Tick Tock – God and Time

 An objection that many non-believers offer as defense for their ‘no-god’ position has to do the following:  How is it possible for a single God to devote Himself to each believer’s needs simultaneously with equal attention?  How is it possible, as St. Augustine said, for God to love each of us as if there were only one of us, when there are actually billions of us?  Beyond the Christian belief that with God all things are possible, C.S. Lewis describes how this might work by proposing that God does not function in the same time frame as we do:

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 (as we would see a whole line contained within a piece of paper)…. Almost certainly God is not in (our) Time.  His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight,  He  need not  listen  to  them  all in that  one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty-and every other moment from the beginning of the world-is always the Present for Him. If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.

Lewis goes on to explain that because of God’s ability to work from outside of the line that we travel upon, he can insert Himself at anytime, into any portion, of any life at His will.  If I am not mistaken, this begins to also be scientifically supported (if it makes a difference) by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.  And though not directly related to this argument is the New Testament passage from 2 Peter 3:8 that hints at God’s ability to operate on a wholly different frame of reference:

‘But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.’

Once we accept this concept we no longer need to defend as literal the Genesis story of the earth’s creation in six days, for with the Lord such ‘days’ may very well have been billions of years.  Pretty cool, huh?