You Already Know What it's Like to be a Worm
A few weeks after I published an article about time and superposition, and a few days after describing topological time, I saw this video in which Dr. William Lane Craig and Emily Qureshi-Hurst debate about A-Theories and B-theories of time.
A-Theoretic Presentism - only the present is real
B-Theoretic Block View - the past, present, and future are all real
In the video, Craig claims that “if you adopt a B-theory of time, it is a theological disaster”. He even claims that, on the B-Theory, Jesus is still dead in the tomb and that “the risen Jesus is a different object than the Jesus that died.” He concludes that “this is wholly unorthodox and denies central Christian doctrines like the resurrection of Jesus” and more.
Regardless of whether or not Craig is correct regarding the tensed theory of time, these claims that holding a B-Theoric view of time is unorthodox or implies the denial of central Christian doctrines are surely overstated. One need only consider the Augustinian traditions (including Reformed theology), which consistently describe the future as a fixed certainty, or the Simple Foreknowledge view, which allows God to simply “see” the future. Christian theologians throughout history have consistently described God as being “outside of time” and seeing all of time as a unified whole1.
Craig’s position that God is temporal with the universe, while not strictly unorthodox, has certainly not been the majority orthodox Christian position throughout history. Views consistent with B-theoretic time have much more support from historic theologians than Craig’s A-theoretic or tensed view. At the very least, it seems unreasonable to claim that a view of time shared by so many from every major historic Christian tradition (including both Reformed Calvinist and Arminian traditions), as well as theologians ranging from Augustine to C.S. Lewis2, is not an orthodox Christian position.
So what is the basis for Dr. Craig’s claims? Craig claims that our experience of temporal becoming is so intuitively obvious and the alternative so absurd that the tensed view of time should be considered a properly basic belief. Our experience of time is so intuitive, he claims, that it is strong enough to defeat any arguments or evidence to the contrary. It is primarily these claims that I will address in this post. I will argue that not only is the B-theoretic view more intuitive, more properly basic, and more theologically consistent, but that there are also ways of describing B-theoretic time that are morally and theologically beautiful.
According to B-Theory, you’re a spacetime “worm”
Ok, I admit, calling people spacetime “worms” is not the most beautiful terminology. The idea is that your existence in the present moment is just a momentary part of your whole existence, which stretches across time like a worm stretches through space.
If the past, present, and future are all real, your past self hasn’t ceased to exist, and your future self already exists. On this view, you are a unified creature that endures through time or is “stretched” across time such that your past self, present self, and future self are all real and all really “you”. Just as you exist as a creature extended through multiple points of 3D space, you also exist as a creature that extends through time. The fact that your hand is in one location and your head is in a different location doesn’t mean that your body is not a unified whole. And so it is, says the B-Theoretic view, with your existence through time.
This is one of the best visuals I’ve seen for what this idea is describing:
Bryanton, Rob. "Time is a Direction." YouTube, uploaded by 10thdim, 11 June 2008
(Most physicists do not take Rob Bryanton’s ideas about dimensions very seriously, but I appreciated this visual.)
This is not an arbitrary or fanciful idea someone dreamed up for science fiction; it is the natural and most common interpretation of the empirically verified theory of relativity. The modern theory of relativity treats space and time as a unified 4-dimensional manifold called spacetime. I won’t try to explain the concept of spacetime here, but I’ll at least point you to this 5-minute animated explainer video that describes spacetime and spacetime diagrams in a way I think anyone can intuitively grasp. And here’s a more detailed 15-minute explainer video.
This is the most widely held understanding of time agreed upon by a majority of physicists, but it is rejected by William Lane Craig, who maintains a commitment to a tensed view of time with a universal present moment. Physicists tend to prefer a B-Theory of time significantly because of the relativity of simultaneity, which most physicists find very difficult to reconcile with the idea of a universal present moment. This means that not only is Craig’s view of God’s relationship to time in a tiny minority among theologians, but his understanding of time and relativity is also in a tiny minority among physicists as well3.
According to B-Theory, you are NOT slices
While the above GIF is helpful in imagining a person’s existence as stretched out across time, it unfortunately requires a series of discrete images or “slices” in order to perceive the effect. But this is just an artifact of our limited ability to visualise time, such that we need to separate the slices into separate images. The B-Theoretic or Block view, on the other hand, claims that spacetime is fundamentally unified. This is where I believe Craig and other A-Theorists badly misrepresent the B-Theoretic view to the degree that they come to the exact opposite conclusions implied by the theory.
For example, Craig claims that a B-theoretic view undermines God’s justice because he imagines that your existence at any moment is simply a temporal slice. He then asks how God could, on the day of judgment, condemn a temporal slice for sins committed by some other temporal part that is “personally not identical with the part that stands before him?” But the whole claim of the B-theory view is that they ARE the same person! Each individual is one unified entity stretched across time, NOT distinct and separate individual slices. It is actually the A-theoric view that is more problematic because the person who committed the sins no longer exists! How can the present person be punished for the actions of some non-existent person?
This confusion seems even more ridiculous when applied to Jesus. Craig claims that, according to B-Theory, the risen Jesus is a “different object” than the Jesus who died, but that’s the exact opposite of what B-Theory claims. B-theory says that the person of Jesus is one unified spacetime person who endures across time - he is the same being yesterday, today, and forever - so it is absolutely the same Jesus who rises from the dead. But how can this work on an A-Theoretic view? How can the risen Jesus be the “same person” as the one who died if that person does not exist?
Our intuitions of time
What does your own subjective experience of time tell you about this issue? Do you feel like you are the same person that you were when you started reading this sentence? Are you the same person now that we’ve moved slightly into the future? Or is the you that is reading this sentence a new creation that has just this second come into being and - WHOOPS - now that “you” has dissolved into total non-existence. I would argue that the “you” from the beginning of this article, the “you” who is reading this now, and the “you” you will be at the end, are all the same creature because, unlike in A-Theory, you do not exist only at one infinitesimally small moment at a time.
A-Theorists slice up the unified manifold that is spacetime and then argue that slices make the continuity of personal identity impossible, but they are the ones doing the slicing. Imagine I slice up a pickup truck into a thousand pieces and then point out that it no longer functions as a pickup truck. The whole point of the B-theory is that time can not be sliced up into ontologically separate units4.
Many people, including Craig, claim that the B-Theoretic Block Universe view goes against our strong intuitions of temporal becoming. But let’s think about that for a minute. Which of these is the more natural, intuitive way of describing your experience as a human being?
A - I come into existence and then immediately disappear out of existence at each moment in time.
B - I am one person whose existence endures across time.
A - When “tomorrow” becomes “today”, a future version of myself, which does not exist yet, will come into existence, make an infinitesimal move towards the grocery store, and then disappear out of existence, at which point another version of myself will appear, make another move towards the grocery store, and then disappear. This pattern will continue until all those versions of myself experience a temporal becoming that results in several versions of myself that are continually appearing and disappearing at the grocery store.
B - Tomorrow I will go to the grocery store. That is, the same person I was yesterday, am today, and will be tomorrow, is the one individual who will go to the grocery store.
A - The child I used to be has disappeared out of existence.
B - The child I used to be is a part of who I am today.
A - The person I was a nanosecond ago has disappeared out of existence.
B - The person I was a nanosecond ago and the person I will be in a nanosecond are the same person I am now; during any given second of time, there is only one me who exists for the duration of that whole second (and beyond).
I would argue that the continuity of personal identity is WAY more consistent with a B-Theoretic view than with an A-Theoretic view. In fact, we have practically zero A-Theoretic intuitions because we can’t ever experience a single moment of the present before it’s immediately gone. You can’t consciously experience a nanosecond, much less a picosecond or a Planck second. Our subjective experience of this extension through time is so fundamental to our experience that we can’t even define what a single present moment is or could be!
Craig claims that: “the experience of temporal becoming is so deep, so pervasive - it’s not just the external world; it’s the inner world of the mind, the flow or the stream of consciousness - so within and without our experience is pervaded by temporal becoming.” This is a common objection to the concept of spacetime, and it is common for people to ask questions like:
If spacetime is a connected fabric with no objective “now”, why do we only experience time as one present moment?
If we are wormy spacetime creatures smeared across time, why can’t we influence the past? And why can’t the future influence the present?
Well, let’s think again about our subjective experiences of time, focusing specifically on our mental states. Consider, for example, these ideas:
Our mental experience of the past (through memory) is practically identical to our mental experience of the future (through imagination). Think about what you had for breakfast this morning. Now imagine you ate toast and butter. I would argue that your mental state when “remembering” is mentally indistinguishable from “imagining” something that didn’t happen, which is indistinguishable from “planning” what you will eat tomorrow.
Anyone who has severe trauma can testify to how the past can force itself unbidden into their present awareness, and this experience can be more vivid and more “real” to them than the present reality.
Anyone who has healed from trauma can testify to the power of actions and choices taken in the present to “change the past” - if not in reality, then at least certainly in the conscious experience of the past.
The reality of our mental experiences is that we are constantly jumping around in time. We have expressions like “quit living in the past” and “move on” specifically because people’s subjective mental states are so frequently turned towards past experiences. I often say that my wife “lives in the future” because she is constantly projecting her mental awareness into the future to make decisions and plans about what she wants to be true at a later point in time. I would argue that our subjective mental experiences clearly extend beyond one singular present moment.
Does B-Theory imply determinism?
Ordinarily, yes. The typical image of this B-Theoretic view of time is of a Block Universe - a fixed, solid, and unchanging structure where our experience of time is strictly subjective. We flow through space like the characters in a film whose frames all exist ontologically before we “arrive” at them. But this is not my view.
My view is that time does not sit in a static line, but that it vibrates dynamically in a superposition of multiple states like a guitar or harp string. This modal field of vibrating possibilities is best described, not as a fixed block, but as a topological space with multiple paths constrained by boundaries. In this view, time and the future are ontologically real, but they are not frozen.
Timelines in Superposition
I think this is actually the most intuitive and natural view of time most consistent with our subjective experiences. We imagine the future as a terrain of possibilities with multiple paths we could freely take, and which each have their own respective outcomes. We imagine the past as full of possibilities we could have taken had we chosen otherwise, and which would have changed our current state had we done so. We are not passive passengers being carried along through life on a deterministic track; we are agents navigating a landscape, seeking the paths that will get us to the destinations we desire. Yes, the paths we have available to us are also impacted by a host of factors outside of our control (just as we can’t determine the terrain around us or what waves may rock our boat), but we can set our course. We can freely choose from the finite set of paths laid out before us.
Logic flows both ways
There’s another point worth mentioning, which I’m far from certain about, but which may resolve many of the tensions raised by this view of God and time. When a musician plucks and presses on a string, the vibrations do not just propagate in one direction but in both directions simultaneously. If this idea were applied to time, it would imply that actions can influence not just the future, but also the past.
This idea may initially seem counterintuitive or even completely illogical, but there is nothing in our modern understanding of physics that rules it out, and there are a few findings I think support it. I plan to write more on this in a later post, so for now I’ll just mention some of the relevant evidence:
• The overwhelming majority of the equations of physics are entirely time-symmetric, meaning their mathematical forms allow physical processes to play out identically in either time direction. Reverse time, and all those laws of physics reverse too5.
For example, one of these GIFs is playing as it was originally made, and one is being played in reverse. Can you tell which is which?
• Some interpretations of quantum mechanics (like the Transactional Interpretation) involve retrocausality, wherein the particle detector sends a wave back in time that constrains which path a particle can take6.
Retrocausality is not as strange as you think
I admit that retrocausality is counterintuitive, but I think it is actually one of the least counterintuitive explanations of quantum experiments7.
For one, retrocausality is not time travel. It’s not like you can go back in time and kill your grandpa, which would of course cause all sorts of logical paradoxes. Instead, retrocausality says that events in the past, present, and future are fundamentally connected in a way that must stay logically consistent, but that the causal direction of this consistency is relative.
For example, because we experience time as flowing in only one direction, we, of course, experience parents causing children, who then grow up to cause grandchildren. But it’s just as logical to say that the birth of a grandchild causes a grandparent. Whenever a grandchild is born, that logically means that there must have been a grandparent, and this logic is just as consistent and necessary as when causation flows the other direction.
Also, it would be reasonable for me to look at an old picture of a twenty-year-old bachelor and say, “That’s my grandpa”, because we all recognise that, from our current frame of reference in the present, he “is” still my grandpa even though he wasn’t a grandpa at the time of the photo. You could kind of say that my birth “retro-causally” made him my grandpa and that that fact influenced his identity relative to me even when he was a child. Once I exist, the whole 4-dimensional spacetime worm that is my grandpa can’t not be my grandpa.
If retrocausality is just the idea that the past, present, and future are mutually consistent, that seems almost trivially true. The part that is trickier is the idea that the future can genuinely influence the past. But I think even this is pretty intuitive. For one, if your future had influenced or constrained your past in some way, you would have no way of knowing that, and your present experience would be indistinguishable from your experience had that not happened. But more relevantly, I think it’s reasonable to imagine that your future self actually does influence your present self in a host of ways.
Imagine you are reading a great book, and you really don’t want to put it down, but since you know you have to get up early, you force yourself to stop reading and roll over to set an alarm.
Or imagine you are offered a third cookie, and you really want to eat it, but you refrain. Or imagine you don’t feel like exercising at all, but you know you’ll feel better after you do, so you get up and do it. Who is it who makes you do those kinds of things?
In one sense, we could imagine that your present self is projecting your conscious awareness into the future and choosing to make decisions based on the present priorities you have for an imagined future. But might it be equally legitimate to imagine that it is your future self that causes you to set the alarm, refuse the cookie, or go to the gym? Think about it: your past and present selves receive no benefit whatsoever from those actions - in fact, your present self may be actively opposed to doing them. So my question for you to ponder is this: Who causes your actions?
• When you make plans
• When you set goals
• When you do something you don’t presently want to do
• When you consider the consequences of your actions
• When you anticipate or imagine something in the future
• When you choose between pursuing two possible future scenarios.
I’m suggesting that your actions are not being caused by the string of domino-like particle interactions dating back to the beginning of the universe. Your actions are caused by YOU - the real you who exists and has causal agency - it’s just that, in some cases, it’s the you from the future. It is only your future self that benefits from any sacrifices, plans, or actions taken in the present, so it’s reasonable to suggest that your future self is the underlying cause.
For a final example, isn’t there a sense in which every betrayal changes the past? If a wife discovers her husband has been cheating for years, that doesn’t just alter the future; it also fundamentally changes every memory of every past experience with him. Sure, you might say this is just in her mind, but this is at least a case where the past can be just as real to her as the present. And a woman who cheats on her husband for the first time tomorrow will be “retrocausally” breaking her marriage vows in a way that stretches back to her wedding day.
Even if you think this relativistic way of imagining time-symmetric causal relationships is silly and nonsensical (it could very well be wrong), I hope that I have at least shown that a B-Theoritic view of time and personhood is not as fundamentally counterintuitive as the A-Theorists like to claim. I sure feel a lot more like a creature extended through time than I do a creature that perpetually comes into and then dissolves out of existence.
Theological Implications
This idea of retrocausality is, admittedly, very speculative, and I present it not as a theological commitment, but as an idea for consideration. I’ll start with the things that make the most sense to me and move towards the most fancifully speculative.
First, the idea of retrocausality seems like a physical analogue to the philosophical distinction between logical and temporal priority. William Lane Craig would agree that, while God’s knowledge of the future is temporally prior to a human’s free choice, the free choice is logically prior. If a human’s free choice retrocausally determines what God knows, that would explain divine foreknowledge in a way that does not result in any logical contradictions.
Or consider the relationship between the death of Jesus and the salvation of Old Testament saints. Many theologians have suggested that the blood of Jesus “stretches back” through time to cover the sins of Old Testament saints as well as stretching forward to atone for all future sins. Might this be a case of both divine causality and retrocausality? God establishes the death and resurrection of Jesus at a specific time on the vibrating string that is the universe, and that atoning work reverberates across all of time.
Might retrocausality help us understand the Old Testament Christophanies, where an incarnate Christ seems to show up temporally before the Word was made flesh? Might the death of Jesus, in some mysterious way, cause the water to flow from the struck rock or cause the sacrifices to be acceptable methods of atonement?
Or consider again the person whose whole life has been shaped by a traumatic event in childhood, but who experiences profound healing as Jesus shows up for them in that traumatic memory. I mentioned these examples earlier simply as they relate to our subjective mental states, but might it be possible that Jesus is really doing some mysterious spiritual work that transcends time? Have we not experienced firsthand the way that Jesus fundamentally alters and reshapes our past, turning pain into wisdom and suffering into glory?
Craig argues that, if the B-Theory of time is true, Jesus never comes down from the cross and his body remains forever in the tomb. He says that we cannot become new creations and that sin and evil can’t be ultimately done away with but remain indelibly etched on creation forever. This is a legitimate critique, but it seems to miss the beauty of the redemptive work of Jesus to bring profound new meaning to sin and suffering. Doesn’t the fact of the resurrection totally transform the facts of Jesus on the cross and Jesus in the tomb? Have these tragic events not been transformed into beautiful and glorious realities in light of God’s redemptive work?
Christian theology across the board (and certainly in the Reformed tradition) has argued that God’s sovereignty in allowing evil ultimately results in a greater and more glorious good. Is a story like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars less good because the villain’s wicked actions remain on the pages of the book or in the frames of the film? I certainly don’t think so. Craig’s critiques do not seem to account for the degree to which Christ can and regularly does transform evil into good, not by eliminating it, but by changing its meaning and significance.
But what if God’s plans are even greater than that? What if God’s redemptive work is even more dramatic than we ever imagined? What if (and now I’m getting very speculative) Jesus’s plan is to retrocausally redeem all of spacetime? Maybe Jesus won’t just give new meaning to our past pain and to all the wickedness and evil that have occurred in the world. Maybe he’ll actually show up at those points throughout history and fix them.
The Universe is God Jammin’ on his Time Harp
I agree that the frozen Block Universe is both problematic and boring. It implies a mechanistic determinism which I find both philosophically implausible and antithetical to the Biblical witness. And I don’t see how God could have a meaningful relationship with a bunch of static spacetime tubes. But if the Universe is a dynamic vibrating web that includes living free creatures in a complex network of interconnected relationships, then the Universe is not just God’s clock (as Craig suggests), it is God’s instrument for making glorious music.
Imagine that the material world is like God playing a time harp. He creates or sings into existence this vibrating timeline of possibility, which contains a modal field of events, past, present, and future. The timeline is constrained by the limits God sets (like the range of vibrations of a harp string), and God proceeds to define certain events which must certainly come to pass by collapsing those possibilities into reality at specific points (like pressing on the string to make notes). We experience time as flowing in one direction, but it actually flows in both directions. God jams on his time harp, and each strum and pinch of the interwoven spacetime strings creates causation ripples both backwards and forwards. And God shares agency with humans such that we too can exercise our will, collapsing possibilities into realities and joining in the glorious symphony of God. God could be jamming on his time harp for all eternity, constantly telling stories and adjusting them in infinitely beautiful and glorious ways. The songs may surprise us with some unexpected notes, and at times the music might even seem dissonant. But the Artist is master of his craft and can always bring each tune to a glorious resolution.
1 For example, Aquinas describes God as seeing all of time from his perspective in eternity. The future may be in the future relative to us, “but this is not future with reference to the divine knowledge, which, abiding in the moment of eternity, is related to all things as present to them…each thing is known by God as seen by Him in the present.” (Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, Book One, Chapters 66, Section 7 & 67, Section 9)
Aquinas says God can do this because all of time is known by God, who is “in eternity, which is above time”. He even uses the analogy of time as a road - travellers on the road can’t see everything ahead of them, but God “sees the whole road from a height.” (Summa Theologiae, First Part, Question 14, God’s Knowledge, Article 13, reply to objection 3)
While Aquinas's view is ambiguous since he seems to deny the ontological existence of the future, Anselm is clearer: "just as the present time contains every place as well as whatever exists is in every place, in the same way, the eternal present simultaneously encompasses all of time along with whatever exists at any time." (Anselm of Canterbury, De Concordia, Book I, Chapter 5)
See also:
Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI, Chapter 13, Section16 & Chapter 66, Section 7)
Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, I, Chapter 13
2 “But God, I believe, does not live in a Timeseries at all. His life is not dribbled out moment by moment like ours: with Him it is, so to speak, still 1920 and already 1960. For His life is Himself. If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.”
(C. S. Lewis: Mere Christianity, Book IV, Chapter 3 "Time and Beyond Time") BACK^
3 In the debate with Emily Qureshi-Hurst, Craig distinguishes between “absolute” time, which he agrees does not exist, and “universal” or “objective” time, which he claims does exist (this is not a standard distinction among physicists). Craig claims that God being in time provides the universal reference frame necessary for a cosmic present or universal “now”, but he agrees that two people moving relative to each other at relativistic speeds or stationary near strong gravitational fields will not experience time flowing at the same rate and will have no awareness of this universal “now”.
When Emily points out that this certainly seems to undermine Craig’s claims that universal experience intuitively confirms a tensed view of time, Craig responds by saying simply that “our bodies, like our instruments, are not reliable clocks” because “if your brain slows down, it’s going to serve as a clock that is not very accurate”. When pressed that this implies we can’t trust our experience of time, Craig responds, “not as a clock,” but he claims you can still trust that temporal becoming is real because of consciousness: “the presentness of experience is, I think, undeniable.”
BACK^
4 I describe this further in my description of Topological Time. BACK^
5 These include Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, Einstein’s general relativity, and quantum mechanics (via both the Schrödinger equation and Feynman’s Path Integral formulation). BACK^
6 This is highlighted in the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment BACK^
7 The Copenhagen Interpretation makes no ontological commitments about what is actually happening (“Shut up and calculate”). The Pilot wave of Bohmian mechanics requires that reality involve an unimaginably large number of dimensions, empty “ghost” packets, and a real invisible force that extends across the whole universe and somehow operates instantly everywhere. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation says everything that can happen does happen in an alternate timeline, producing a practically infinitely branching tree of universes full of nonsense realities. Superdeterminism denies measurement independence, meaning the setup of every experiment has already been determined by the initial conditions of the universe. This implies scientists aren't actually free in how they set up experiments and that the universe somehow causally coordinates their decisions with outcomes. This would undermine our ability to do science at all. BACK^