Chapter 31

Relativity, Physics, and the Theology of Time

Introduction: When Physics and Theology Meet

Few developments in the history of human thought have shaken our intuitions about time as thoroughly as Albert Einstein's theories of relativity. For most of Western history, time seemed like one of the most basic and unchanging features of reality. A second was a second. An hour was an hour. Two events that happened "at the same time" happened at the same time for everyone, everywhere. Then, in 1905, a young patent clerk in Switzerland published a paper that turned all of that upside down. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity told us that time is not absolute. Clocks tick at different speeds depending on how fast they are moving. Two events that are simultaneous for one observer may not be simultaneous for another. There is no single, universal "now" that is the same everywhere in the universe.¹

If you have never really wrestled with these ideas, they can sound like science fiction. They are not. Relativity has been tested thousands of times and has passed every test. GPS satellites have to correct for relativistic effects, or our navigation systems would drift by miles each day.² The theory is as solid as any theory in the history of science. And this is precisely what makes it so theologically challenging. If physics tells us that time behaves in ways that shatter our ordinary assumptions, what does that mean for our understanding of God's relationship to time?

Here is the worry, stated as plainly as I can put it. Many philosophers and physicists believe that Einstein's theories support what is called the B-theory of time, or the "block universe" view. On this view, past, present, and future are all equally real. Time does not really "flow." Our sense that the present is special and that the future is still open is just a trick of human psychology. If this view is correct, then the whole biblical picture of God acting in time, responding to prayer, grieving over sin, and unfolding His plan across the centuries starts to look like an illusion. Worse, if time is a static block, then the classical doctrine of divine timelessness suddenly looks very attractive again. A timeless God simply stands "outside" the block, seeing all of it at once, without being bound to any "now."³

Some have gone further. They argue that relativity actually proves that time is a block, that tensed reality is an illusion, and that a temporal God is therefore impossible or at least incoherent.⁴ If this is right, the whole thesis of this book falls apart. We cannot coherently say that God is genuinely temporal, experiencing real sequence and succession, if science has shown that time itself is static and tenseless.

This chapter takes that challenge seriously. I will argue, however, that the challenge is not nearly as strong as it first appears. Here is my thesis in one sentence: Einstein's theories of relativity pose a significant but not insurmountable challenge to the A-theory of time and divine temporality — and when properly understood, relativity does not prove that time is a "block" or that God must be timeless, because alternative interpretations of relativity are available that preserve absolute simultaneity and a dynamic view of time. In plain English: physics has not killed the biblical picture of time, and it has not settled the God-and-time question in favor of the timelessness view. Not even close.

Before we dive in, I want to be honest with you about one thing. I am not a physicist. I am a theologian and a philosopher of religion. The physics in this chapter draws heavily on careful work by Christian philosophers like William Lane Craig, R. T. Mullins, and Garrett DeWeese, who have studied these questions in depth. Where their readings of the physics are controversial among physicists — and they sometimes are — I will try to be candid about that. My goal is not to prove Einstein wrong. Einstein was a towering genius, and his scientific achievements stand. My goal is much more modest: to show that the philosophical interpretation of relativity is a separate question from the mathematical formalism of relativity, and that nothing in the tested physics forces us to abandon the biblical picture of a God who genuinely acts in time.

Part One: Special Relativity for Ordinary Readers

The World Before Einstein

To understand what Einstein did, we have to understand the world he overturned. For more than two centuries, Western physics operated within the framework laid down by Sir Isaac Newton in his 1687 masterpiece, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Newton held that space and time are absolute. Space is like an infinite, empty container. Time is like a river that flows at the same rate everywhere, independent of what any observer is doing. Two events that happen at the same moment in Newton's absolute time happen at the same moment for everyone. The "now" is universal. There is one true time, and all our clocks are merely imperfect attempts to measure it.⁵

Newton was not just doing physics. He was also doing theology. For Newton, absolute time and space were features of God's own existence — they were, in his famous phrase, God's "sensorium," the medium of His omnipresence and eternal duration.⁶ As Craig summarizes the point, "In Newton's view God's 'now' is thus the present moment of absolute time. Since God is not 'a dwarf-god' located at a particular place in space, but is omnipresent, there is a worldwide moment which is absolutely present. Newton's temporal theism thus provides the foundation for absolute simultaneity."⁷ This is worth pausing over. Long before anyone had heard of Einstein, one of the greatest physicists in history grounded absolute time not in physics but in theology — in the existence of an omnipresent God whose "now" defines the true present for the entire universe.

For most of the nineteenth century, Newton's absolute time was simply assumed. Physicists knew light was a wave, and they hypothesized that waves of light must travel through some medium, which they called the "aether." The aether filled all of space and served as the preferred reference frame — the stationary background against which all motion could be measured. Experiments in the late 1800s tried to detect the Earth's motion through the aether. The most famous of these, the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, found nothing. The Earth seemed to be at rest with respect to the aether, no matter how fast it was moving through space. This was a problem.⁸

The Lorentz Solution

Several physicists tried to solve this problem. The Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, along with the Irish physicist George FitzGerald, proposed a remarkable hypothesis. What if moving objects actually contract in the direction of their motion? What if moving clocks actually tick more slowly? If measuring devices themselves change when they move through the aether, then no experiment could detect the aether, even though it exists. Lorentz developed a set of equations — now called the Lorentz transformations — that described exactly how measurements of time and space should change with motion.⁹

Here is the key point, and I want you to remember it because it matters enormously for what comes later in this chapter: On the Lorentz view, there is still absolute time, absolute space, and absolute simultaneity. There is still a true "now." It is simply the case that moving observers, because their own clocks and rulers are distorted by motion, cannot detect the absolute frame. Reality has a privileged now; we just cannot measure it directly.¹⁰

Einstein's Revolution

Then came Einstein. In 1905, he published a paper titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." In it, he did something radical. Rather than trying to explain why the aether could not be detected, he simply eliminated the aether altogether. He built his Special Theory of Relativity on two postulates:

(1) The laws of physics are the same in all inertial (unaccelerated) reference frames.

(2) The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of their motion.

From these two postulates, using a procedure for synchronizing clocks with light signals, Einstein derived the same mathematical equations Lorentz had developed — the Lorentz transformations. But the interpretation was completely different. For Einstein, there is no aether, no absolute space, no absolute time, and no absolute simultaneity. Different observers in different inertial frames literally have different "nows" and different times. None of them is privileged.¹¹

Let me try to make this concrete with a simple thought experiment. Imagine a long train car moving at very high speed. In the exact middle of the car is a lamp. At the front of the car is a sensor, and at the back of the car is another sensor. Now suppose the lamp flashes. According to an observer inside the train, the light reaches both sensors at the same time, because they are equidistant from the lamp. Simultaneity, inside the train.

But now imagine an observer standing on the platform as the train zooms by. According to this observer, what happens? Because the train is moving forward, the back of the train is rushing toward the point where the light was emitted, while the front of the train is rushing away. From the platform observer's frame, the light has to travel a shorter distance to reach the back sensor and a longer distance to reach the front sensor. Since light travels at the same speed for both observers, the platform observer will see the light hit the back sensor before it hits the front sensor. Not simultaneous.¹²

So which observer is correct? Was the light hitting the two sensors simultaneous or not? Einstein's answer is that both observers are correct, relative to their own inertial frames. There is no fact of the matter about absolute simultaneity. Simultaneity itself is relative. This is the famous "relativity of simultaneity," and it is the heart of Special Relativity.¹³

Time Dilation and Length Contraction

Two other consequences follow directly. First, time dilation: moving clocks run slow. If one twin stays on Earth while another zooms off in a spaceship at near the speed of light, the traveling twin will, upon returning, be younger than the stay-at-home twin. This is not a measurement error; the traveling twin's biological processes, clocks, and every physical process have actually proceeded more slowly, as measured from the Earth's frame.¹⁴ Second, length contraction: moving objects shrink in the direction of their motion. A meter stick flying by at high speed is, relative to a stationary observer, less than a meter long.

Here is the really strange part, on Einstein's interpretation. These effects are reciprocal. If two rockets are moving past each other at high speed, each astronaut observes the other rocket to be contracted and the other's clock to be running slow. Neither one is "really" contracted or "really" running slow. Each is correct relative to their own frame. As Craig puts it, "on a truly Einsteinian view, the present moment, length, and time are all things that different observers have radically different perspectives on — and none of those perspectives is the one correct perspective."¹⁵

If Einstein is right — if there truly is no privileged frame, no absolute simultaneity, no universal "now" — then we have a serious theological puzzle on our hands. Because if there is no universal now, then God does not have a privileged now either. What does it mean for God to be "present" to the universe if "presence" is relative to inertial frames? As we will see in a moment, this is exactly the argument that defenders of divine timelessness have used.

Why This Matters: Biblical Theology Hangs in the Balance

Before moving on, I want to pause and let the theological stakes sink in. When we read the Bible, we meet a God who is intensely, pervasively temporal. He walks in the garden "in the cool of the day" (Gen 3:8). He hears Israel's cry in Egypt and says, "Now go, I am sending you" (Ex 3:10). He declares through Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jer 1:5). Jesus weeps at Lazarus's tomb (John 11:35). The apostle Paul tells us that Christ died "in the fullness of time" (Gal 4:4). The book of Revelation describes saints crying out, "How long, O Lord?" (Rev 6:10). None of this is dressed-up philosophical speculation. It is the actual texture of biblical revelation.

If Einstein's interpretation of Special Relativity is right — if there is no absolute "now," if all moments are equally real in a static block — then a lot of this biblical language becomes deeply puzzling. A God who exists in a timeless eternity cannot "walk in the cool of the day" any more than He can walk through space. A God for whom no moment is more real than any other cannot respond in real time to the cries of His people. This is not a minor issue. It goes to the heart of how we read the Bible and how we understand our relationship with God.

Some theologians try to handle this by saying that all such language is "accommodative" — God speaks to us in temporal terms even though He is really timeless, because we are temporal creatures who cannot grasp His timelessness directly. I do not find this convincing, for reasons developed in Chapters 16–23 of this book. But for now, let me just note: if we can preserve the biblical portrait of a temporal God while taking modern physics fully seriously, that is a significant theological gain. And I believe we can.

Part Two: The Minkowski Block Universe and the Argument for Timelessness

Space-Time and the Fourth Dimension

In 1908, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski — who had once been Einstein's mathematics professor — delivered a famous lecture in which he argued that the right way to understand Special Relativity was to treat space and time as a unified four-dimensional structure. "Henceforth," Minkowski declared, "space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."¹⁶

This unified structure is called Minkowski space-time, or simply space-time. Think of it this way. In ordinary three-dimensional space, you can describe any point with three numbers (call them x, y, and z — like width, depth, and height). In Minkowski space-time, you need four numbers: three for space and one for time (x, y, z, and t). Every event — anything that happens anywhere at any time — can be located at a unique point in this four-dimensional manifold.

Now here is the key interpretive move. Many physicists and philosophers took Minkowski's geometric framework to imply that time is really just a fourth dimension alongside the three spatial dimensions. And if time is a dimension, then all points in time are equally real, in exactly the same way that all points in space are equally real. The future exists "up ahead" just as the top of your desk exists above the floor. The past exists "back there" just as last block exists to your west. All of it is already there.¹⁷

This is the block universe. The entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the final eschaton, exists as a single, static, four-dimensional block. Our sense that time "flows" and that the present is special is an illusion of consciousness. Objectively speaking, every moment is equally real. The year 1066 is as real as the year 2026, and the year 2100 is as real as both. Nothing "happens" in the sense of coming into being. Things simply exist tenselessly at their four-dimensional coordinates.¹⁸

Einstein himself seems to have embraced this view. In a famous letter written shortly before his own death, Einstein comforted the family of his recently deceased friend Michele Besso with these words: "For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."¹⁹

Why the Block Universe Makes Timelessness Attractive

You can probably see where this is going. If the block universe is true — if all moments in time are equally real and temporal passage is an illusion — then divine timelessness suddenly becomes much more attractive. Here is the argument, put as charitably as I can:

(1) Special Relativity shows that simultaneity is relative to inertial frames.

(2) If simultaneity is relative, then there is no absolute, universal "now."

(3) If there is no universal "now," then God's "now" cannot be identified with any specific moment in time, because any such identification would arbitrarily privilege one inertial frame over others.

(4) A God without a specific "now" is a God who is not located at any particular moment in time.

(5) Therefore, God is not temporal. God is timeless.²⁰

Put another way: the block universe gives us the perfect picture of a timeless God. God stands "outside" the four-dimensional block, perceiving all moments simultaneously in the "eternal now." There is no problem of God's relation to creatures at different moments, because from God's perspective, all moments are equally present. The Stump-Kretzmann model of eternal-temporal simultaneity (ET-simultaneity) draws explicitly on this relativistic analogy.²¹

This is a powerful argument, and I want to acknowledge its strength. If the block universe is true, then divine temporality faces very serious problems. The defender of divine temporality has to somehow say that God is "at" a particular moment in time — but which moment? In which inertial frame? If God is associated with Earth's frame, then different parts of the universe are "really" in God's future or past in ways that seem to conflict with God's omnipresence. If God is associated with some other frame, what makes that frame special? And if God is not associated with any frame, in what sense is He temporal at all?

I want to be clear: this is the strongest version of the argument. I have not softened it. Many sophisticated defenders of divine timelessness — including Paul Helm, Brian Leftow, Eleonore Stump, and the late Norman Kretzmann — have drawn on this relativistic framework to argue for the coherence of divine atemporality.²² They are not fools. They see something real in the data.

A Word on the Historical Development

It is worth noting how the block universe view actually developed. Einstein himself, in 1905, did not explicitly argue for the block universe. His Special Theory of Relativity was a theory about how measurements transform between inertial frames. Minkowski's 1908 geometric reformulation — treating time as a fourth dimension of a unified space-time — was an interpretive move that went beyond what Einstein had strictly argued for. And the full embrace of the block universe as the correct metaphysical picture came even later, through the work of a range of twentieth-century philosophers and physicists.

This matters because it shows that the path from "the mathematical formalism of Special Relativity" to "the block universe is metaphysically correct" involves multiple philosophical steps, not just the reading off of a metaphysical view from the equations. Each of those steps can be challenged. Einstein gave us an enormously successful mathematical theory; it does not follow that every philosophical interpretation of that theory is equally successful.

But the argument has a critical weakness. It treats Einstein's interpretation of Special Relativity as if it were identical with the mathematical theory of Special Relativity. It assumes that because the theory is empirically successful, the philosophical interpretation must also be correct. And that assumption is simply wrong. We turn now to the alternative.

Part Three: The Neo-Lorentzian Alternative

Same Math, Different Metaphysics

Here is a fact that most physicists will grant, if you press them, and that most philosophers of physics acknowledge openly: Einstein's interpretation of Special Relativity and Lorentz's interpretation of Special Relativity are empirically equivalent. They predict exactly the same experimental results. Every observation that confirms Einstein equally confirms Lorentz. No experiment can distinguish between them. As Craig observes, "Lorentzian relativity is admitted on all sides to be empirically equivalent to Einsteinian relativity."²³

Let that sink in. The difference between the two theories is not empirical. It is philosophical. They use the same mathematics (the Lorentz transformations). They predict the same time dilation, the same length contraction, the same null result for the Michelson-Morley experiment. But they interpret these results differently. Einstein says there is no privileged frame and no absolute simultaneity. Lorentz says there is a privileged frame and absolute simultaneity — we just cannot detect it because our measuring instruments are affected by motion through that frame.

If this is correct, then the physics does not actually force us to accept the block universe or abandon absolute simultaneity. The physics is perfectly compatible with a neo-Lorentzian view in which there is a true "now" and in which time genuinely flows. Craig argues this case extensively, drawing on the work of philosophers of science like Lawrence Sklar, Karl Popper, and John Bell.²⁴ DeWeese independently reaches a similar conclusion, showing that the dynamic causal theory of time he defends is fully compatible with alternative interpretations of Special Relativity.²⁵

An Analogy: The Map and the Territory

Let me try to make this point with an analogy that has helped me. Imagine you have two different maps of the same city. The first map uses a standard north-up orientation, with the downtown area at the center. The second map uses a different projection — perhaps east-up, or with a different center. Both maps accurately represent the city. Both allow you to navigate. Both will get you from point A to point B correctly. But they look different. They emphasize different features. They organize the information in different ways.

Now suppose I claimed that only the first map is "really" correct because it is the one most people use. You might reasonably push back. Both maps are accurate representations of the same underlying reality. The choice between them is not an empirical matter (both work equally well); it is a matter of convention, convenience, or philosophical preference about how to organize the information.

Something similar is going on with the Einsteinian and Lorentzian interpretations of Special Relativity. The underlying reality — whatever it is — is the same. The mathematical structure (the Lorentz transformations) is the same. What differs is how we interpret that mathematical structure. Einstein's interpretation abolishes the privileged frame as meaningless; Lorentz's interpretation retains it as real but empirically inaccessible. Both interpretations fit the data equally well. The choice between them must be made on philosophical grounds, not empirical ones.

This is a critical point, and I want to press it. When people say "Einstein's theory shows that time is relative," they are sometimes making a claim about the mathematics (which is correct) and sometimes making a claim about metaphysics (which is not forced by the math). Conflating the two is a major source of confusion in discussions of God and time. Physics provides the mathematics; metaphysics interprets it. And on the metaphysical question — is time really a block, or does it really flow? — physics alone cannot give us an answer.

The Verificationist Foundation of Einstein's Interpretation

Why did Einstein reject the aether and absolute simultaneity? The answer, as historians of science have shown, is philosophical. Einstein was deeply influenced by Ernst Mach, a prominent advocate of verificationism. Verificationism is the view that a proposition is meaningful only if it can be empirically verified. Claims that cannot be tested in principle are not true or false; they are simply meaningless.²⁶

Einstein applied verificationism to the concept of simultaneity. Since we cannot empirically distinguish Lorentzian absolute simultaneity from Einsteinian relative simultaneity — since the two theories predict identical results — Einstein concluded that absolute simultaneity is meaningless. He redefined simultaneity in purely operational terms, using light signals to synchronize clocks. On this redefinition, simultaneity is by definition relative to inertial frames.²⁷

But here is the thing: verificationism is a highly controversial philosophical position. It was enormously influential in the early twentieth century through the logical positivist movement, but it has since been abandoned by the vast majority of philosophers of science. Why? Because verificationism is self-refuting. The statement "only empirically verifiable claims are meaningful" is itself not empirically verifiable. By its own standard, it is meaningless. More importantly, verificationism would force us to reject huge swaths of perfectly sensible claims about the world, including claims about the distant past, mathematical truths, moral truths, and many unobservable theoretical entities in science itself.²⁸

As Lawrence Sklar, one of the leading philosophers of physics in the twentieth century, has candidly admitted: "Certainly the original arguments in favor of the relativistic viewpoint were rife with verificationist presuppositions about meaning, etc. And despite Einstein's later disavowal of the verificationist point of view, no one to my knowledge has provided an adequate account of the foundations of relativity which isn't verificationist in essence."²⁹

This is a striking admission. The philosophical foundations of Einstein's interpretation of Special Relativity depend on a philosophical doctrine — verificationism — that contemporary philosophers have almost universally rejected. Einstein himself, later in his life, backed away from verificationism. But if we reject verificationism, then Einstein's philosophical interpretation loses its foundation. The mathematical theory remains. The experimental predictions remain. What we are free to reject is the specific metaphysical interpretation that Einstein placed on the math.

The Lorentzian Alternative in Detail

On the neo-Lorentzian view, there is a preferred inertial frame — call it the "aether frame," or better, the "absolute rest frame" — in which time flows uniformly and absolute simultaneity holds. When objects move with respect to this absolute frame, their physical processes (including clocks and measuring rods) are affected. Moving clocks really do tick more slowly. Moving rods really do contract. Neither observer can detect which one is "really" moving with respect to the absolute frame, because their own measuring instruments are distorted in ways that mask the underlying absolute reality.³⁰

This view preserves several things the A-theorist wants:

First, absolute simultaneity. There is a fact of the matter about whether two events are simultaneous, grounded in the absolute rest frame. Our measurements may be frame-relative, but the underlying reality is not.

Second, absolute time. There is a true "now" that is the same throughout the universe. It is the "now" of the absolute frame.

Third, dynamic time. The present is objectively real. The future has not yet happened. The past has happened and is now no longer present. Temporal becoming is a real feature of the world.

Fourth, theological significance. There is no problem with locating God's "now" in a specific reference frame. God's "now" is simply the "now" of the absolute frame — the true, universal present. This was, in fact, Newton's view. Absolute time is God's time.³¹

Some philosophers object: isn't the Lorentzian view unscientific because it posits something (the absolute frame) that cannot be detected? DeWeese responds pointedly: "It is beyond the scope of this book to... but I will merely note that there is a renewed interest in some form of global hidden variable theory as opposed to non-locality."³² And Craig notes that the philosophical objection assumes verificationism — if what cannot be detected does not exist, then the absolute frame does not exist. But verificationism is exactly what we have rejected. Positing an undetectable absolute frame is no more problematic than positing undetectable theoretical entities elsewhere in physics, of which there are many.

Bell's Theorem and Quantum Non-Locality

Here is where the story gets really interesting. Over the past several decades, a series of experiments in quantum physics has strongly suggested that there really is something going on that requires absolute simultaneity. These experiments test what is called Bell's theorem, and they have enormous implications for the philosophy of time.³³

Here is the basic idea, simplified. In quantum mechanics, two particles can be "entangled," meaning that they are correlated in a way that links their properties. If you measure one entangled particle and find that it has a certain property (say, "spin up"), then the other entangled particle — no matter how far away — instantly takes on the opposite property ("spin down"). These correlations have been confirmed in experiment after experiment, including at distances of many kilometers.

Einstein famously hated this. He called it "spooky action at a distance" and insisted that the particles must have had determinate properties all along, even before measurement. Together with two colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein proposed a famous thought experiment (known as EPR) in 1935 designed to show that quantum mechanics must be incomplete.³⁴

In 1964, the Irish physicist John Bell derived a mathematical inequality that could test Einstein's position against standard quantum mechanics. If Einstein was right and the particles had determinate local properties all along, the experimental results should fall within a certain range. If standard quantum mechanics was right and the particles are genuinely non-locally correlated, the results should violate Bell's inequality. Starting in the early 1980s with Alain Aspect and continuing through experiments by a growing number of physicists, the results have been unambiguous: quantum mechanics wins. The Bell inequality is violated. The particles really are non-locally correlated.³⁵

This has enormous implications. Karl Popper, one of the great philosophers of science, saw the implications clearly. He noted that the experimental results seem to require either (a) faster-than-light causal influences, or (b) some kind of absolute simultaneity. Either way, Einsteinian relativity is in trouble. Popper wrote: "The reason for this assertion is that the mere existence of an infinite velocity entails that of an absolute simultaneity and thereby of an absolute space. Whether or not an infinite velocity can be attained in the transmission of signals is irrelevant for this argument."³⁶

John Bell himself — the very physicist who derived the inequality — became increasingly attracted to a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of Special Relativity. In a remarkable interview, he said:

I think it's a deep dilemma, and the resolution of it will not be trivial; it will require a substantial change in the way we look at things. But I would say that the cheapest resolution is something like going back to relativity as it was before Einstein, when people like Lorentz and Poincaré thought that there was an aether — a preferred frame of reference — but that our measuring instruments were distorted by motion in such a way that we could not detect motion through the aether... the pre-Einstein position of Lorentz and Poincaré, Larmor and Fitzgerald was perfectly coherent, and is not inconsistent with relativity theory.³⁷

Let me underline the significance of this. One of the leading physicists of the twentieth century — the man who derived the inequality that is now the foundation of modern tests of quantum entanglement — openly advocates returning to the Lorentzian interpretation of Special Relativity. And he does so on the basis of the experimental evidence. This is not the fringe. This is serious science.

Part Four: General Relativity, Cosmology, and Cosmic Time

From Special to General Relativity

Everything so far has concerned Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (STR), which applies only to inertial (unaccelerated) reference frames. In 1915, after a decade of struggle, Einstein published the General Theory of Relativity (GTR), which extends the theory to include gravity and acceleration. General Relativity has been called the most beautiful scientific theory ever devised. It describes gravity not as a force but as the curvature of space-time itself. Massive objects bend the fabric of space-time, and other objects follow the curvature — not because they are being "pulled" but because they are following the natural geometry of curved space-time.³⁸

General Relativity has been spectacularly confirmed. It correctly predicted the bending of starlight around the sun (confirmed in 1919), the perihelion advance of Mercury, gravitational time dilation (heavier clocks at sea level tick more slowly than clocks on mountaintops), the existence of black holes, the expansion of the universe, and gravitational waves (directly detected in 2015).³⁹ There is simply no serious doubt about the empirical adequacy of General Relativity.

What does General Relativity say about time? This is where things get interesting — and where, I will argue, General Relativity actually helps the defender of absolute simultaneity and dynamic time.

Cosmic Time and the Preferred Frame

In Special Relativity, there is no preferred frame. Every inertial frame is on an equal footing. But General Relativity, when applied to the universe as a whole, reveals something remarkable: there is, in fact, a preferred cosmic reference frame.⁴⁰

Here is why. General Relativity applied to cosmology requires models that describe the universe at the largest scales. The standard cosmological models — derived from work by Alexander Friedmann, Georges Lemaître, Howard Robertson, and Arthur Walker (the so-called Friedmann-Robertson-Walker or FRW models) — describe a universe that is expanding uniformly. The universe has natural symmetries: it is homogeneous (the same everywhere on large scales) and isotropic (the same in every direction).⁴¹

In such a universe, there is a natural way to slice space-time into "moments" of cosmic time. These moments are defined by hypothetical observers who are at rest with respect to the cosmic expansion. These "fundamental observers" are at rest with respect to the expanding space itself, and their clocks, taken together, define a universal cosmic time that is the same everywhere in the universe.⁴²

As Craig summarizes: "Thus, on a cosmic scale, we seem to have that universality of time and absolute simultaneity of events which the Special Theory had denied. G. J. Whitrow of London's Imperial College of Science and Technology asserts, 'in a universe that is characterized by the existence of a cosmic time, relativity is reduced to a local phenomenon, since this time is world-wide and independent of the observer.'"⁴³

In other words, when we apply General Relativity to the actual universe we live in — not to abstract local frames, but to the whole cosmos — a preferred frame emerges naturally. And with it, a universal cosmic time and absolute cosmic simultaneity. The relativistic considerations that seemed to undermine absolute time at the local level actually restore absolute time at the cosmic level.

The Cosmic Microwave Background and the Aether's Return

Is there any way to actually identify this preferred frame? Remarkably, yes. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) — the leftover thermal radiation from the early hot universe. The CMB fills all of space and is at rest with respect to the expanding universe as a whole. Any observer moving through the CMB can detect that motion, because the CMB will appear slightly blueshifted (hotter) in the direction of motion and slightly redshifted (cooler) in the opposite direction.⁴⁴

Measurements in the late twentieth century, especially from the COBE satellite (1989) and later the WMAP (2001) and Planck (2009) satellites, have detected the Earth's motion with respect to the CMB. The Earth (and our galaxy) is moving at about 370 km/s with respect to the CMB rest frame. In other words, the CMB rest frame is a detectable, physically identifiable preferred reference frame for the entire universe.⁴⁵

The philosopher of science James Cushing has drawn out the significance: "Today... the aether has re-emerged through quantum phenomena!"⁴⁶ The CMB effectively plays the role that the nineteenth-century aether was supposed to play: it defines a universal rest frame. And absolute simultaneity can be defined with respect to this frame. Einstein's claim that there is no physically preferred frame is, on close inspection, simply false at the cosmological scale.⁴⁷

The Big Bang and the Beginning of Time

General Relativity, combined with observational cosmology, has revealed something theologically stunning: the universe had a beginning. The Big Bang, originally proposed by Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître in the 1920s and confirmed observationally over the following decades, tells us that the universe began about 13.8 billion years ago from an initial singularity — a state of infinite density and zero volume from which space, time, matter, and energy all emerged.⁴⁸

The Big Bang is not just an expansion of the universe through pre-existing space. It is the expansion of space itself. Time also began at the Big Bang. There was no moment "before" the Big Bang in physical time, because physical time started at t = 0.

This has profound theological implications, some of which are developed in detail in Chapter 8's treatment of the kalām cosmological argument. For our purposes here, I want to emphasize a different point: the Big Bang does not imply that God Himself began to exist. What began was physical, measured time — cosmic time associated with the expansion of the universe. God's time — whether we conceive it as the duration of His being in Newton's sense, or as the time generated by the intra-Trinitarian relations in the sense defended by Mullins and throughout this book — did not begin at the Big Bang.⁴⁹

Craig puts the point precisely: "Cosmic time provides an approximate measure of God's absolute time and of His co-existence with the universe since the moment of creation. While this empirical measure of time had a beginning in the Big Bang, time itself did not. Thus God existed literally before the Big Bang event in absolute time."⁵⁰

I think this is exactly right. Physical time — the time we measure with clocks, the time structured by the laws of physics, the time we have been discussing in terms of relativity — began at the Big Bang. But there is a deeper level of time, a "metaphysical time" or "ontological time," that is grounded in the reality of God and the sequence of divine states. That time did not begin at the Big Bang. It is, in some sense, eternal — without beginning, rooted in the eternal life of the Trinity, as developed in Chapter 26's treatment of perichoresis and time.

Two Ways of Understanding "The Beginning of Time"

Let me try to make this clearer by distinguishing two different things we might mean when we say "time began at the Big Bang."

On the first understanding — call it the strong claim — time itself, including any possible time, began at the Big Bang. There was literally no temporal reality of any kind before the Big Bang. This is what most physicists mean when they casually say "time began with the Big Bang." It is also what Craig's "timeless sans creation" view implies.

On the second understanding — call it the weak claim — physical, cosmic, measurable time began at the Big Bang, but a deeper level of temporal reality (God's time, or metaphysical time) did not begin and did not depend on the existence of the physical universe. This is the view I am defending, following Mullins and others.

Which of these two claims does the physics actually support? Here is the honest answer: the physics supports only the weak claim. Physics studies the physical universe. When physicists say "time began at the Big Bang," they mean that the time variable in our physical equations has a boundary at the Big Bang. This is a claim about physical time, not about all possible time. To get from "physical time began at the Big Bang" to "there is no temporal reality beyond physical time" is a metaphysical inference that goes beyond what the physics itself establishes.

So when we say "God existed in His own divine time before the Big Bang," we are not contradicting the physics. We are making a metaphysical claim that goes beyond the physics. And that claim is fully compatible with everything the physics actually tells us.

What Was "Before" the Big Bang?

If physical time began at t = 0, was there anything "before" the Big Bang? The question is tricky, because "before" assumes a temporal framework, and physical time did not exist. Yet if God existed in His own divine time before creating the physical universe, then there was something "before" the Big Bang in the sense of God's pre-creation temporal life.

I differ slightly from Craig here. Craig's hybrid view (examined in detail in Chapter 8) holds that God was timeless without creation and temporal with creation. He argues that there was no divine time before creation; God's timeless state was the boundary condition from which physical time began. Following Mullins's critique, I think this is a mistake.⁵¹ If God deliberated about creation, decided to create, and then created, these states involve sequence — a genuine "before" the act of creation and an "after." The dynamic life of the Trinity, in perichoretic communion, involves real relational sequence even apart from creation.

But what is crucial here, for our discussion of physics, is that the physical universe's beginning at the Big Bang does not tell us anything about whether God is temporal or atemporal prior to creation. That is a philosophical and theological question, not a scientific one. The physics tells us that cosmic time had a beginning. The physics is silent on whether there is a deeper, divine time that precedes physical time.

Part Five: Quantum Mechanics and the Privileged Present

A Third Pillar of Modern Physics

We have talked about Special Relativity and General Relativity. The third great pillar of twentieth-century physics is quantum mechanics. It describes the behavior of matter and energy at the smallest scales — atoms, electrons, photons. Quantum mechanics is, in some ways, even stranger than relativity. Particles behave as waves, observation seems to affect outcomes, and the quantum world is characterized by irreducible probability rather than classical determinism.⁵²

I do not have space here — nor would it be appropriate for a theology book — to do justice to the full range of interpretive debates in quantum mechanics. But I do want to flag two features of quantum mechanics that are relevant to our argument.

Collapse and the Arrow of Time

In standard quantum mechanics, a quantum system evolves according to the Schrödinger equation — a deterministic, reversible equation. But when a measurement is made, the system undergoes "wave function collapse" — a seemingly non-deterministic, irreversible process in which the superposition of possibilities is reduced to a single definite outcome.⁵³

This collapse process is profoundly time-asymmetric. It happens in a particular temporal direction: from the indefinite (before measurement) to the definite (after measurement). Time-symmetric in reverse — going from a definite outcome back to a superposition — is not something that happens in the real world. This is one of the most prominent cases of irreducible time-asymmetry in physics, and it sits uneasily with the block universe picture in which all moments are equally real and there is no objective "flow."⁵⁴

Some interpreters of quantum mechanics, like the "many-worlds" interpretation of Hugh Everett, try to avoid genuine collapse by positing that every quantum measurement causes the universe to branch into multiple worlds. But many-worlds views raise their own enormous problems, and they are far from being the consensus view among physicists and philosophers of physics.⁵⁵

Non-Locality Revisited

We already saw that Bell's theorem experiments strongly suggest non-local correlations in the quantum world. This, as I noted, seems to require either faster-than-light influences or absolute simultaneity — either way, it is hard to square with standard Einsteinian relativity.

Quantum non-locality is especially troubling for the block universe view because it seems to require a privileged temporal ordering between the measurement events. Bell himself, as we saw, was attracted to a neo-Lorentzian interpretation precisely because it accommodates these non-local correlations in a natural way.⁵⁶

The upshot is that when we put together Special Relativity, General Relativity (with cosmic time), and quantum mechanics (with non-locality and irreducible wave function collapse), the case for the block universe and against the dynamic A-theory of time is much weaker than it first appears. Physics, taken in its full scope, is actually more hospitable to the A-theory than to the B-theory, even if the Einsteinian interpretation of Special Relativity, taken in isolation, seems to favor the B-theory.

Part Six: Theological Conclusions

Physics Cannot Settle the God-and-Time Question

I want to step back now and draw out the implications for our central thesis. This book is defending a view I have called "dynamic omnitemporality" — the claim that God is genuinely temporal, experiencing real sequence and succession, while also transcending creaturely temporal limitations in ways that give Him access to all of time. Does the physics of relativity undermine this view?

The answer, I hope I have shown, is no. Physics does not settle the God-and-time question. Here is a summary of the argument:

(1) Special Relativity, on the Einsteinian interpretation, does imply the relativity of simultaneity and seems to support a block universe view of time. If that interpretation is correct, divine temporality faces serious problems.

(2) But Special Relativity can be equally well interpreted on the Lorentzian view, which preserves absolute simultaneity and dynamic time. The two interpretations are empirically equivalent; no experiment can distinguish them.

(3) Einstein's interpretation rests on verificationist presuppositions that have been largely abandoned in contemporary philosophy of science. Once we reject verificationism, the philosophical foundations of Einstein's interpretation lose their force.

(4) Experiments on Bell's theorem and quantum entanglement strongly suggest that absolute simultaneity does exist, favoring a neo-Lorentzian interpretation.

(5) General Relativity applied to cosmology yields a preferred cosmic time defined by the expansion of the universe and identifiable with the CMB rest frame. This restores a form of absolute simultaneity at the cosmic scale.

(6) Quantum mechanics, through its irreducible wave function collapse and non-local correlations, is more naturally interpreted in terms of an A-theoretic, dynamic ontology of time.

Taken together, none of this proves that the A-theory of time is correct. Physics cannot prove metaphysical claims about the nature of time; that would be a category mistake. But it does show that the A-theory remains fully defensible after taking modern physics fully into account. The claim that "science has shown that time is a block" is overstated — in fact, it is false.

Physics and the Limits of Empirical Inquiry

Let me make a more general point. Even setting aside the specific debates about Special Relativity interpretations, we should remember that physics has inherent limits as a tool for answering metaphysical and theological questions.⁵⁷ Physics studies the behavior of physical things. It can tell us how matter and energy behave, how space and time are structured at the cosmic scale, how quantum systems evolve. But it cannot, in principle, settle questions about the fundamental nature of time, the existence of God, the relationship between the physical world and a non-physical Creator, or the reality of consciousness and temporal passage.

Mullins makes a similar point. In his discussion of the metaphysics of time, he emphasizes that "the fundamental physical laws, as we currently have them, 'are not Time Reversal Invariant.'"⁵⁸ He notes that "the physical laws have a temporal orientation grounded in the observation that physical processes are not indifferent to temporal direction."⁵⁹ Moreover, Mullins rightly observes that scientific practice itself relies on an assumption of temporal directionality that would make no sense on a strict block universe view. As he puts it somewhat tongue-in-cheek, "Your average scientist knows this in practice. When an actual scientist sits at her bench to work, she does not actually think that the laws of nature could somehow go in reverse."⁶⁰

DeWeese makes a complementary point. Physics works with measured time — the time of clocks, of physical processes, of empirical observations. But the measured time of physics is not identical to time itself. There is a distinction between physical time (the time of clocks and physical processes, which is affected by motion and gravity) and metaphysical time (the time of successive being, which grounds all causal successions).⁶¹ The Einsteinian interpretation collapses this distinction by operationally defining time in terms of clock synchronization. But the collapse is not forced on us by the physics; it is a philosophical move. On the distinction between physical and metaphysical time — a distinction defended by Craig, DeWeese, Alan Padgett, and others — we can consistently say that physics has revealed interesting facts about measured physical time while metaphysical time itself is untouched.

A Temporal God and a Relativistic Universe

So how should we think about God's relationship to time, given all this? My view, developed throughout this book, has three components.

First, God is genuinely temporal. He experiences real sequence and succession. This temporal experience is grounded in the intra-Trinitarian relations — the perichoretic life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — and it is not dependent on the physical universe. When God created the cosmos, He created physical time with it, but He was already temporal in a deeper sense.

Second, God's "now" is privileged. God's time is absolute time, in something like the Newtonian sense. This is fully compatible with a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of Special Relativity and with the cosmic time of General Relativity. There is no need to locate God in a specific physical inertial frame, because God's "now" is the metaphysical "now" that grounds all physical simultaneity. The CMB rest frame can be thought of as an approximate physical reflection of God's absolute temporal perspective, though it is not to be strictly identified with it.

Third, God transcends creaturely temporal limitations. While God is temporal, He is not locked into the "now" the way creatures are. He has access to the past (without changing it) and to the future (without determining it). This is what I have called, following the logic of the book's argument, "transcendent temporal access." It is compatible with both the A-theory and with a sophisticated understanding of divine foreknowledge (developed in Chapter 25).

In short: a God who is genuinely temporal can coherently interact with a relativistic universe. He is not located at a particular inertial frame within the universe. He sustains the whole universe in being, from a transcendent temporal perspective that grounds the absolute cosmic "now." His time is not identical to cosmic physical time, but it is the metaphysical reality that cosmic physical time reflects and approximates. This is not a forced synthesis. It is, I think, the most natural reading of both the physics and the theology when we take both seriously.

The Pastoral Payoff: A God Who Meets Us in Our Time

Before we get to the final counterarguments, I want to pause and note the pastoral significance of what we have been arguing. This chapter has been heavy on physics and philosophy. It is easy to lose sight of why any of this matters for Christian life and faith. Let me bring it back to earth.

If the block universe is true and the defender of divine timelessness is right, then certain things follow for the Christian life that are, I think, deeply troubling. First, your prayers cannot really "reach" God in the moment you are praying. God sees your whole life at once, already complete, from outside time. Your current suffering, your current joy, your current repentance — these are not things God is encountering in this moment, because there is no "this moment" for God. He has always-already seen it all. Second, God's emotional responses to you are not really responses at all. They are timeless states that exist eternally, not reactions to what is happening in your life. When Scripture says God grieves over sin, rejoices over the sinner who repents, or delights in His people, these must all be reinterpreted as something other than temporal response. Third, the doctrine of God's providence — His active governance of history — becomes harder to conceive. God does not "act" in time in any straightforward sense; rather, He timelessly wills the whole temporal sequence to be what it is.

None of these implications are strict contradictions, and sophisticated defenders of timelessness have worked hard to make them coherent. But notice how different the picture is from the God we meet in Scripture. The biblical God weeps with Jeremiah. He grieves that He made humanity (Gen 6:6). He relents from judgment when Nineveh repents (Jonah 3:10). He hears the cry of His people and comes down to deliver them (Ex 3:7–8). These are not polite fictions or anthropomorphic accommodations. They are descriptions of who God really is.

If the physics does not force us to abandon this biblical picture — and I have argued extensively that it does not — then why would we abandon it? The philosophical cost of timelessness is very high, and the scientific benefit is an illusion. We can have a God who genuinely hears our prayers in real time, who genuinely responds to what happens in our lives, who genuinely acts in history — and we can have Him without any violation of modern physics.

Responding to Counterarguments

Let me address a few remaining counterarguments.

Counterargument 1: "You are just grasping at straws. The overwhelming consensus of physicists is that the block universe is true, and you are appealing to a fringe interpretation."

Response: It is true that many physicists speak casually as if the block universe were simply "what relativity says." But when pressed, most physicists will grant that the block universe is a philosophical interpretation of relativity, not a direct consequence of the math. Moreover, major physicists like John Bell have openly advocated neo-Lorentzian views, and the CMB rest frame is genuinely privileged at the cosmic scale. This is not fringe. It is the careful position defended by philosophers of physics like Craig, DeWeese, and others who have read widely in the technical literature. Additionally, the block universe is not a unified view; there are multiple different interpretations even among defenders, and all of them face deep problems of their own (e.g., how to account for the experience of temporal passage).⁶²

Counterargument 2: "Even if the neo-Lorentzian view is defensible, it requires positing an undetectable preferred frame. Isn't that bad science?"

Response: First, as we have seen, the preferred frame may not be undetectable at all. The CMB rest frame is detectable. Second, theoretical physics is full of undetectable posits. Dark matter, dark energy, quantum fields, the interiors of black holes, the conditions before the Big Bang — none of these are directly observed. The criterion of "detectability" is not an absolute scientific virtue, and insisting on it would require us to reject much of contemporary theoretical physics.

Counterargument 3: "Even if a privileged frame exists, why think God is associated with it rather than some other frame?"

Response: Because God is the Creator and Sustainer of all things, His perspective has a kind of ontological primacy that no creaturely perspective has. This is not arbitrary; it follows from God's nature as the Creator. Newton made this point three centuries ago, grounding absolute time in God's eternal existence. As the philosopher Milton Munitz put it (quoted by Craig), if we imagine a "superhuman observer — a god — who is not bound by the limitations of the maximum velocity of light," then we have precisely the kind of privileged observer that grounds absolute simultaneity.⁶³

Counterargument 4: "What about the philosophical objections to A-theory — McTaggart's paradox, the problem of presentism, etc.?"

Response: These are real issues, and they are addressed in detail in Chapter 24 (on A-theory vs. B-theory). McTaggart's paradox has been decisively answered by contemporary A-theorists, and presentism, while facing its own challenges, is a fully defensible position. I have not attempted to defend the A-theory on independent philosophical grounds in this chapter; my task here has been only to show that the physics does not undermine it.

A Final Reflection: Time, Science, and Humility

As I close this chapter, I want to urge a certain theological humility. Our understanding of time — both physical and metaphysical — is incomplete. We know a lot more than we did a century ago, but we also know that we know very little in comparison to what remains to be discovered. Physicists working on quantum gravity — the attempt to unify General Relativity and quantum mechanics — tell us that space-time itself may be an emergent rather than fundamental feature of reality. If they are right, then all our discussions of relativity and the block universe may turn out to be at the level of a higher-order approximation, with the true story of time at the most fundamental level still to be discovered.⁶⁴

This should make all parties in the God-and-time debate more humble. Defenders of divine timelessness should not confidently claim that relativity has shown the block universe to be true. Defenders of divine temporality (like me) should not confidently claim that relativity has been "refuted" in favor of an absolute time framework. What we can say is that the physics, as currently understood, is fully compatible with a dynamic, A-theoretic view of time, and that this view preserves the biblical portrait of a living God who acts in history, hears prayers in real time, and unfolds His redemptive purposes through genuine temporal sequence.

Conclusion

The argument from relativity has been one of the most influential modern arguments for divine timelessness. It is sophisticated, empirically grounded, and initially compelling. If physics really has shown that time is a block and that simultaneity is merely relative, then the classical view of a timeless God does have strong support.

But on closer inspection, the argument is weaker than it first appears. The philosophical interpretation of Einstein's theories is not forced by the mathematics. Neo-Lorentzian interpretations are empirically equivalent and preserve absolute simultaneity. Quantum mechanics, especially through Bell's theorem experiments, points to real non-local correlations that favor the neo-Lorentzian view. General Relativity applied to cosmology yields a preferred cosmic time. And the foundations of Einstein's interpretation rest on a verificationist philosophy of science that has been largely abandoned.

None of this proves the A-theory. But it does show that the A-theory remains defensible, and with it, the biblical portrait of a temporal God who genuinely acts in history. The God of Scripture is not an abstract timeless observer of a static block. He is the living God who spoke the universe into being, who walked with Israel through the wilderness, who became incarnate in the fullness of time, who suffered on the cross on a specific Friday afternoon around 30 AD, who rose from the dead on the following Sunday morning, and who will come again to judge the living and the dead. Physics has not killed that God. Physics cannot kill that God. The God revealed in Scripture is a God in time — a God who dwells in eternity, yes, but an eternity that is dynamic, relational, and genuinely temporal in a way that transcends and includes the time of His creatures.

In the next chapter, we turn to a different challenge — not from physics but from theology. Some critics charge that if God is genuinely temporal, then the future must be open, and the classical doctrine of divine foreknowledge must be abandoned. Chapter 32 shows why this is wrong: divine temporality does not require an open future, because God's temporal experience transcends creaturely limitations in ways that preserve both genuine sequence and exhaustive foreknowledge.