and larger regions of phase space. Eternal inflation is a natural context in which to invoke this idea, since it looks like the maximum possible entropy is unlimited in an eternally inflating universe.”

The controversy over time’s arrow has come far since the 19th-century ideas of Boltzmann and the 20th-century notions of Eddington, but in many ways, Barbour says, the debate at its core remains appropriately timeless. “This is opening up a completely new way to think about a fundamental problem, the nature of the arrow of time and the origin of the second law of thermodynamics,” Barbour says. “But really we’re just investigating a new aspect of Newton’s gravitation, which hadn’t been noticed before. Who knows what might flow from this with further work and elaboration?”

“Arthur Eddington coined the term ‘arrow of time,’ and famously said the shuffling of material and energy is the only thing which nature cannot undo,” Barbour adds. “And here we are, showing beyond any doubt really that this is in fact exactly what gravity does. It takes [entropic] systems that look extraordinarily disordered and makes them wonderfully ordered. And this is what has happened in our universe. We are realizing the ancient Greek dream of order out of chaos.”

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continue to -

Index to past articles on "Particle Physics, Quantum Science, and the Universe"

Additional References

Aarow of Time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

Inflation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)

The Big Crunch - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch

Dark Energy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy

Time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time

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FROM THE BLOG OF SEAN CARROLL

Why Does Dark Energy

Make the Universe Accelerate?

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/11/16/why-does-dark-energy-make-the-universe-accelerate/

by Sean Carroll

November 16, 2013

Peter Coles has issued a challenge: explain why dark energy makes the universe accelerate in terms that are understandable to non-scientists. This is a pet peeve of mine — any number of fellow cosmologists will recall me haranguing them about it over coffee at conferences — but I’m not sure I’ve ever blogged about it directly, so here goes. In three parts: the wrong way, the right way, and the math.

The Wrong Way

Ordinary matter acts to slow down the expansion of the universe. That makes intuitive sense, because the matter is exerting a gravitational force, acting to pull things together. So why does dark energy seem to push things apart?

The usual (wrong) way to explain this is to point out that dark energy has “negative pressure.” The kind of pressure we are most familiar with, in a balloon or an inflated tire, pushing out on the membrane enclosing it. But negative pressure — tension — is more like a stretched string or rubber band, pulling in rather than pushing out. And dark energy has negative pressure, so that makes the universe accelerate.

If the kindly cosmologist is both lazy and fortunate, that little bit of word salad will suffice. But it makes no sense at all, as Peter points out. Why do we go through all the conceptual effort of explaining that negative pressure corresponds to a pull, and then quickly mumble that this accounts for why galaxies are pushed apart?

So the slightly more careful cosmologist has to explain that the direct action of this negative pressure is completely impotent, because it’s equal in all directions and cancels out. (That’s a bit of a lie as well, of course; it’s really because you don’t interact directly with the dark energy, so you don’t feel pressure of any sort, but admitting that runs the risk of making it all seem even more confusing.) What matters, according to this line of fast talk, is the gravitational effect of the negative pressure. And in Einstein’s general relativity, unlike Newtonian gravity, both the pressure and the energy contribute to the force of gravity. The negative pressure associated with dark energy is so large that it overcomes the positive (attractive) impulse of the energy itself, so the net effect is a push rather than a pull.

This explanation isn’t wrong; it does track the actual equations. But it’s not the slightest bit of help in bringing people to any real understanding. It simply replaces one question (why does dark energy cause acceleration?) with two facts that need to be taken on faith (dark energy has negative pressure, and gravity is sourced by a sum of energy and pressure). The listener goes away with, at best, the impression that something profound has just happened rather than any actual understanding.

The Right Way

The right way is to not mention pressure at all, positive or negative. For cosmological dynamics, the relevant fact about dark energy isn’t its pressure, it’s that it’s persistent. It doesn’t dilute away as the universe expands. And this is even a fact that can be explained, by saying that dark energy isn’t a collection of particles growing less dense as space expands, but instead is (according to our simplest and best models) a feature of space itself. The amount of dark energy is constant throughout both space and time: about one hundred-millionth of an erg per cubic centimeter. It doesn’t dilute away, even as space expands.

Given that, all you need to accept is that Einstein’s formulation of gravity says “the curvature of spacetime is proportional to the amount of stuff within it.” (The technical version of “curvature of spacetime” is the Einstein tensor, and the technical version of “stuff” is the energy-momentum tensor.) In the case of an expanding universe, the manifestation of spacetime curvature is simply the fact that space is expanding. (There can also be spatial curvature, but that seems negligible in the real world, so why complicate things.)

So: the density of dark energy is constant, which means the curvature of spacetime is constant, which means that the universe expands at a fixed rate.

The tricky part is explaining why “expanding at a fixed rate” means “accelerating.” But this is a subtlety worth clarifying, as it helps distinguish between the expansion of the universe and the speed of a physical object like a moving car, and perhaps will help someone down the road not get confused about the universe “expanding faster than light.” (A confusion which many trained cosmologists who really should know better continue to fall into.)

The point is that the expansion rate of the universe is not a speed. It’s a timescale — the time it takes the universe to double in size (or expand by one percent, or whatever, depending on your conventions). It couldn’t possibly be a speed, because the apparent velocity of distant galaxies is not a constant number, it’s proportional to their distance. When we say “the expansion rate of the universe is a constant,” we mean it takes a fixed amount of time for the universe to double in size. So if we look at any one particular galaxy, in roughly ten billion years it will be twice as far away; in twenty billion years (twice that time) it will be four times as far away; in thirty billion years it will be eight times that far away, and so on. It’s accelerating away from us, exponentially. “Constant expansion rate” implies “accelerated motion away from us” for individual objects.

There’s absolutely no reason why a non-scientist shouldn’t be able to follow why dark energy makes the universe accelerate, given just a bit of willingness to think about it. Dark energy is persistent, which imparts a constant impulse to the expansion of the universe, which makes galaxies accelerate away. No negative pressures, no double-talk.

The Math

So why are people tempted to talk about negative pressure? As Peter says, there is an equation for the second derivative (roughly, the acceleration) of the universe, which looks like this:

(I use a for the scale factor rather than R, and sensibly set c=1.) Here, ρ is the energy density and p is the pressure. To get acceleration, you want the second derivative to be positive, and there’s a minus sign outside the right-hand side, so we want (ρ + 3p) to be negative. The data say the dark energy density is positive, so a negative pressure is just the trick.

But, while that’s a perfectly good equation — the “second Friedmann equation” — it’s not the one anyone actually uses to solve for the evolution of the universe. It’s much nicer to use the first Friedmann equation, which involves the first derivative of the scale factor rather than its second derivative (spatial curvature set to zero for convenience):

Here H is the Hubble parameter, which is what we mean when we say “the expansion rate.” You notice a couple of nice things about this equation. First, the pressure doesn’t appear. The expansion rate is simply driven by the energy density ρ. It’s completely consistent with the first equation, as they are related to each other by an equation that encodes energy-momentum conservation, and the pressure does make an appearance there. Second, a constant energy density straightforwardly implies a constant expansion rate H. So no problem at all: a persistent source of energy causes the universe to accelerate.

Banning “negative pressure” from popular expositions of cosmology would be a great step forward. It’s a legitimate scientific concept, but is more often employed to give the illusion of understanding rather than any actual insight.