Mark 10:35-45: Quantum Physics and the Nature of Eternity – Day1 series: Faith and Science, part 4

In Mark’s Gospel the two brothers, James and John, ask Jesus to give them the seats of honor in the fulfilled kingdom of God. It’s not a huge surprise that it should be these two who ask such a thing. They’re known as the Sons of Thunder, a nickname that Jesus himself gave them, most likely because of their boisterous and impetuous behavior.

When he hears their request, Jesus doesn’t dismiss it. He asks them if they’re prepared to share the sort of trial and test that he is going to undergo. They exclaim that they are able! Jesus’ response is haunting. Yes, you will suffer as I suffer he says. And…he’s not the one who decides who sits where in the kingdom of God.

Leaving aside the question of why Jesus asks them the question about their suffering if it isn’t his to decide, how exactly does he know what is to happen in the future? Is it a guess? Or is it something more? Does Jesus have the ability to see forward in time? It certainly seems like he’s claiming that.

If you look carefully in other places in the Gospels, Jesus makes a number of predictions about what is to come. And he describes things that happened in the distant past as if he were an eyewitness. While he lives a mortal life on earth, eating and sleeping and dying like any other human, he seems to also have the ability to perceive events outside of the experience of the normal flow of time. This prediction of the deaths of James and John is just one example of this ability.

There are certainly other places in the Holy Scriptures where we find ourselves scratching our heads about the way that the various authors use language about time. Jesus, for instance, in a question about the truthfulness of the resurrection of the dead, says that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive–even though they had died many thousands of years prior, and are presumed to still be dead at the time of Jesus’ words, because the general resurrection had not happened–and still hasn’t as far as we know. And yet to God they are alive! How?

Such riddles don’t just exist in the Gospel texts. In the Book of Job, we have the paradox that Job exclaims to those who attempt to comfort him in the misery of his unjust suffering. Job says in Chapter 19: “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, And at the last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I shall see God; Whom I myself shall behold, And whom my eyes will see and not another.” How will Job see the future redeemer even though his eyes have been destroyed, and how does this redeemer live even though Jesus had not yet been born?

Okay–so here’s the thing. The way the Scriptures use time is different than the way you and I experience it. So, is this a poetic device, or is it something more?

There’s an idea that I’ve heard attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo that essentially says in regard to all these sorts of questions: “When a paradox occurs, it’s resolved by remembering that God exists in eternity, not in time.” I’ve not been able to track down the exact quote, but the sentiment is certainly in keeping with St. Augustine’s writings, particularly the last sections of his “Confessions.” Augustine invites us to remember that God exists outside the flow of time as we know it, so that all is “eternal day” to God, that the past, the present and the future are all “now” to God’s experience. We as creatures live in the time that we call the present, though it is a constantly moving and transitory state as the present fades into our past, flowing from the stream of our future.

When you say it that way, it’s all much easier, isn’t it?

Well, maybe not so much as I might hope.

To make sense of this idea that God, that Jesus, has all the future as present, and all the past as present as well, we might do well to take a moment and talk about what we know about time.

Our modern experience of time is relatively novel. We have machines strapped to our wrists or computers in our pockets, that slice time up into exactly defined moments each marching equally past us as we watch the seconds tick by. At least that’s what seems to be happening. There’s an innate belief inspired by the design of a clock face that each second is like each other second, each one representing the same duration of time.

It’s more than just the clock face that communicates that idea. All of our language about how we experience the world, how we measure things like speed or acceleration or growth or decay, depend on the assumption that time is “flowing” at a constant rate for all of us. When you and I agree to meet for dinner at 6 p.m., we are tacitly assuming that 6 p.m. for me is the same for you.

Isaac Newton, following Galileo’s lead, described time as a river, with a steady current that flows from the future, to the present and on into the past. Newton’s laws of motion, which undergird all of classical physics, are dependent on this assumption. And our own daily experience of time, with our watches and atomic clocks and GPS devices, seems to neatly fit into this metaphor.

But it’s wrong. It’s not wrong in our daily experience; but as soon as we start moving quickly or climbing into orbit, we realize that our clocks compared to Earth-based clocks are behaving oddly. The rate of the flow of time isn’t constant; they speed up or slow down depending on where we are or what we are doing.

This observation, first predicted by Albert Einstein in his theories of special and general relativity and experimentally verified again and again and again, teaches us that time isn’t at all what we thought we knew it to be. Einstein went as far as to fold this sense of elastic time into his description of the fundament of the universe, speaking of space-time rather than of space and time, and then showing how the elasticity of this strange hybrid exactly describes the experience of gravity. Bend in the space-time of the Universe strong and tight and you are caught in a gravity well that might not be escapable. Stretch this fabric out as far as you can, and the misnomer of zero-gravity becomes a reality and not an exaggeration.

And the flow of time changes in these situations too. Bend the space-time strongly and time slows to a crawl, even stopping at the edge of a black hole’s event horizon. Or measure time in a flat and smooth region of space-time, and you’ll experience the sort of time Newton and others assumed was the universal experience. It all depends on the local shape of the universe.

It is almost impossible to imagine, but much of modern life would be impossible without our ability to calculate and even exploit this variable aspect of the way the flow of time changes between one place and another. Satellite transmission, nuclear medicine, communication theory, all depend on this phenomenon to one degree or another. That which staggers our imagination is actually our commonplace experience.

But wait! There’s more!

Everything I’ve said assumes that time is a classical variable, a thing like a line as described by Euclid, a thing that is infinite in extent and can be infinitely divided into smaller and smaller divisions. That idea, which is true for spatial variables as well as time in Einstein’s and Newton’s theories, is called a classical understanding of time. It’s based in classical geometry and inherits many of the tacit assumptions you might remember from high school math.

But in the early part of the twentieth century, a new way of understanding time and space began to develop. Rather than being like a classical one dimensional line, time and space, and pretty much everything else, comes in tiny, indivisible chunks–quanta–that are strung together like pearls on a string. Instead of moving smoothly along the line at so many units per unit of time, you jump from quanta to quanta in instantaneous leaps called transitions. This is the fundamental insight of Quantum Physics, and it’s where it differs from Classical Physics. There is a smallest chunk of something–whether it is a chunk of charge–an electron–or a chunk of distance–a Plank length–or a chunk of energy. You can divide things and divide things, but eventually you come to a place–a very, very small place–where you can no longer divide things. The Universe comes in quanta–small indivisible chunks.

Well, okay. What does this have to do with time and being able to see the future and live in the past all at the same moment? Perhaps you noticed that I didn’t include time in the list of things that become quantized. To many physicist’s dismay, time can’t be quantized. In fact, when you start thinking of nature as being quantized, in a subtle sort of way, it isn’t clear actually that time exists!

We experience the sensation of time because we experience things going from ordered states into disordered ones–whole things can be broken; but it’s essentially impossible to make a broken thing unbroken. Run a movie backward; you can immediately tell that something is off in what you’re seeing. Time, it is argued, is a way of counting and ordering the quanta of transitions between quantum states as complex systems evolve from order into disorder. You might recognize a nod here to Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You’d be right.

Confused yet? Many of you probably are and that’s not surprising. Much of this makes little sense to the physicists who study it. And I’m just starting to open the door to the whole and complicated thinking in this particular research field. A full treatment of this is really the work of years of study. And we only have a few minutes left in this sermon…so let me tell you some of the surprising consequences of thinking this way about time and space.

First, we have to reconcile our experience of time versus what the theories are saying. That is done by noting that what the theory is saying is that there is no such thing as time in the full universe, but that time–as we know it and experience it–can exist in regions, or bubbles, of space-time within the full universe. We know, for instance, that time stops at the edge of black holes. We know that there was no time before the Big Bang. Some leading theorists believe that there will be no time after the universe has expanded. There are even those who believe that what we are seeing as the rapid acceleration of distant galaxies as they fly away from us is, in fact, the consequence of time stopping at the edge of the universe.

So what does this have to do with God? Well, St. Augustine’s ideas that God exists outside of time and in eternity, a place without the flow of human time, suddenly stops being poetic or philosophical, and becomes instead calculable and sensible in terms of our best scientific understanding of gravity. The language that Jesus is using in the Gospel isn’t poetry or mystery, but a direct consequence of the way the universe is ordered.

Look now at the first lesson that’s read today, the reading from the Book of Job. It is, to my mind, the great climactic moment of the book. Job, who has been suffering because of a decision that God made as a result of a challenge from Satan, has been rightly insisting that his suffering is unjust. His friends gathered around him argue with him that God could never act unjustly. This complaint to and defense of God goes on for many chapters. Finally, God appears before Job and responds. But the response is profoundly challenging in and of itself.

God asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its measurements–surely you know!

Or who stretched the line upon it?

On what were its bases sunk,

or who laid its cornerstone

when the morning stars sang together

and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”

Might we, in light of the discussion we just had about time and space, quantum physics and reality, recast this as an answer to Job that is essentially; “Job, I am a being that speaks from eternity, where cause and effect do not mean the same thing as what you experience. What I created out of the chaos of the beginning of your reality in a portion of the universe is ultimately beyond a finite creature’s full comprehension. There is a reason and a purpose to everything I do. But it is ultimately impossible to explain to a being who cannot perceive the full reality and lives within a shadow portion of the whole.”

It is exactly what we should expect from the Divine Eternal fount of all existence. It is asking the universe “Why?” and getting back the answer “Because.” It isn’t terribly satisfying. But it may be all that we can ultimately comprehend until we too inhabit eternity.

This idea that God’s actions have purpose, but that we might not ever be able to fully comprehend them, is to me a profoundly important insight.

It has helped me trust that while I’ve not been able to understand the reason that bad things happen, why the innocent suffer, and have been unwilling to accept the facile answers that you often encounter when you ask about it, there is an answer. I just may never be able to understand it or bear it. But it means that we don’t live in a random purposeless world with a capricious God or at the hands of unthinking fate.

Jesus’ words about time and eternity, God’s beautiful poetic response to Job, are exactly what we ultimately hope for in our longing to make sense of the senseless. There are no easy answers to the paradox of time and eternity. But God inhabits Eternity and Jesus inhabits Time, and we believe by Faith that God is good.

So somehow our faith tells us, in the fullness of the reality of the universe, things are sensible; there is order and not chaos and God is working out a deep purpose that we can only dimly perceive–a purpose that is healing the pain and bringing renewal and re-creation out of eternity and into the portion of the universe where there is time and in which we are born and live and die.

Amen.

Note: The Rt. Rev. Nicholas Knisely’s sermon is part 4 of 8 in a series on Faith & Science from Day1. For more information about the series and a transcription of a conversation between Rev. Nisely and Peter Wallace of Day1, see this link.