Time and Theology

Theologians don't seem to be trained in physics or math. I've been reading Theology and Sanity by Sheed, and some of the arguments he brings to bear are rather less than plausible to a mathematician. Sheed is merely trying to support existing Catholic doctrine with existing arguments, so I won't blame him for the failures.

Take the doctrines of angels. He and others (including Mortimer Adler) spilt a great deal of ink on the nature of angels assuming that they are spiritual beings. But that is the rub, isn't it? I find several unacknowledged assumptions built into this structure. Do we understand clearly what is meant when the Bible uses the word spirit? Are all creations closely intertwined? The model he uses is of the absolute spirit God who creates matter, spirit, and the matter/spirit hybrid called man. But I do not see any justification for this beyond its obvious simplicity. Given that the Bible was written for men about God's relations with men, it is hardly surprising to find that it is not a textbook on fishing. And in fact it lumps almost all fish together. It seems risky to assume that when it uses the word spirit to describe angels (messengers) it intends spirit as a single type of creation; and then try to derive all sorts of surprising characteristics about angels from that assumption. Some early church fathers even spent time trying to describe the orders and hierarchies of angels. I'm agnostic about that--I don't see warrant for it in the texts.

Theologians seem to use infinity in a different way than mathematicians. Any schoolchild knows, thanks to Cantor, that there are many infinities. As any mathematician knows, it is not hard at all to have systems without an ordering. (Hence the Panglossian "Best of all possible worlds" is not well-defined; you can't a priori say that one creation is better than a different one.) If you want to use anologies, you could speak of God as a maximal infinity and spirits as infinite--but if so you easily see that just as there is a lot of room for different infinities, there could be different orders of spirits in an almost Gnostic progression. I will not say this is true. In fact I don't believe in such a hierarchy myself. I merely point out that since it is possible, angelology that relies on the uniformity of the word "spirit" falls to the ground.

And, of course, just because there exists a hierarchy of infinities doesn't mean we can obviously classify any particular infinity in that chain. It was found that it doesn't matter whether you assume that the size (cardinality) of the infinity of the points on the line is equal to the size of ℵ_1 or not! This isn't obvious (certainly not to me), but the implication is clear enough: you can't always tell where the infinity you have fits in the big picture. And do we understand spirit as well as we understand infinity?

Setting angels aside (what an interesting conceit!), consider the nature of time. Philosophers taught long ago that time (and motion) were closely tied together with space. Modern physics calls space-time a single thing, with rotations possible among all its directions (under known rules). Either way, space and time are both created things, and God the creator of both cannot foresee anything. Why?

It makes no sense whatever to talk of God knowing the future. He sees everything--our past, our present, our future--in His Now. This isn't my discovery; it has been known for well over 1500 years. What isn't so obvious is that the limitations of our language have been the source of the dispute over predestination versus free will. We have no language to describe God's operation with time in eternity. Not only that, but every attempt we make obscures some aspect of God's nature and action. The executive summary is that there is no necessary contradiction between God's creation/sustaining of the universe and our having a role in its creation. But try to describe this. Just try. If you describe God as outmaneuvering men's sin to win the war, you lose the sense of His unity beyond time and make it sound like God is also bound by time. If you describe His ultimate victory, you make it sound like we have no free will in the matter. If you try mixing the viewpoints you just sound confused. Our words mislead us.

Purgatory is another vexed issue; the abuses of this doctrine sparked the Reformation. In brief the idea is that our sinful natures need to be cleansed of their sinful tendencies before we can enter heaven. One would expect such a cleansing to be both painful and joyful. But the notion that we spend time there is uncalled-for. This is after death, remember? Time is for the body. What our spirits will experience in place of time is undefined. Call it aeveternity if you like. You still don't know what it is, and talking about spending more or less time there is talking nonsense.

The notion that Mary or any of the dead in Christ intercede for us assumes several ill-specified details of life after death and before judgement. Do souls in paradise experience time before they are resurrected? If not, how in the world could we communicate with them? I do not know what happened to Elijah, and I'm afraid I see no way of getting from "I do not know what happened" to the proposition "There are saints in Paradise who can hear us and intercede with God for us."