Space and Time: God

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If there was anything outside of our space/time then it would be able to view the whole of the universe for the whole of the time the universe has existed. That would be an amazing thing to look at, but I don't think we can even begin to imagine what it would look like.

I like to think of the "tree of life" which is talked about in evolution science, because all life that is living now is linked backwards to the first cellular life. So if one could see our universe from the outside we would see life as a tree that has multiple branches and recedes back to a simple trunk. But this tree would not be three dimensional, it would represent time as well so I am not sure what it would look like.

But if there is a god outside of space/time would this god be able to change what is going on in our space/time? And if we have free will does that mean this god is observing the universe growing and changing based on our decisions? If that is so it would imply this god is experiencing our time as well.

Seems like all of this filters through the subconscious and to get a good look at it one really has to practice looking inward into hypnogogia (and practicing such throughout the day in meditation) for a long time. Looking inward essentially provides, after enough practice, the same sort of thing that LSD, psilocybin, DXM, or even DMT might offer - ie. hallucinogens fold-back your visual and sensory processing in such ways that you get feedback loops which project internal processes right out into your senses and by similar sources, by training, people are able to sort of tune in to the 'ethers', unified field, or whatever one would hypothesize it being.

People who have NDE's of course come to find this state with incredible vividness and most verify such claims that God is outside of time and that they're outside of time (albeit there's still something keeping a metronome for them to think, move, and interact - perhaps lateral time?). Suffice to say that to have an NDE you probably went through something to get there that you'd generally not choose to partake in.

Whether such experiences are 'real' or not in the fullest sense we've got a few minutes (or decades) I think to go, however there are plenty of cases of human beings who meditate often having moments of feeling self fully dissolve and feeling an absolute connection with things around them. I'm hoping one of these days I'll get to enjoy that one myself and be able to describe it in detail and what it seems to be located under for those who are as left-brained 'gimme the brass tacks!' as I am. Things right now, from a lot of directions, POINT to our minds being linked to much broader pools of awareness than we're aware of but we're still in an army of anecdote and awaiting hard proof for those who'd demand it.

As far as what it would be like to be 'outside of time' and have any coherent thoughts - I think it would mean that you'd have to be in a place where you can look at the world you either feel like you just left or feel like you're temporarily standing outside of and be able to see 'time' in the way that you see a spatial dimension. You'd have to be on a completely different psychological time (POS watches don't count) because we have a problem which is similar to explaining water to a fish; ie. we're so absorbed in it throughout our conscious existence that we have no current remedies for parsing our instinctive tautologies in this sense and because of that, aside for the NDE'rs, heavy meditators, and tripheads, its a very difficult concept for anyone who hasn't pinned down to make sense of.

Uhm, I ask the OP's forbearance in re-framing the question.

How about; Why did God create this universe, and then hide Himself from us?

How am I supposed to know that? I'm not God nor do I have his neurology. I have asked the same thing. If God chooses to reveal himself and tell me the answer then he will. If he chooses not to reveal himself nor tell me then he will not. Right now, God has chosen not to.

Let's say God's existence is disproven someway somehow. Forget I even brought up God. It does not mean that there is not an outside of space and time. What I wanted to understand was what is considered the criteria for space and what is considered the criteria for time and is there an area of existence that does not meet this criteria for either space or time?

Please don't be offended.
God for me is a fact of personal experience. I have no other sane option but to believe in God.

I asked the question before because it is likely that the answer may be of the same vein as your question. I guessed that.

With regards to your question of 'outside of time and space', I rationalized it as the classical Newtonian type universe of our experience is a special circumstance. That this bubble of space time universe of ours exists within an underlying timeless quantum existence.

I heard that scientists have discovered evidence for a particle that has the ability to destroy space and time. This particle creates some kind of randomness in the universe that will eventually, in hundreds of billions of years, lead to the universe just ceasing to exist. Something must replace space and time after it ceases to exist, something not space and time or perhaps new space and time. Wait, it's the Higgs Boson particle. Also, if beings from other dimensions can interact with ours, they could be the divine beings religion is based. I am protestant and my theories could be entirely wrong or right, I've no idea neither do I assume.

How does that make you feel?

I'm not very knowledgeable about the various quantum theories of gravity but a number of them try to do away with spacetime. And some physicists, like Gisin, who are convinced that violation of Bell's implies that nature is non-local, further argue that nonlocal quantum correlations would appear to emerge, from "outside" space-time:

Quantum nonlocality: How does Nature perform the trick?
http://lanl.arxiv.org/pdf/0912.1475.pdf

How Quantum Entanglement Transcends Space and Time
http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/994?search=1

But since only entities localized in spacetime can ever be observed, it's not clear if "progress" can be made on this issue which kind of hi-lites Einstein's concerns witn non-locality/non-separability; nevertheless, I found these 2 questions/problems discussed in the paper below very interesting:

Maudlin quoted in that paper also makes this point which the author refers to and ultimately criticizes (e.g. the bolded part) as Maudlin's challenge:

Emergent spacetime and Empirical (In)coherence
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.6290.pdf

An "express tunnel" through other dimensions?

That is an interesting notion to conjure with.

the answer to the question is in the question itself

Assuming that God exists, everything we know about him is based on man, not God. That is, we really know nothing at all about God, only man.

Space and time are measures within our universe. I'm no physicist, but the way I understand it, space is the measure of distance from a given point of origin (in this case, the point of big bang), and time is, well, the amount of time that has passed since that point of origin. Of course, the closer you get to the big bang singularity, the increase is gravity would slow time, so time increases as distance increases, and our velocity (our rate of motion through space) would decrease without a force exerted upon all matter, so the distance traveled would change at a slower rate, so I would think space=time, but as I said, I'm a physics layman. Anyone with a working knowledge, please to correct me on this.

Nobody would know if God exists outside space and time, because then s/he would exist outside the universe. The laws of the universe would not matter, and s/he would be virtually undetectable. This is a trick to throw off skeptics that might ask logical questions about the existence of God.

More so, it also functionally eliminates the idea of a God that influences our universe, as that would, by my judgment, violate the first law, that matter or energy can be neither created or destroyed. The amount of matter in our universe is a constant, as is the amount of energy, and so is the amount of dark matter and dark energy. A being from outside our universe would be incapable of entering our closed system, as s/he would have to exist as either matter or energy (if s/he existed as dark energy or dark matter, s/he would annihilate itself and any matter or energy s/he might come into contact with), and since we can not gain or lose matter or energy, nothing can come in from outside.

As I said, not a physicist, and I haven't read any Hawking for many years, so if there's someone out there who knows more, please, PLEASE correct me. I'm fascinated by it.

Of course, if I'm right then everyone but deists are SOL.

Last edited by fueledbycoffee on 14 Mar 2013, 5:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

When we look at the big picture the disperate parts act together as one.

The school of fish, a flock of birds

I am very interested in the question of 'why is there anything at all?'

Some scientists now say 'Nothing is an unstable state - it is not surprising that something has emerged', but their 'Nothing' is their view of a particular condition of space-time, under various science laws, where a net nothing exists; I am more interested in why even that state should exit; why should there even be physics laws?

Some scientists further say 'The net energy of the universe is zero, so actually there is nothing'. This seems again to not help; if there are positive and negative energies, netting at zero, there is still 'something' ; i.e. the positive and negative energies.


As to whether God exists, it is not necessarily much harder to believe in God (or whatever created God) spontaneously emerging somehow (even if this happens outside time), than to believe in the Big Bang spontaneously emerging.

And although we appear to be tiny physically and in the time context of this universe (let alone multiple universes), God may still have have made a huge and long-timed universe(s) as part of His purposes, including as a crucible for making us for heaven and maybe others, other purposes.

The truth or otherwise of Jesus resurrection (i.e. a break in the normal physics etc laws) remains a key event in appraising what sort of situation we are in.

Or maybe not.

ruveyn

I think you're taking too much for granted.

I disagree that God is hiding. After all, if Creation exists, it is evidence of a Creator. Not only that, but God has used a variety of ways of communicating His message to us, both individually in our personal experiences and as people groups. Some of us accept those experiences for what they are and many of us don't. It's not that God has turned His back on us. We've turned our backs to Him.