Philosophy – Page 3

Would It Matter If We’re Living in a Simulation?

A reader writes:

My good sir, a baptized Catholic who is away from the Faith asked me at work this week: “How do we know we are not living in a computer simulation? What is wrong with Elon Musk’s simulation hypothesis?” What do I say in reply?

What the Simulation Hypothesis Is

Currently we use computers to run simulations of many different kinds of scenarios. For example, physicists use them to run simulations of how different kinds of subatomic particles interact.

The basic idea of the simulation hypothesis is that as computers get better and better, we will be able to run better and better simulations, and one day we could arrive at a stage where computers would allow us to run detailed simulations of the natural world as we experience it.

We might then choose to run simulations about the past and learn about what our ancestors did. Or we might run simulations just for fun, like a supercomplex, universe-sized Tamagotchi toy.

We might, in fact, run many, many simulations. Or if we don’t, aliens on other planets might.

If a very large number of simulations exists, each of which is indistinguishable from the natural world as we experience it, then how do we know we aren’t living in such a simulation?

This idea—as far out as it may sound—is being seriously entertained by some philosophers and scientists.

It’s essentially a modern variant of an ancient question: How do we know that the world we experience is as it seems? Could reality actually be very different?

Bostrom’s Trilemma

As Wikipedia explains, in 2003 the philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper in which he argued that one of three propositions is very likely to be true:

“The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero,” or
“The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero,” or
“The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.”

Bostrom himself does not consider any of these three to be especially more likely than the others, but some have definite preferences.

Option 3 is favored by industrialist Elon Musk, who has said that the thinks the odds are billions to one in favor of us living in a simulation, while astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson has put the odds of us living in a simulation around 50/50 (source).

Others have put the odds vastly lower.

Some Objections

Option 1 has been favored by those who have argued that there are insurmountable physical limits to the kinds of computers that can be built even by an advanced civilization, and these would prevent the kind of detailed simulations needed.

One might support Option 2 by arguing that any advanced civilization capable of creating such simulations would have progressed past the point of needing them—either for research or entertainment purposes (an electric wire connected directly to the pleasure center of the brain would be vastly more entertaining, just like Tamagotchi toys proved to be much less entertaining than other options we have).

Some have also challenged the whole trilemma—for example, by noting that we experience consciousness, but patterns of information in a computer do not. The fact of our consciousness means that we are not living in a simulation.

In other words, “the faction of all people with our kind of experiences”—i.e., consciousness—would be exactly zero (Option 3 is false), and computers cannot simulate experiences of our kind (making the kind of ancestor-simulations envisioned in Options 1 and 2 impossible).

And there are other objections, yet.

The simulation hypothesis is thus far from established. However, let’s consider what the implications for the Christian Faith would be if it were true.

The Christian Worldview

The Christian worldview contains three essential elements that are relevant to our discussion, and they are encapsulated in the Creed, when we profess our faith in “God . . . maker of heaven and earth”:

God, the infinitely perfect Creator of everything is obviously essential to the Christian worldview.
“Heaven”—i.e., the spiritual world which includes our souls, is also essential.
“Earth”—i.e., the natural world as we experience it, is the final component.

What would we conclude about these three if the simulation hypothesis were true?

The Existence of God

Philosophical arguments prove that there is an infinitely perfect Creator outside of all Creation. Therefore, God exists.

The simulation hypothesis does not affect the existence of God. Even if we’re living in a computer simulation, that simulation exists within a computer somewhere in a higher universe.

That universe might itself be a simulation, so you could posit any number of worlds within worlds that you might like.

It doesn’t matter, for eventually there would be some final, created world (or set of worlds in the case of a multiverse) containing the computer(s) that run all the simulations.

That final world (or worlds) still needs an explanation, and that explanation is God.

The Physical World

People have wondered for a long time about the nature of the physical world that we live in.

According to the classical element theory, the natural world was made of four (or five) elements: air, earth, fire, and water (and maybe ether).

According to the modern atomic theory of matter, the natural world is made of patterns of subatomic particles that form atoms.

According to the simulation theory, the natural world is made of patterns of information that exist in some unknown computer medium that form simulations of atoms.

Either way, the natural world we live in exists. It’s just a question of what its fundamental components are—whether subatomic particles or patterns of information.

The fundamental nature of our world is an interesting subject, but it doesn’t change anything from a religious perspective. The natural world still exists. Whether it’s made of four/five elements, subatomic particles, or patterns of information, it’s still real.

So, the only thing the simulation theory would do is add at least one additional layer to creation—i.e., the layer containing the computer in which our natural world exists.

The Spiritual World

That leaves us with the question of the human soul and the larger spiritual world.

A key point of evidence for this is our subjective experience of consciousness. Although one can assert that consciousness is explained by subatomic particles (as materialists would) or by patterns of information in a computer medium (as simulationists would), one cannot prove this.

In fact, we have no scientific hypothesis at all explaining how consciousness could arise from these things. That is, nobody has produced a testable hypothesis that would account for how non-living things like subatomic particles or information could give rise to consciousness.

This is known in scientific and philosophical circles as “the hard problem of consciousness.”

Yet our consciousness remains as a brute fact that is unexplainable in scientific terms.

One is therefore entitled to set aside assertions that consciousness arises from physical phenomena and propose what our experience indicates—that there is something non-physical (a soul) that, however closely it interacts with our bodies, is responsible for consciousness.

The simulation hypothesis can’t explain this any better than the atomic theory of matter does. Therefore, the simulation hypothesis changes nothing with respect to the third component of the Christian worldview—the soul.

If the atomic theory is true, then our souls interact with the patterns of subatomic particles that form the base layer of the natural world.

If the simulation hypothesis is true, then our souls interact with the patterns of information simulating our bodies in the computer system that resides in the base layer of reality.

If one finds it implausible that souls would interact with such data patterns, that would give you reason to reject the idea that we’re living in a simulation, but it wouldn’t give you reason to reject either the existence of the soul or the existence of a natural world.

The End of the World

The Christian Faith holds that, at some point, the physical world in which we live will be renovated and replaced by a “New Earth,” where we will have a place for all eternity.

The simulation hypothesis would not prevent this. If our present physical world is a simulation, God might put us in a new, similar world—or he might put us in a base level reality and have our souls interact with that. Ultimately, that’s up to him.

Either way, whether the present world we experience is a simulation or a base reality doesn’t matter. The Creator who exists outside the entire created world—however many levels it may contain—has made contact with us, here, and told us that one day we will live in a new world.

The nature of that world is in his hands, as it has always been.

Conclusion

I thus don’t see how the simulation theory changes anything from a faith perspective. We still have the same three elements—God, the spiritual world, and the natural world—and all three interact.

The natural world used to be explained by the classical element theory, it is presently explained by the atomic theory, and if we ever get actual, robust scientific evidence that we’re living in a simulation then it would be explained by the simulation theory.

But all these theories do is shed varying degrees of light on the nature of the physical world as we experience it. They don’t change anything from a religious perspective.

Learning that the physical world as we experience it is contained in a larger, meta-world would be interesting, but it doesn’t alter the need for us to have a right relationship with the Creator, who is responsible for both the spiritual and the natural world—whatever the specific components or structure of the latter turns out to be.

Neither does the simulation hypothesis stop us from needing to live our lives in the world as we find it.

I’d note that it certainly hasn’t stopped Elon Musk from living his life as an entrepreneur and industrialist and undertaking all kinds of projects.

It hasn’t caused him an existential crisis, and neither should it us.

Affecting the Past—Today! (with St. Faustina)

divine-mercy-old-testament-historyisreseach-cc-dipinto_originale_autentico_divina_misericordia_gesucc80_confido_santa_faustina_pittore_eugeniusz_kazimirowski_1934 Recently I wrote about the possibility of praying across time.

For example, you might pray for the salvation of a person who has already died.

The theory is that, since God is outside of time, he is aware of your prayer in the eternal now and can intervene at any point in history, including when the person your are praying for was still alive.

Your prayer today—in 2018—could thus be applied to someone as he was dying a century ago, in 1918 (perhaps as a result of the Spanish Flu).

I mentioned that this view has been endorsed by figures such as C.S. Lewis in the Protestant community and, apparently, by Padre Pio in the Catholic community.

I also asked if readers were aware of other Catholic figures who had discussed it, and several wrote back with examples.

Here’s one of them . . .

The Divine Mercy Novena

A reader pointed out that, in the Divine Mercy Novena contained in the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, Jesus is reported as saying that the actions of various groups living today have an effect on his experience of the Passion, back in A.D. 33.

These remarks occur on five of the nine days of the novena. On the various days, Jesus asks that specific groups of people be brought before him in prayer.

Here’s what St. Faustina reported him saying:

Second Day

1212 Today bring to me the souls of priests and religious, and immerse them in my unfathomable mercy. It was they who gave me the strength to endure my bitter Passion.

Third Day

1214 Today bring to me all devout and faithful souls, and immerse them in the ocean of my mercy. These souls brought me consolation on the Way of the Cross. They were that drop of consolation in the midst of an ocean of bitterness.

Fourth Day

1216 Today bring to me the pagans and those who do not yet know me. I was thinking also of them during my bitter Passion, and their future zeal comforted my Heart.

Fifth Day

1218 Today bring to me the souls of heretics and schismatics, and immerse them in the ocean of my mercy. During my bitter Passion they tore at my Body and Heart; that is, my Church. As they return to unity with the Church, my wounds heal, and in this way they alleviate my Passion.

Sixth Day

1220 Today bring to me the meek and humble souls and the souls of little children, and immerse them in my mercy. These souls most closely resemble my Heart. They strengthened me during my bitter agony. I saw them as earthly angels, who would keep vigil at my altars.

A Matter of Perspective

These passages do not show Jesus referring to the perspective he has as God outside of time. They are consistent with him simply having foreknowledge at the time of his Passion.

This is fine for our thesis that present actions can affect the past. In fact, I made the point in my previous post that even if one doesn’t have the eternal perspective that God does, simple foreknowledge is enough to achieve this effect.

If God—or anybody else—knows what someone will ask in the future, he is capable of acting on it now. A future request can thus affect matters that (from the future perspective) are in the past.

In the novena passages, Jesus refers to people living in the future (from an A.D. 33 perspective). This is evident from the fact that St. Faustina was expected to pray (at least) for the people living in her own day.

It is also evident from the fact that in A.D. 33 there were as yet no religious (the invention of religious orders came later), that he refers to those “who do not yet know me,” and that the various heresies and schisms that have affected the Church had not yet arisen.

He also depicts the actions of these people affecting him back in A.D. 33—most notably when he refers to the heretics and schismatics both tearing at his body and heart “during my bitter Passion” and alleviating his passion “as they return to unity with the Church.”

Strikingly, the actions of these people at two different times—(1) when they are in a state of separation and (2) when they are later reconciled—are said to affect Jesus’ Passion in two different ways.

A Word of Caution

It should be pointed out that, although the Church as declared Sister Faustina a saint and incorporated Divine Mercy Sunday into the liturgical calendar, it has not directly ruled on the authenticity of her private revelations.

Also, the Church acknowledges that, even in the case of an authentic private revelation, we must take into account “the possibility that the subject might have added, even unconsciously, purely human elements or some error of the natural order to an authentic supernatural revelation” (CDF, Norms for Discerning Presumed Apparitions or Revelations).

We therefore need to be cautious in how far we press the details of St. Faustina’s reported revelations.

Nevertheless, this represents another instance where the idea of present actions affecting the past has received acknowledgement in the Catholic tradition.

Praying Across Time

time In the Back to the Future movies, Doc Brown chides Marty McFly for not thinking fourth-dimensionally.

He means that Marty—like most of us—is letting his options be limited too much by the here and now.

Marty’s not taking into account the possibilities that open up if we’re not stuck in that one moment of time we call the present.

Something similar happens in theology . . .

God and Time

We cannot grasp the full reality of who and what God is. He is infinite, and our minds are only finite.

As a result, we often depict God as if he were a human being—just as a way of helping us understand him.

That’s why Scripture talks about him having a strong right arm (a symbol of his omnipotence) and eyes that survey the whole earth (a symbol of his omniscience).

But in reality, apart from the Incarnation, he doesn’t have body parts.

One of the ways we picture God is as an old man—“the Ancient of Days,” to use Daniel’s phrase. We also picture him as an immortal Being who will live on and on into the endless future.

This envisions God as if he is bound by time the same way we are, and it has implications for how we relate to him.

If God is bound to time like us, always stuck in the present as that moment rolls ever forward into the future, then it would make no sense to pray for certain things.

Suppose that someone has died. In the here and now, that person’s eternal fate is sealed, for “it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27).

If God is bound by time the way we are, it would make no sense to pray for the person to be saved in the moment he died. He either was or wasn’t.

But things are not so simple.

God and Eternity

In reality, God is not bound by time. He is completely outside of time. All of history is simultaneously present to him like a giant mural.

From his eternal perspective outside of time, God simultaneously knows everything that exists, whether in the past, the present, or the future.

He is also capable of interacting with history at any point. This is illustrated by the fact that he not only created the universe in the beginning, he also—from his eternal perspective—sustains it at every moment of its existence.

The consequences of these facts are significant: If God is aware of everything in history then he knows it if on April 15 I am praying for a man who died on April 12.

Further, if he is capable of interacting with every point in history, he can give his grace to that man—as he is dying on April 12—in light of the request I make on April 15.

It thus can make sense for me to pray for the salvation of someone who is already dead.

Usually, our prayers concern the future, but they can also concern the present, and as this illustration shows, they can even concern the past.

We are thus capable of praying across the fullness of time—for things past, present, and future.

C.S. Lewis and Padre Pio

The idea of praying across time in this way is not something unique to me.

C.S. Lewis famously discussed it in his book Miracles (see Appendix B: “On ‘Special Providences’”).

A while back, a friend asked if I could name any Catholic figures who had discussed the idea, and off the top of my head, I couldn’t, though I was sure there were.

Recently, I came across a reference to such a figure: Padre Pio is reported to have made such prayers. Susanne Tassone writes:

A doctor who was very close to Padre Pio received a letter from a woman whose daughter was near death. The mother implored the future saint for his priestly prayers and blessings. The doctor was unable to get this letter to Padre Pio until several days after he had received it. After reading the letter to Padre Pio, this physician asked how should he answer it. Pio responded, “Fiat.”

The doctor knew that some time had passed since he had received the letter, and that the girl was at death’s door. He was perplexed by Padre Pio’s assurance that all was done, that the request for prayer would work. The Capuchin priest continued, “Maybe you don’t know that I can pray even now for the happy death of my great-grandfather.” “But he has been dead for many, many years,” replied the doctor. “I know that too,” said Padre Pio. “Let me explain by giving you an example.

“You and I both die, and, through the good fortune and the goodness and mercy of the Lord, we are obliged to stay in purgatory for 100 years. During these years nobody prays for us or has a Mass offered for the release of our souls. The 100 years pass, and somebody thinks of Padre Pio and the good doctor and has Masses offered. For Our Lord, the past does not exist; the future does not exist. Everything is an eternal present. Those prayers had already been taken into account so that even now I can pray for the happy death of my great-grandfather! . . . ”

The little girl in need of prayer, by the way, was healed (Praying with the Saints for the Holy Souls in Purgatory, 71-72).

I’m sure that the concept of praying for past events has been discussed by various Catholic authors, and perhaps someone can point to additional examples, but the logic behind such prayers is sound.

In fact, it would be sound even if God were not outside of time.

The Core of the Issue

All that is needed for requests concerning the past to be efficacious are two things:

Knowledge of what a future request will be, and
Possession of this knowledge when it is needed to affect matters.

A being does not have to be outside of time to have these two things. It is quite possible for us to have them in the here and now.

Suppose that every Tuesday when you get home from work, your spouse asks you to order a pizza for dinner. It’s now a Tuesday, so you know (for practical purposes) that when you get home your spouse will ask you to do this. You have foreknowledge of the request.

But suppose that this particular Tuesday there is some reason you won’t be able to order the pizza once you get home. You therefore order it in advance and schedule it to arrive at dinnertime.

When you get home, your spouse makes the request, and you’re able to announce, “Already taken care of!”

In this case, you had both of the things you needed: Knowledge of the future request and possession of this knowledge in time to affect matters.

Of course, one could quibble about whether one really had “knowledge” of the request, since humans don’t have infallible certitude regarding what their spouses will ask in the future.

But this objection would not apply to God, who does have infallible certitude regarding the requests that will be made to him. His omniscience guarantees that.

Thus even if God were not outside of time—if he were stuck to the present the way we are—then he would still be able to affect matters based on his omniscient knowledge of what people will ask him in the future.

Unlike Marty McFly, God has no problem thinking fourth-dimensionally.

The Practice of Praying Across Time

The possibility of praying about things in the past raises the question of when it is appropriate to do so.

I would answer this question by dividing things in the past into three categories:

Things we know happened
Things we’re uncertain about
Things we know didn’t happen

Things That Didn’t Happen

The most straightforward answer concerns the last category—things we know didn’t happen.

It is not appropriate to pray for these things.

The reason is that we know it was God’s will to allow our history to unfold in a way that didn’t include them. To pray for something we know didn’t happen would be to pray contrary to God’s known will.

For example, we know that the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. We know that God allowed that to happen as part of his providence, and it would be contrary to God’s known will to pray for the Twin Towers never to have fallen.

It would be equally improper to pray for things we know won’t happen in the future, because they are also contrary to God’s known will.

Thus God periodically told Jeremiah not to pray for the welfare of the people because he was determined to bring judgment on them (Jer. 7:16, 11:14, 14:11).

In the same way, it would be in appropriate for us to pray contrary to things we know will happen in the future (e.g., that the end of the world not happen).

Things That Did Happen

The answer for the first category—things we know did happen—is more complex.

Suppose you are considering praying—all these years later—that at least some people survive the 9/11 attacks.

Well, we know that some people did survive the attacks, so we know that it was God’s will to allow this to happen.

Praying that some survive thus is not praying contrary to God’s will. In fact, it’s praying in accordance with his known will.

It could even be that God allowed some of the people who survived the 9/11 attacks to do so because you are praying for them now.

I thus can’t say there’s anything wrong with praying for things that you know to have happened.

I do, however, have a note of caution: God has designed us as time-bound creatures to be principally oriented toward the future, not the past.

There is a sense in which, like St. Paul, we need to be “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead” (Phil. 3:13).

Spending too much time thinking about the past can lead us to neglect the attention we need to give to future concerns.

I can’t rule out that some might grow closer to God by praying for something they know God allowed to happen in the past, but it’s easy to see how this kind of prayer could become a spiritual distraction from more urgent concerns.

Things We’re Uncertain About

The case where praying concerning past events is most appropriate is the middle one—things we aren’t certain about.

Suppose it is 9/11 and you’ve just watched the Twin Towers go down on television.

You know someone who worked in one of the towers, and that person either died in the collapse or he got away, but you don’t know which.

Because you don’t know, it’s appropriate for you to say, “God, please let him have escaped!”

In this case, you don’t know whether it was or wasn’t God’s will, so you’re neither praying against God’s known will nor praying for something you already know happened.

That’s the situation we’re in with most of our prayers: We don’t know whether God will grant them or not, but he encourages us “always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1).

This principle has a special application to the dying.

We can’t objectively tell whether a person is in a state of grace at the point of death, so this knowledge is by its nature inaccessible to us.

It thus makes sense, whenever someone has died, to ask God to have given the person the graces he needed for salvation at the moment of death.

In view of the stakes involved—eternal life and eternal death—I regularly make this prayer when I hear of someone dying, and especially if it is a friend or loved one.

Care to join me?

Does Only the Present Exist?

Akin-ETERNITY2 What is the nature of time?

Three views have been proposed:

Presentism holds that only the present is real (so the past and future are not)
The growing block theory holds that the past and the present are real (but the future is not)
Eternalism holds that the past, the present, and the future are all real

The Church does not have an official teaching on this, and orthodox Catholics take different views.

However, the Church does teach (as we recently saw) that God is eternal—outside of time—and this seems to have implications for the nature of time.

Let’s suppose that presentism is true and that only the present exists.

What would that mean for God’s eternity?

The Eternal Now and Presentism

In this case, we could speak of two moments that are actually real:

Outside of time, there is God’s “eternal now”
Inside of time, there is the present, which we may think of as the “temporal now”

The former is, by definition, changeless, while the latter changes constantly.

At one moment in the temporal now, it’s 8:00 a.m., but a minute later it’s 8:01 a.m., and so forth. At one moment, you’re waking up, at another moment you’re getting out of bed, etc.

How would an eternal, changeless God relate to a constantly changing temporal now, if that is the only moment of time that exists?

Here we run into what strike me as problems. We’ll look at several of them.

Getting the Universe Started

If presentism is true then, in the eternal now, God would create time—a single moment (the “temporal now”) which constantly changes, alongside his changelessness.

One of the things that is constantly changing about time is what the current time actually is. Suppose that God created the universe at 12:01 a.m. In that case:

At the moment of creation, the temporal now is 12:01 a.m.
One minute after creation, the temporal now is 12:02 a.m.
Two minutes after creation, the temporal now is 12:03 a.m.
And so on.

It follows that God knows all of these things in the eternal now. Thus:

In the eternal now, God knows that at the first moment of creation it is 12:01 a.m.
He also knows that a minute after creation it is 12:02 a.m.
And he knows that two minutes after creation is 12:03 a.m.
And so on.

By virtue of his omniscience, in the eternal now, God knows what time it will be at all moments after creation—even if those moments haven’t occurred yet.

Now let’s ask a question: Supposing that presentism is true and only the present moment is real, what does God know about what exists?

Notice that we’re not asking about what will exist or what did exist. We’re asking about what exists.

If we ask this question at the moment of creation then we will find the following:

God knows that he is real, and that he exists changelessly, outside of time.
God knows that the universe is real, and that in time it is currently 12:01 a.m.

But if we ask the same question a minute later, we will find these things:

God knows that he is real, and that he exists changelessly, outside of time.
God knows that the universe is real, and that in time it is currently 12:02 a.m.

We have a problem.

When we first asked the question, God eternally and changelessly knew that the moment 12:01 a.m. exists.

The second time we asked the question, God eternally and changelessly knew that the moment 12:02 a.m. exists.

We have a contradiction.

If only a single moment of time exists then 12:01 a.m. and 12:02 a.m. cannot simultaneously be real. Consequently, God can’t simultaneously know that they are real.

For God to first know that 12:01 a.m. is real and later know that 12:02 a.m. is real, God’s knowledge would have to be changeable, and God would have to be experiencing time.

He would not be timeless.

The same problem appears if we ask about what times God knows are not real. For example:

At the first moment of creation, 12:02 a.m. is not real because it is in the (unreal) future.
A minute after creation, 12:01 a.m. is not real because it is in the (unreal) past.

If we asked what God knows about the times that are not real then, when we first ask the question, God would know that 12:02 a.m. is not real (and that 12:01 a.m. is real), but when we next ask the question, he would know that 12:01 a.m. is not real (and that 12:02 a.m. is).

Again, God’s knowledge would be changing with time.

The Underlying Logical Problem

This contradiction happens because we are entertaining the following propositions:

God is real.
Time is real.
God knows what is real.
God is changeless.
Time consists only of a single, changing moment.

These propositions are not all consistent with each other. Up to four of them can be true, but not all five.

If God knows what is real and what is real changes, then so must God’s knowledge, so God is not changeless.

If you want to accept propositions 1-3 then you must sacrifice either proposition 4 or proposition 5.

Ongoing Change

The same problem reappears when we consider other things God knows.

For example, the way the things in the universe are arranged constantly changes with time.

Even if the total amount of physical energy and mass in the universe stays the same, as modern physics holds, that matter and energy is constantly being rearranged.

Thus there was a time before matter and energy was arranged into stars, a time before it was arranged into living beings, a time before it was arranged into our bodies, etc.

We thus might consider the following:

At the first moment in time, the matter and energy in the universe was arranged in Configuration 1.
At the second moment in time, it was arranged in Configuration 2.
At the third moment in time, it was arranged in Configuration 3.
And so on.

If we ask our previous question about what God knows is real, it will turn out that—the first time we ask the question—he knows that Configuration 1 is real. But if we ask the same question again, he will know that Configuration 2 is real, etc.

This generates the same kind of problems that we saw above.

God’s Conserving Action

The problem is even worse, because it doesn’t apply just to God’s knowledge. It also applies to his actions.

The Church teaches that the world would not continue to exist unless God sustained it in existence. Thus John Paul II stated:

By creating, God called into being from nothing all that began to exist outside himself. But God’s creative act does not end here. What comes forth from nothing would return to nothing if it were left to itself and not conserved in being by the Creator. Having created the cosmos, God continues to create it, by maintaining it in existence. Conservation is a continuous creation (conservatio est continua creatio) (Audience, May 7, 1986).

This means that, at the first moment of creation, God would generate the universe , with all of the matter and energy in it in Configuration 1.

But then God would have to stop conserving Configuration 1 so that Configuration 2 could come about.

He would then have to stop conserving Configuration 2 so that Configuration 3 could arise.

This would also place God inside of time, since if he were simultaneously conserving all three configurations from outside of time, all three would exist simultaneously from the perspective of the eternal now.

That means all three would be real at once—three different moments of time would exist, contradicting the idea that only a single moment (the present, the “temporal now”) exists.

God would have to be in time if he were to initially create/conserve the moment containing Configuration 1 and then stop doing that to allow Configuration 1 to be replaced by Configuration 2 in the temporal now.

But the Church teaches that God is not in time, so we have another problem.

These aren’t the only problems with the idea that only the present exists. We’ll look at more next time.

(Go to Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3)

3 Views of Time and Eternity

Akin-ETERNITY1 The fact that we live in time and God lives in eternity leads to all kinds of questions. For example:

If God is eternal and outside of time, does he create all of history all at once?
Does the fact that what is true in time changes mean that God’s knowledge changes?
How can God be eternal and yet incarnate as Jesus Christ at a specific moment in time?

To answer questions like this, we need to think about the nature of both time and eternity.

Three Views of Time

Philosophers sometimes talk about three views of time:

The view that only the present is real (so the past and the future are not real)
The view that the past and the present are real (but the future is not real)
The view that the past, present, and future are all real.

The first view is sometimes called “presentism,” since it believes that there is only one moment that truly exists: right now, the present. On this view, the past and the future don’t exist. The moments in the past once existed, and the moments in the future will exist later on, but right now, the only thing that is real is the present.

The second view is sometimes called the “growing block” theory, since it presents time as a block that grows with the course of events. The events that are in the past are real, as are events occurring in the present, at the leading edge of the block, but future events do not yet exist.

The third view is sometimes called “eternalism.” On this view, the past, present, and future are all equally real. The present is the moment of time that we are experiencing right now. We no longer have access to moments in the past, and we do not yet have access to moments in the future, but they still exist.

Which of these theories is true?

Arguments from Physics

A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein proposed that time is essentially another dimension—a fourth dimension, alongside the three spatial dimensions we experience: height, width, and length.

He proposed that, together, these dimensions make up a reality physicists now call “spacetime.”

This concept has served physics extremely well. It makes it easy to describe physical phenomena using equations, and it has proved enormously useful to scientists.

Consequently, modern physicists lean heavily toward eternalism.

The idea of time as a dimension has proved so useful, in fact, that even physicists like Lee Smolin—who wants to revisit the idea—acknowledge it is very hard to imagine an alternative that would make sense. (Smolin talks about this in his book Time Reborn).

It thus seems safe to say that, to the extent contemporary physics is a guide, there is significant support for eternalism.

However, the findings of science are always provisional—never final—so they are not definitive for the question.

Arguments from Philosophy

If the results of physics are not definitive, neither are the results of philosophy.

The debate about the nature of time has been going on since the ancient Greeks began wrestling with the question, and no definitive solution has emerged.

An individual philosopher may find the arguments mounted for one position or another to be the most compelling, but—as on most subjects—there is no definitive consensus among philosophers.

Theology

What I’d like to do, rather than proposing an argument from physics or philosophy, is mount a theological case.

I want to point out right up front that the Church does not have an official teaching on the nature of time, and I know orthodox Catholics who take different positions on the matter.

However, I think that what the Church teaches about God has implications for the nature of time.

So let’s look at that.

God’s Eternity

The Church teaches that God is eternal. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal, infinite (immensus), and unchangeable, incomprehensible, almighty and ineffable, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; three persons indeed, but one essence, substance or nature entirely simple (CCC 202).

In popular speech, saying that something is eternal means that it lasts for an unlimited amount of time. However, when applied to God, the term “eternal” means something else: It means he is outside of time altogether.

The classic theological explanation of eternity was provided in the sixth century by the Roman philosopher Boethius, who wrote:

Eternity . . . is the simultaneously-whole and perfect possession of interminable life (On the Consolation of Philosophy 5:6).

This means that God’s life has no end (it’s interminable), and that he possesses all of that life all at once (in a simultaneously-whole manner). He does not experience it moment-by-moment, the way we do. God’s life thus is not spread out over time the way ours is, meaning that he is outside of time.

As St. John Paul II explained:

[H]is eternity . . . must be understood as the “indivisible, perfect, and simultaneous possession of an unending life,” and therefore as the attribute of being absolutely “beyond time” (John Paul II, Audience, Sept. 4, 1985).

He went on to teach:

God’s eternity does not go by with the time of the created world. “It does not coincide with the present.” It does not precede it or “prolong” it into infinity. . . .

He is eternal because he is the absolute fullness of being which cannot be understood as a sum of fragments or of “particles” of being which change with time. The texts quoted from the Bible clearly indicate this.

The absolute fullness of being can come to be understood only as eternity, which is, as the total and indivisible possession of that being, God’s own life.

In this sense God is eternal: a “Now,” a “Present,” subsisting and unchanging.

This mode of being is essentially distinguished from that of creatures, which are “contingent” beings (ibid.).

God therefore exists in what theologians refer to as an “eternal now” outside of time, a now where time does not pass from moment to moment. It is thus distinct from the “temporal now” we experience, where new moments arrive and then slip into the past.

A consequence of this is that there is no change in God. There is no progression from moment to moment in the eternal now, and so no change occurs in God.

This appears to have theological implications for the nature of time.

We’ll look at those next.

(Go to Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3)

Internal Struggles Common to All

There is a famous (among philosphers) passage in Plato where there is a particularly good illustration of the kind of struggles we often fight with ourselves–the same kind we read about in the New Testament in passages like “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” and St. Paul’s description of his internal struggles in Romans 7:13-25.

I wanted to keep track of the passage in Plato for use in the future, because it shows that these struggles are common to all humans, even the pagan Greeks.

I hadn’t read it since grad school, so I looked it up where it is.

It’s found in Book 4 of The Republic, where Socrates is talking with Glaucon, where we read:

SOCRATES: Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying [to his eyes], “Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”

GLAUCON: I have heard the story myself, he said.

SOCRATES: The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire, as though they were two distinct things [SOURCE].

You can see why this is such a vivid illustration–both wanting and not wanting to look at dead bodies.

Creepy!

But exactly the kind of thing that we all find ourselves faced with on occasion.

Will we have free will in heaven?

new_jerusalem — Will we have free will in heaven?

Will we have free will in heaven?

If so, does that mean we might sin and fall again?

If not, what kind of free will would we have there?

And if God can harmonize our free will and sinlessness in heaven, why doesn’t he do so in this life?

Here are some thoughts . . .

A Robot “Loves” Me. Big Deal.

NOTE: This is part of a series on the problem of evil. Click here to read the previous posts in the series.

In a previous post, we looked at a common answer to the problem of evil–that God allows sin and the suffering it causes to exist because the only way to eliminate them would be to eliminate free will.

Without free will, according to this view, something important would be lost.

If we didn’t freely choose good–to freely love God and love our fellow human beings–then these actions would lose something very important.

It would be like being “loved” by a robot–a being programmed to do nothing else.

The Love of the Saints

What about the saints in heaven? They don’t sin. Does that make their love less valuable?

KEEP READING.

Why does God allow sin and suffering?

good-vs-evil — Why does God allow evil to exist? Why is there sin and suffering in the world? And, what's love got to do with it?

The most perplexing problem in apologetics is the problem of evil: Why would an all-good, all-powerful God allow evil to exist?

There is a real mystery here, and we can only give partial answers.

Here are some of mine . . .

Two Kinds of Evil

We need to recognize that there is more than one kind of evil.

When we use the word “evil,” we often mean moral evil (sin), but historically it was frequently used for other things, such as suffering.

These two forms of evil are linked: It is a sin to cause needless suffering, for example.

This brings us to an important question . . .

Could God Stop These Evils?

Yes. God is omnipotent. He is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe.

Without his action, the universe would never have come into existence, and without his continued action, it would cease to exist or go “to nothing” (Latin, ad nihilum–where we get “annihilate”).

God could have prevented all sin and suffering by not creating the universe.

And he could end all sin and suffering simply by allowing the universe to cease to exist.

You might call this “the Annihilation Solution.”

So what doesn’t he?

KEEP READING.

Christianity & Greek Philosophy

Should You Read Non-Catholic Materials?

A correspondent writes:

I am presently attending a Bible study. During our small group discussion, a question arose from someone in our group.We would like to know if it is wrong for us to read and examine other books and Bibles that are not Catholic-based to see what they have information-wise pertaining to spiritual matters. For example, we both have Life Application Study Bibles and enjoy reading the associated study footnotes.

My opinion is that the Holy Spirit guides us with discernment especially when we pray before reading or delving into other Christian denomination books and Bibles. I guard myself (my heart, mind and spirit) so that I’m not influenced in any way that could conflict with Catholic beliefs. If I’m not sure or confused about an issue (e.g., Why do we believe this and they that?”), I said I then will go to a religious authoritative person to have any questions or issues addressed or I check Internet sites like www.Catholic.com. I believe I am exercising my ‘child-like faith’ with wanting to know and love more, which draws me closer to Him and to others, while using my adult judgment. I also believe that, when we know more about other religions and philosophies (Christian, Jewish, Eastern, scientific, etc.), it helps us to practice love, respect others, and establish a common ground for our relationship and possible future discussions for witnessing for Catholicism. If I didn’t understand or have knowledge of what they believe, I may not be able to convey my Catholic beliefs and doctrines as accurately.

The other person in our small discussion group is concerned that when we read, we can be swayed / influenced to turn from our Catholic beliefs and choose another path. Are we able to guard ourselves enough (with the Holy Spirit’s assistance), spiritually and mentally, to protect our Catholic faith or is avoidance of other doctrines the answer? Is it a matter where it differs per individual and how strong their faith is (figuratively, those who are nursing vs. those eating solid food)?

Please share your opinion and feel free to correct me where I’m wrong. Thank you!

I think that you and the other person in your Bible study have valid points. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer on this one.

On the one hand, there is a great deal to be learned from non-Catholic sources, including non-Catholic religious and philosophical ones. St. Thomas Aquinas did an enormous service for the Church by showing how Christian faith can be related to the thought of non-Christian thinkers, such as (and especially) the pre-Christian philosopher Aristotle. Aquinas’s attitude was that all truth is God’s truth, and so if you find truth in a non-Christian source it not only will not contradict the Christian faith but it also will be of use to Christians. The more truth, the better!

His attitude was thus to exercise critical thinking in reading materials from non-Catholic sources (and from Catholic ones, for that matter!). Although St. Paul said it in a different context, the idea also applies here:

Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22)

This philosophy has also carried down to our day. In fact, in the books he is writing on the life of Jesus, Pope Benedict regularly interacts with the ideas of the American Rabbi Jacob Neusner, whose perspective on Jesus he finds to have value, even though he doesn’t agree with everything. (And he’s willing to reference Neusner in public—and thus implicitly encourage others to see what Neusner has to say.)

If you have a good grounding in your Catholic faith and can exercise critical thinking in what you read then there is nothing to fear in non-Catholic writings, and there is much to be learned from them! Though we have the fullness of religious truth, we do not have a monopoly on truth, and the perspectives of others can help bring out things that we as Catholics may not have known or may not have fully worked out yet.

In my own work, I use non-Catholic materials all the time. In fact, my favorite commentaries on the book of Genesis are by Jewish authors (Rashi and Nahum Sarna), there are Evangelical commentaries on certain books of the Bible that I learn a great deal from (the writings of N. T. Wright and James Dunn come to mind), and there are things to be learned even from folks who do not have any faith.

The key to being able to sift through this material and find what is good in it, though, involves more than praying to the Holy Spirit, and here is where I think your friend has a good point. One must also have a firm knowledge of your own faith in order to be able to think critically about material presented from other perspectives.

While one certainly should and must rely on the Holy Spirit for guidance, the Holy Spirit does not promise to protect us from coming to mistaken conclusions just because we pray to him. He also wants us to study, internalize, and thoroughly know our own faith. And then, with his guidance, we can approach materials from other perspectives profitably and with confidence.

Because everybody in our culture is taught to regard himself as an expert on religion from the time of birth, it is easy—often far too easy—for us to imagine that we have the kind of knowledge of our own faith that is needed to accurately identify beliefs that conflict with it. Indeed, we’d often feel insulted if someone suggested that we don’t! “What do you mean I don’t know my Catholic faith well enough to know what contradicts it!”

Yet there are a great many people who, in fact, don’t have a good grasp on the Church’s teaching even though they think they do.

And then there are people who, while they know the teaching of the Church well, may be experiencing an emotional crisis or a crisis of faith of some sort, and this would interfere with their ability to productively and serenely interact with materials from non-Catholic authors.

Certainly the safest course is to stick with Catholic materials, and as a general matter this is advisable, particularly for those who are less educated in their faith or who are going through difficult patches in their lives, but if you are well educated in your faith and able to exercise the critical thinking necessary to profitably sift what you are reading, there is nothing to fear from doing so.

There is thus no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on each individual and where that person is in their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journeys.

In terms of the group—since people may be at different stages of those journeys—I would recommend erring on the side of caution (a flock travels at the speed of its slowest member), and if you use non-Catholic materials (or less-reliable Catholic ones, which can even be more insidious since they may have been written by wolves in sheep’s clothing), point out their limitations and strongly caution people against using them uncritically.

I hope this helps, and best of luck!

What are your thoughts?