It’s about time!

We live in a universe of clocks, from stars, to photons, to atoms! There are no lumps of matter or gleams of light in the universe we know of that do not have a temporal component! So, if religion and theology speak of time as malleable, or changeable, that is pretty interesting. What might that mean?

Every atom, indeed every subatomic particle, is moving in some periodic motion. That motion is characterized by time. They cannot be understood or described, or function, without time. Every glimmer of light is at its essence, an oscillation of energy, fundamentally described by time.

Likewise all large scale motion that we see has a temporal component: swirling galaxies, rotating planets, the life cycle of stars.

It is amazing that there exist Cepheid Variable stars (about one in every billion stars), which show large scale oscillations in luminosity, and where the oscillation frequency is directly tied to their brightness. Science believes that this oscillatory effect is due to their stellar atmosphere being at an unstable point of ionized helium opacity. (If the atmosphere cools below a threshold, helium atoms fall into a lower excited state and it becomes opaque to light transmission, but that opaque layer blocks the escape of heat, causing heat to build up under the opaque layer until the spectrum is hot enough to again excite those higher energy states, “bleaching” out the layer and allowing heat to escape. Then the free-streaming atmosphere cools, the layer becomes opaque again, and heat builds back up to the bleaching point again.) The oscillatory period of these Cepheid Variables is tightly tied to their brightness, allowing astronomers to relate oscillatory frequencies to “standard candles” of brightness, allowing us to estimate their distance from us. Coupling this to Doppler shifted spectra, this then allows us to make profound assessments of cosmic distances and expansion.

“So what?” you say, yawning. “What does this have to do with the interface of faith and science?”

Well, the cool thing is that scripture says a lot about time in ways that do not easily match with science. Here I will examine several of those statements and model them in a way that might add to our understanding. An important caveat is that when God is speaking to non-gods, like herdsmen, farmers, etc., He might not feel constrained to constrain His discussion with scientific precision.

The scriptures use the word time in a number of ways: a duration or span; a specific instance of time, e.g. “today at sunrise”; or a set interval, e.g. a day, or “the span of your life”. For our discussion, we are interested in time as an entity, the physical parameter which marks progression along the time, e.g. “the passing of time”.

We are told of a number of events at specific times, related to this planet and mankind:

the times of the creation, days 1-7. There is considerable variation in understanding of these events: 24 hour days, sequential periods of time, e.g. eons; potentially overlapping periods of time. Only the latter comfortably matches the scientifically-inferred sequences of planet and life formation.
The creation of mankind- Adam and Eve- does Genesis mean their creation was done instantaneously, or over a period of time (evolutionary development), or over the gestation period of Adam’s mother?
The birth of Christ, His life, His death, and the timing of His Resurrection.
Several periods of the Resurrections, a First, a Second, a Last.
The end of the probationary experience of mankind, immediately preceding the “day of Judgement”
The post-resurrection eternities.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: (A series of planned events at different points on the Earth’s time axis)

Daniel 8: 15 … I Daniel, had seen the vision,… at the time of the end shall be the vision…. I will make thee know what shall be in the last end of the indignation: for at the time appointed the end shall be. (A specific point on the time axis of God’s work with mankind on this planet)

Job 7:1 Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? (This is a specific lifetime interval, for each person)

1 John 2: 18 Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. (A specific interval, for mankind)

Matt 8:28-29 there met him two possessed with devils, … And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us before the time? (A specific point on the time axis of God’s work with mankind on this planet)

Revelations 10: And the angel … sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: … the mystery of God should be finished… (Now this might be different from all of the others. Perhaps this is the existence of the temporal parameter in all of the universe. Does this mean that the Universe then freezes into the state it was at that point?)

I believe that “time” is a fundamental structure of the universe. To remove it would be like removing the periodicity, or the yarn, from a knit fabric. The fabric would disappear, it would be fundamentally altered, changing its fundamental nature. So, I am inclined to think that scriptural statements which speak of time ending, are really referring to a set period of time, like the processing time in an industrial refinery, or when cooking in a kitchen. A timer is set, and when that set time is finished, the process under development is also completed. The cake is taken out of the oven, for further, different treatment.