Spacetime As A Canvas For Divine Genius

 

Some Christians struggle with the concept of a universe that spans billions of years, as if it challenges God's sovereignty and precision. I don’t agree. Given time’s highly complex relationship with space (the four dimensions of space-time), I think it’s another opportunity for us created creatures to see God’s genius at work. When you think of how impressed we can be by what humans create - Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Escher’s staircase, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Welles’ Citizen Kane, etc - I think not enough people are highly impressed with the intricacies of God’s spacetime. In fact, they probably just take it for granted - but it’s actually much more majestic than they are willing to consider.

Spacetime is rather like a canvas on which the process of God’s artistic critical path analysis goes to work: the splendour of the cosmos, atoms to molecules, molecules to cells, cells to communities, communities to multi-cellular differentiations, and so forth. If you think about the standard SI unit system, which measures all macroscopic activity (length, time, substances, electricity currents, temperature, mass, etc), it is built on the discrete, grainy substrate of spacetime, and resembles some kind of giant cosmic computational process, which can be measured in critical path operations within a search space in a finite execution time.

So when we get something like Psalm 33:9, which states that “He spoke, and it came to be”, and some Christians get tempted to say “Ah that fits in nicely with Genesis 1, and how God instantaneously brought these things into existence, not over billions of years” - I think, no, it just won’t do. Firstly, even computational commands are merely the apex of a whole host of complex background computations that require billions of critical pathways. And secondly, where in any other area of God’s created nature do we see such fait accompli results that require no prior work or effort? The answer is nowhere. Nothing exists in the whole of nature that provides a free lunch without someone having to plan, prepare and cook it - and that truth is instantiated in the cosmic process, from the macroscopic process of inorganic matter, right down to the discrete interstices of spacetime where the computations are underwritten.

In my submission, the prodigious amount of mathematical wash in the universe, far from exhibiting a God of profligacy, actually shows a Cosmic Genius able to undertake the most intricate sift and select computations, with an upper level of complexity beyond what the entire collaboration of human mathematicians could enumerate. Humans had to spend hundreds of years creating some of the most sophisticated computers in the world just to be able to get a slight handle on the topological mysteries behind God’s creative dispensations - and the vast stretches of time actually give glory to God and some of His creative genius.

Further reading: Why Did God Use So Much Space & Time?