“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
– Revelation 22:13
My previous post uses established science and logic to explain how the origin of the universe is not a physical thing, but an abstract thought that issues from the mind of God.
For anyone (like me) who thinks on such things, it still begs the question of where God came from. How did He and His mind originate?
The answer to that takes us to the very limits of human thought, where we can attain just enough insights into the reality of eternal being that we can grasp, though we’ll never be able to understand how eternal being functions. There are points of reason that we can reduce to a sentence, but trying to visualize them in reality is hopeless for creatures who can only think in three dimensions and in chronology, in which one physical thing leads to another. My experience has been that metaphors can help, but that even they, as representations for how things might work outside of the physical realm, can make your head hurt as much as they help you understand. The reality, I’m afraid, is just impossible for us to envision.
I liken it to witnessing a miracle — physical transformations or disturbances that defy the laws of physics. We could tell something is manipulating existence, but we can’t discern what is doing it or how. God exists on a plane we can know exists, but that we could never hope to perceive or even visualize with our “mind’s eye.”
That starts with the question of where God comes from. It’s our nature as space and time-bound creatures to expect that everything that can exist does so in space and time. Because we know that the universe came into being at a point in the past, we expect an explanation for how God came into being at some time preceding the beginning of the universe. That’s how I always tried to think of it, but we’ll never attain the right insight like that.
If we use logic to gather insights from the Singularity, we can understand why God does not come from anything. Time itself, after all, originates from God.
The commonly accepted explanation for how the Universe began is an explosive expansion from the Big Bang, from which time and the laws of physics came into being. But consider this point of temporal logic: if the Singularity existed and the Big Bang occurred before time began, then they are not themselves time-bound, but timeless. That means the Singularity and the moment of universal origin didn’t just “happen” and then disappear when the universe appeared. They both still exist. Something that’s in a timeless state cannot “subsequently” become part of time. That would make it temporarily eternal, or, eternal for a certain amount of time. It would be would be a logical self contradiction, like saying, “That time we had together a couple of weekends ago was eternal while it lasted.” Nothing can be eternal for a couple of days, millennia or for two billion years.
That’s why the Singularity rests permanently outside of time, and the Big Bang, the moment of universal creation from which time and physics originate, is still and is always happening.
Remember my warning about thinking but not trying to visualize, because that will begin to apply in earnest here. The universal Singularity, rather than being just a prior state of the universe, is also a permanent, timeless alternative state to everything that exists, including all of the space-time continuum, as a unity. So there is a timeless “Singularity” side to everything that exists and a Big Bang “creation” that’s always happening. Those states of timeless being and creation are invisible and undetectable to us and to everything else in time-bound existence. That original state and the act of creation encompass everything in the Universe, including all of time.
As we experience the Universe in space and time, the Big Bang began time and everything has developed along an arc of existence through time. Let’s call it the arc of Alpha to Omega. Right now, we’re living on a point of the arc careening from the past through the present towards future points of time “in front of us” on the arc that have not yet occurred. In the timeless Singularity state that envelops all of space-time, that arc of existence doesn’t start tracing through time. Rather, the entire arc of being just “lights up” from beginning to end in an instant.
The flash of creation that originates all things envelops all things throughout time. The Big Bang is more like a permanent realm on the other side of existence that’s not part of time as we experience it. It’s a realm from which God creates or alters existence. I believe it’s the realm of the Holy Spirit through which God manipulates and orders the universe.
Existence in a ‘snapshot’
A useful analogy we can use to visualize what I’m explaining is a group of friends going on a coast-to-coast trip. They pile their things and themselves into an SUV, drive along the route they’ve mapped out for their trip, make stops at gas stations, restaurants or hotels before arriving at their destination. What I’m proposing is that the Singularity side of the universe is that route of travel plus all of our travelers’ activity in one blur along the route, from the beginning of the trip to the end.
From God’s perspective, the singular unity of the universe appears as something like a vast, static map of all things and all creatures as they form, change, go out of existence, or live and die throughout all space and time. He could enter any point of that static blur to visit all people “in focus” at any moment in our lives to listen to prayers. It might seem to us that He’s able to listen to the prayers of millions simultaneously, but He could conceivably do so for each of us individually at different times in His realm, but at the same point in time in ours.
From the realm of atemporal eternity, God is not restricted by the chronology of time any more than He needs air to breathe. He could order the laws of the universe, manipulate certain occurrences and reveal His presence to us – all with the knowledge of the future, or even from the future using the “map” of all time and space. Cosmologists have puzzled over how the laws of science and the conditions under which the universe formed seem ordered against astronomical odds to be hospitable to life. Well, voila! God could from a point in the future order science and the beginning of time in a way to produce desired outcomes. Rather than the past always determining the present and the future, the future could in that way determine what happened in the past.
That’s why in “The Endeavor of Life,” I caution that my explanation for why a good God would allow evil in the world is probably not the only one or the best one. God could hear a prayer or see an outcome that does not please Him, and rearrange the past so that it doesn’t happen, or so that we never have to pray about it. And He could do it without us ever knowing it! I can argue why the perils to life motivate the behavior that brings people closer to God, but I can’t compete with that!
In my church, when we pray together about our hardships, we sometimes say, “… but Lord, you know all about it.” He knows what’s going on, what will happen, what’s good for us, or simply better or worse. And oftentimes, the order of life and the trials we endure are not what we want. God knows what’s right.
He knows all about it.
The Universe as awareness
God is the Universe itself, but the part of it that is aware and sentient, just as we are tiny, aware bits of the universe. He is the flash of the Big Bang, a moment of ordering and creation existing in a dimension of being outside the space-time continuum, but that covers everything that exists throughout time.
It is a dimension of being that is not bound by time or even chronology. Eternal creation is why we should continue to pray, because God is always shaping existence through feedback loops that could operate backwards and forwards through time.
God is not a person who merely precedes the beginning of time, but an omnipresence throughout all time generating existence from all points in time. We understand the eternal presence of God as Alpha and Omega. What I’m proposing is that we also understand God as Omega and Alpha who as far as we can tell can generate the beginning of the universe and sculpt space-time and the Singularity that mirrors it from the end of time through means we could never fathom.
Rather than thinking of time as a line with a beginning point in the past, we should understand time and all existence as a circle defined by the mind of God at the center the way the center of the circle geometrically defines the circle. Living on that circle, it seems to us as a line headed towards an endpoint in the future or an infinite extension of time going forward. We are actually on a circle that does not have an endpoint or a terminus.
Our special place
The human place on the circle of existence is uniquely significant. In the next post, I’ll show how a related line of reasoning using temporal logic and physics shows how it is that we are eternal souls.