The Nature of Time

98.01.29
1910 Leyns Rd
Victoria BC V8N 2Z8

Dear Professor

Thank you for your lectures these past two weeks. I raised a question with you after the third talk which I wish to elaborate on. You may feel free to use this question publicly as expressed or simply to consider it as a stimulus to further thought.

It seems to me that our ancestors thought about the problems of science and knowledge in ways that allowed them to infer the unanswerable questions without all of our carefully constructed experimental methods. While our knowledge has increased in these days, our awareness of our limitations is not necessarily any better or worse than theirs.

Here is the question: Is anyone studying the science of Time? Would questions related to the psychological, physical, mathematical, and sociological perhaps especially the economic aspects of time help us to see our limitations more clearly?

Here is the reason for the question and some of the background ferment that has prompted it.

Many aspects of creation are functions of Time. From a purely human point of view, if time were to stand still, there would be no music, no money (especially no interest, no inflation, no actuarial predictions), and no memory. Time is among the first items of God's creation. The fiat, Let there be light, creates the possibility of the recognition of the passage of time for those aspects of creation that are being brooded over by the Spirit.

As a result of this creation, the recognition of the passage of Time is captured by all forms of imagination in the created order. E.g. from a human point of view again, the laws of motion, the mathematics of black holes, the subdivisions of the beat in music, the predictions of the actuaries. But we also perceive that we are time's prisoner. Our split-beam experiments indicate that some information transfer appears to us to propagate faster than the speed of light and so to seem to make time move backwards, but our measurements are transient and are not able to move forward-causality more than a fraction of a picosecond.

Our days are given to us relentlessly; our values are measured by our limited memory and extrapolations. We find ourselves in fear of the future, and powerless over our anticipated death - so we pile up riches to meet our needs as if we could cheat time of its ultimate claim. This is the life of Cain. So time gives birth to injustice, insurance, and rights, but also community, caring, and compassion.

Community nourishes us over time and extends our awareness to all the living orders of the earth. In our Christian faith, we especially note the Communion of Saints, a community of Spirit that extends our participation in each other and in the Spirit beyond the bounds of our earthly life. Other faiths have a similar recognition of the influence of ancestors and the impact of our decisions to future generations.

It seems to me that many of the foundational statements of our faith in the Canon of Scripture are related to this fact of our life - that we are bound by time. So God is not the God of the dead but of the Living. Here we have an intimation of a dimension (and I mean this in the mathematical sense) that is mutually orthogonal to the three normal spatial dimensions and the imaginary dimension of time. The orthogonality of this Glory is the basis on which Our Lord can say: I have authority to lay down my life and I have authority to take it up again. This in turn allows us to relinquish our hold on those things that impede us, and relinquish their hold on us, so that we might live to the One who has risen from the dead.

As an aside, I think that arguments over 'soul' which are evident in so-called scientific writing about consciousness (Hofstader, Dennet, Dawkins and many others) are tilting at windmills. Soul is not the product of evolution, but the fact of relationship by faith with what cannot be seen. It is the life that we must lay down in order to take it up by grace. It is the life of the whole creation groaning in travail. While reason is a wonderful gift, no amount of reasoning in the four dimensional framework can give rise to logic affecting or proving a pre-existing orthogonal Glory. This is why string and membrane theory must postulate 10 or 11 dimensions for a theory of everything. And they are still in danger of leaving out the primal dimension.

In this I have written briefly by analogy, with an admittedly limited grasp of 'all' the relevant sciences. But we all try to communicate by analogy, even the scientists.

The Lord be with you

Bob MacDonald