I was recently messaged the following question by a friend on Facebook :
I was chatting with someone yesterday who is intelligent but seems to have
an issue with the nature of time, and a 14 billion year old universe, and doesn't
understand why God would take so many billions of years to create so much
mathematical spillage.
I know you've been interested in this, but have you ever
written anything on this subject - on the nature of an old universe and what
God might be trying to tell us by having so much excess space and time?
This was my quick message back:
Clearly the creation, even if it is
"instantaneous" to us, would involve a huge number of events in God's
mind as he assembled it. Using critical path analysis it is clear that
there must be dependencies between the events: e.g atoms must be created before
you create molecules, molecules before you create cells, cells before you create cell communities, cell communities before you create differentiated multi cell animals etc etc. Hence the critical path must be composed of M stages where M is going
to be very large indeed for such a complex construction as the cosmos. The big
question is this: Has God left evidence of the length of the critical path? I
suggest he has and that he has given us a metric of, say, value "tau"
seconds between the events on the critical path. Hence M x Tau = billions of
years. In contrast, for the quasi-pagan
fundie, God simply "speaks" stuff into existence, "Hey
presto!" style. I suppose this article I have written is relevant:
For more on the concept of the "Critical Path" see here. It is my guess that at some super-microscopic level the apparent continuity of Cosmic change is actually a sequence of discrete events - that is, the cosmos is infinitely divisible in neither time nor space*1. For the moment let's call the minimum time and minimum length "tau" and "epsilon" respectively although if I am right we don't know, of course, at what dimensions this discreteness kicks in.
The SI unit system is defined from standard macroscopic behaviours and objects. Therefore, we could derive tau and epsilon in SI units if we knew the number of fundamental discrete units per SI unit. We define our standards of length and time from the macroscopic world, but this macroscopic world is built out of the conjectured discrete "bricks" of time and space. Therefore it is the count of these discrete "bricks" which really define our macroscopic standards rather than the other way round; that is, these bricks don't have some absolute dimension of "tau" and "epsilon" apart from standards taken from the very macroscopic world they make up. We find a similar situation in computation: From a purely mathematical perspective the absolute "time" of a computation can only be measured in terms of the discrete number of critical path operations the computation takes. Ultimately time is only absolutely measured as the count of a discrete sequence of distinguishable events.
Let me contrast the foregoing considerations with the thinking of many fundamentalists on this subject where for them "supernatural instantaneity" is the name of the creation game. As an example I quote below young earth fundamentalist Stuart Burgess from his squalid little book "He made the stars also" (2001). For many fundamentalists like Burgess the following kind of intellectual debauchery is par for the course and may be regarded as an all but mandated belief for Christians if they want to lay claim to God's grace*2 (My emphases):
".. the Bible teaches that the stars were created in an
instant of time at the verbal command of God (Psalm 33:9). It is an awesome thought that God needed only to speak a word and
billions upon billions of stars instantly appeared." (p15)
"... God supernaturally and instantaneously created the
stars on the fourth day of creation" (p24)
"When we read of God's supernatural and instantaneous
method of creation we must stand in awe of Him." (p34)
"When we consider God speaking the vast Universe of
stars into existence, we can do nothing but stand in awe of Him" (p34) (See also pages
46 & 48)
To Burgess commands are commands and that's the end of it and the truly devout are encouraged to ask no more probing questions! But as we know commands are invariably just at the pinnacle of a huge mountain of lower level causation and action which can be analysed.
Now, let's look at another quote from Burgess where he misses the obvious and makes a mother of a faux pas. After quoting Prov 8:27-30, verses which talk of God as a craftsmen, Burgess somehow manages to cough up this piece of half digested intellectual vomit (My emphases):
"The description of God as a great craftsman measuring out the dimensions of the foundations of the earth supports the conclusion that God did not use evolution because a craftsman carries out instantaneous and deliberate actions whereas evolution involves long random processes".(p31)*3
I don't think even Burgess is stupid enough to interpret the Biblical word for "foundations" so literally that he thinks the Earth is flat. But even if we are to interpret the concept of "craftsman" literally Burgess' argument completely unravels. Craftsmen don't do things instantaneously - whatever a fundamentalist like Burgess may think, craftsmen are certainly not hey presto! magicians: The activity of a truly creative craftsman will entail a lot of thought and trial & error as (s)he implements his/her designs. In fact I would go as far as to suggest that all thought is in large part a seek, reject and select process, a process which probably involves mathematical chaos. This creative process, which consists of an extended sequence of countable events, marks creative time for the craftsmen. So, the craftsman metaphor teaches us that creation is exactly the opposite of what Burgess is suggesting; namely, that it is a process, a process which entails a critical path of events and this critical path entails time, creative time.
Among many of a religious persuasion there is a premium on a belief in divine omnipotence as naked undressed power; in fact a belief in the indivisible power of divine fiat is taken as a sign of abject faith and therefore evidence of utter self-abasement, a shibboleth of unquestioning awe and devotion. For these people God is Great because His sheer power means that the divine "mouth" can get whatever it wants just by speaking it; Viz: God speaks stuff into existence with little or no intervening effort/work/thought. It is as if God is either a lazy despot who commands others to do his bidding or a super-magician who is so powerful that he doesn't even need to think and act in regard to what he wants done - he just does it by uttering a single command, just like that! In this fawning devotional context any suggestion that God needs time to do His stuff is, for the abject devotionalist, considered an affront to God's indivisible power. In fact implicit in my friend's encounter with the young earthist we see a person who just could not understand why omnipotence would require so much time; after all, it would seem from daily experience that speed equates to power. But this is no so! This equation is a delusion: If time is proportional to the count of discrete events on a critical path we find that true power involves the sustenance of processing that adds up to huge amounts of time.*4
For me the fawning devotionalist has a childish magical view of God's omnipotence and I would suggest that the very opposite of their opinion is actually the case; processing sustained over huge amounts of time is the epitome of omnipotence.
Footnotes
*1 I suspect that the dimensions at which this limit occurs is in the order of magnitude of the famous 10-40 figure. In any case think of the implications of absolute continuity: It would mean that the real variables of physical measure would likely have infinite numbers of digits when expressed in macroscopic SI units. In fact disorder theory teaches us that there are far more real numbers with random sequences of digits than ordered combinations of digits. This would open up a version of the multiverse where every possible configuration has some kind of reification somewhere.
*2 For example see my article on holy bad mouthing here as evidence of a close connection between salvation and belief in young earth in the mind of Ken Ham.
*3 Burgess repeats the old canard of implicating evolution as a random process. Even (intelligent) atheists don't believe this! See here
*4 "Time" in the sense that I have defined it in this post (Viz; as the count of events taken along a critical) means that any creative process will take time; lots of it, in fact, if the task is complex. Hence "Time" is logically inherent in all creative activities. The question remains for the Christian, however, as to whether this logically obliged time has been revealed to us. Hence, the question of whether the cosmos has taken billions of years is thus a question, not of logical necessity (since time is a logical necessity), but of revelation.
*2 For example see my article on holy bad mouthing here as evidence of a close connection between salvation and belief in young earth in the mind of Ken Ham.
*3 Burgess repeats the old canard of implicating evolution as a random process. Even (intelligent) atheists don't believe this! See here
*4 "Time" in the sense that I have defined it in this post (Viz; as the count of events taken along a critical) means that any creative process will take time; lots of it, in fact, if the task is complex. Hence "Time" is logically inherent in all creative activities. The question remains for the Christian, however, as to whether this logically obliged time has been revealed to us. Hence, the question of whether the cosmos has taken billions of years is thus a question, not of logical necessity (since time is a logical necessity), but of revelation.
