The relationship between God and time

I am promoting this reply to the front page to add images and see what happens (experimental theology I guess).

I think Hofstadter’s scenario is essentially equivalent to Tipler’s: infinite computation can happen in a time that appears as finite to an observer. From the subjective point of view of the entity that is doing the computation, the time taken for infinite computation is infinite.

The relationship between God and time that I have in mind is in the revised version of my point 2:

2. God emerges asymptotically from the universe and comes to full being, omnipotence and benevolence at the end of time. But once God exists at the end of time, at an unattainable distance in the future, He is present and acts in the universe at all earlier times (perhaps through quantum time loops and that sort of things), so that He is the omnipotent and benevolent God of Christianity at all times. These entangled concepts of time and causation are beyond current physics and language, and therefore can’t be formulated more precisely at this moment.

Olaf Stapledon said it better, but left it in a more vague form:

Perhaps the final result of the cosmical process is the attainment of full cosmical consciousness, and yet (in some very queer way) what is attained in the end is also, from another point of view, the origin of all things. So to speak, God, who created all things in the beginning, is himself created by all things in the end. (Olaf Stapledon in “Interplanetary Man?”)

Perhaps we can’t do better than Stapledon. But perhaps we can add some possibilities in more detail, which is what I am trying to do. I guess I should reword the first sentence of point 2 as “God could emerge asymptotically from the universe and come to full being, omnipotence and benevolence at the end of time.”

Another possible relationship between God and time is the idea of multiple time dimensions, described for example in the book “Extra Dimensions in Space and Time.”

Rudy Rucker explains the concept in “Lifebox”:

Since our time-bound human nature makes its easier to imagine a deterministic computation as being embedded in some kind of time, let’s invoke a (possibly imaginary) second time dimension in which to compute our world — call this extra time dimension paratime. Paratime is perpendicular to our ordinary dimensions of space and time, and we want the entire universe to be the result of a computation that’s taken place in the direction of paratime, as illustrated in figure 45.

If so, God could be above the block universe of spacetime, and compute (aka create) the universe in paratime. That’s a cool scenario worth contemplating, but doesn’t seem to offer even vague intuitive hints at a physical mechanism for God to emerge from the universe and at the same time ;-) create/steer the universe, which is what I am trying to do. Of course, future theoretical research could permit being more precise.

Images from Pixabay and Rudy Rucker.