A View of God

by Glenn Wood

"Now you know it's a meaningless question to ask if these stories are right,
'cause what matters most is the feeling you get when you're hypnotized."

Hypnotized, by Fleetwood Mac

It is written that when God created the Universe, His first declaration was, “Let there be Light”. This was written three-thousand years ago by some creative genius of the day. Perhaps he just made it up. Perhaps he was divinely inspired. Perhaps it is true.

Three-thousand years later, and more than one-hundred years ago, another creative genius wrote that space and time are a continuum. This has fascinated many people, especially science fiction writers, while few of them actually understand what it means. You see, Einstein proposed that space/time has its own internal structure – it's not just an empty void with nothing in it. Physicists have a name for that one; an empty void with nothing in it is called a “vacuum”. Space is an entirely different thing.

A “vacuum” becomes a “space” only after something, say a beam of light, traverses it. There is actually nothing there, no space, no time, no nothing, until light enters into the picture. You might think, hey, isn't there always a space between any two objects, say a couple of objects floating in a vacuum? The answer is “No”. Until these objects exchange some kind of electromagnetic particles (another name for “light”), they don't exist to each other, and the idea of there being a space between them is, literally, nonsense. The space between them makes no sense. It's purely imaginary until two objects in the vacuum interact in some way, establishing for the first time what space there is between them, and that way is always through the medium of light.

Another way to look at this is to consider the implications of Albert's most popular equation, E = mc². This equation is actually one of the minor conclusions of the Special Theory of Relativity, made to seem important merely because of its role in recent human history. Most people seem to think the equation means that mass and energy can be changed into each other, one to the other and back again. Actually, if viewed from the proper perspective, what it means is that mass and energy are the same thing. They are two concepts bound together through the medium of light, the “constant” in Einstein's equation. But it's just a constant, right? It's just there, doesn't really mean anything to the equation since it never changes, it's just a given, right? Right.

Isn't it interesting that one man's three-thousand year-old Creation story meshes so neatly with one of modern man's most advanced theories of the universe?

There's more to this than just “science meets religion”. Space is not possible without light, objects are not possible without light, and because of the equivalence of space and time, time is not possible without light. Therefore, if this story is right, when God declared that there be light, He created both space and time, and everything in it.

It is also written that “God knows the fall of the tiniest sparrow.” This is a way of saying that God is omniscient; He sees all, throughout all of space, presumably simultaneously. But, if from the physicist's viewpoint that space and time on the Universal scale are identical, and if God knows the fall of the tiniest sparrow, then He also knows all events in all of space and all of time, simultaneously. He doesn't know the future as some Perfect Predictor of the consequences of His Creation. He knows it just as you know that picture on the wall; all He need do is turn His Gaze in that direction and there it is, as it's always been.

This means that God knows what you did last summer, what you're doing right now, and what you'll ever do in the future, since from His Viewpoint, you are doing all that right now. Moreover, it's easy for Him to forgive you for it, because He already has!

You might say, “But hold on, there! If everything is predestined then what about free will?”. Think about it; has anything you've ever done fundamentally changed anything? We all know from our own experience that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and the only thing that has ever truly changed anything in your life is Love.

Any yet, from his omniscient Viewpoint, there is one Surprise that God has reserved for Himself.

The Catholics have a way of expressing this. “Accept Me into your heart and all is forgiven.” If their God has already forgiven you everything, just what is missing from this equation? The Buddhists must mean something like this when they say the physical universe is just an illusion we can do nothing about, and that there is something else going on that we could see if we only learn to look from the right perspective. From what little I have read of the Qur'an, I think Islam knows this, too. They have a two word expression for it: “Alá Akbar!”.

Now you know it's a meaningless question to ask how God feels about you – that is a Given. What matters most is how do you feel about God?