God Lives in One Eternal Now
To God, there isn’t a past, present and future. All things (or all times) are present for Him. He can see the future as naturally as we see the present. He does not merely estimate what the future might bring. He knows all things. While we are subject to the passage of time, He transcends time.
Taking a number of scriptures that teach that God is omniscient, we might naturally come to the conclusion that He must be able to see the future. But we needn’t extrapolate. In Latter-day Saint scripture, he is abundantly clear on this:
But they reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.
Now whether there is more than one time appointed for men to rise it mattereth not; for all do not die at once, and this mattereth not; all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men.
and all things are present with me, for I know them all.
But the Lord knoweth all things from the beginning;
The fallacy of predestination
Some people don’t believe these scriptures, because they can’t reconcile a God who can see the future with retaining their own agency. Surely, they say, if God has seen what they will do, then they’ve lost all choice in the matter. Instead, they believe that God is subject to time, as we are.
I suppose if someone feels they must choose between predestination and God merely making well-informed, educated guesses as to the future, the latter probably leads to better outcomes for them than the former. But they are both false.
Predestination is a theory that our fates are predetermined and outside of our own control. That is counter to the gospel of Jesus Christ, who teaches that all are invited to come and be saved. Heavenly Father cast Lucifer out of heaven because he sought to destroy the agency of man. God, who has everything else, merely asks us to turn our agency over to Him by following His Son. In the end, when some of His children return to Him and some don’t, that will not be because He predestined us, but because we ourselves used the agency he preserved for us to choose for or against Him.
Is God making well-informed, educated guesses as to the future then? Two major hurdles must be overcome to believe this:
- How can we have perfect faith in a being who doesn’t really know what will happen in the end?
- How do we reconcile this belief with the scriptures? Where in the scriptures does God say He does not see the future? That He is subject to time? That he is making guesses?
To me, these are insurmountable obstacles. I have to believe the scriptures that teach is both all-knowing and can see the end from the beginning.
In the article “The Fulness of the Gospel: Agency” from the March 2006 Ensign, we read:
We do not believe in a deterministic God—that is, one who determines in advance the eventual fate of His children. Rather, we believe in a God who has perfect foreknowledge of the choices His children will make. He may use this foreknowledge to guide us or even to warn us, but He does not use it to preempt our agency. He allows us to become what we truly desire to become.
Agency in the midst of a time transcending Being
I really don’t like how the study of philosophy can lead people to ask unfalsifiable questions such as “am I just a brain in a vat?” I believe it is also philosophy that tells people that they cannot have agency if a time transcendent being has seen how they behave in the future. This is evil and false philosophy. I am not a student of philosophy, so my arguments won’t be sophisticated. But so much the better, perhaps.
Consider yourself, without an all-knowing God. Can you make decisions? Yes. I’m not going to defend this point any further, as it is self-evident.
Now add an observant God to the scene who does not interfere with you in any way. He sees what you do. You are not aware of Him. Can you still make your own decisions? Yes, by definition because He is not interfering with you; He is merely observing.
Now add to God the capability to see the future and past as easily as the present. He still does not interfere. Can you still make your own decisions? Yes, because He is not interfering with you. He hasn’t changed you. The only thing that has changed is recognition that a timeline exists. Where before we thought it started behind us and ended at ‘now’, we now realize it stretches before us as well. But just as our past is littered with our own choices, so too is the future.
Now, in this above scenario I describe a God who does not interfere. Now, we know He does interfere to some extent, but that doesn’t change the fundamental truth that we still make our own decisions. In my next blog post, I’ll dive more into His interference and how that influences us and how even God is limited in how He interacts with us.
Time as a spatial dimension
We experience 3 spatial dimensions in which we have a great deal of control. We can choose to go left, right, ahead and behind, which are the first two dimensions. The third dimension (up and down) we can also control by squatting or standing up, or by flying, or climbing down a canyon. We have mastery over these three dimensions. We are subject to a 4th dimension, time. But in this dimension, we are propelled forward by an unseen force. We can neither go backward nor speed up or slow down our forward progression.
When we have no control over a dimension, we don’t perceive it as such. In fact, some scientists believe there may be more than 3 spatial dimensions that we live in based on very tiny vibrations along alternate dimensions that with very fine instructions we think we can detect. Perception is the first step. Eventually, maybe we’ll learn to control movement along these alternate dimensions. Who knows what that will unlock? The point though is, until we can observe free movement along a dimension, we might not recognize that it exists. But it does whether we recognize it or not.
My mental model of God’s transcendence of time is that God might see time as a spatial dimension. If “past, present, and future are continually before the Lord”, I imagine he can shift His focus between them like we can shift our focus from left to right. He knows what will happen to us next year because to Him it’s as plainly before Him as today is for us. And He can interact with us anywhere along time. That is, He can intercept any time He wants to interact with us.
And still, the fact that He can and does see us as babies and dying old people simultaneously never took away our agency. What He observes is the result of our choices. He is not dictating our choices anymore that we dictate an ant’s path merely be observing it crawl across the sidewalk.
The importance of our belief in God dwelling in an “eternal now”
Joseph Smith’s Lectures on Faith repeatedly stresses how God’s character, perfections and attributes are all critical parts to our having faith in Him sufficient to obtain our own salvation. Believing God when He says He is all knowing, can see and declare the end from the beginning, and has all things past, present, and future before Him, I submit is critical to our having unshaken faith in Him.
The idea of God having all time present before Him is what I colloquially refer to as an “eternal now”, because God doesn’t experience past or future. All this is available to Him ‘now’.
Believing that God transcends time also answers questions like “How does God hear all prayers at once?” and “How does He have time for me?”
I believe in a God that is completely, ultimately trustworthy. Not a God who merely has a pretty good idea of how things will turn out.