There is an important result from modern physics that everyone needs to be aware of. It's been "hidden" for a long time for various reasons but it is now popping up more and more in scientific and philosophical books and journals. It gives the best ever proof for the existence of God and a human soul. And changes our entire understanding of the world we live in. And more besides!

To start, take a look at the following 20 second video:



What did you see? You're probably going to say you saw one palm tree moving in the breeze. But that was a video. What you really saw were 435 images of the tree. Well, that's a video. But if you were looking at the palm tree on the beach (in Carolina, Puerto Rico, just east of San Juan, BTW) would you be seeing a whole series of images? Or would you be seeing just one tree where the parts are moving around in the breeze? The standard assumption we make about the world is that we see parts moving around. But is that assumption right? Maybe when you are right there on the beach (or anywhere in this world) you ARE seeing a whole series of different, unique images. Is there some way to tell if you're seeing things moving around or a series of images just like in a video? It turns out there is a way to decide this.

This issue was settled by a physicist/mathematician, Hermann Minkowski in 1908 although often people say Einstein gets the credit because the idea is used in his theories of special relativity and general relativity. But hardly anyone knows about this result. It is an idea that has never really leaked out to the general public. Some physicists who specialize in time and Einstein's theory of relativity know about it as do philosophers who study the issue of time. It is only in the last 20 years or so that more people have been paying attention to this result. The answer is that we ARE viewing one 3D image after another, after another. The universe is just like a video that we are watching except it is a 3D video and each "image" in the video is huge. Each 3D image is a snapshot of the entire universe at a given moment in time! Now, in a video, as you start to watch it, everything you're going to see in the future is already out there for you to see. Then when you are half-way through the video, the part that you watched is still there. Physicists found that the universe is really a huge block of everything that has ever happened, is happening now or will happen in the future. They call it the block universe, or sometimes the blockworld. So they say that the past, present and future are all equally real. There is absolutely nothing that makes the present special except that it is what we see right NOW. In philosophy, the idea is called eternalism and goes way back in time to the Greek philosopher, Parmenides of Elea. For some documentation on the reality of this result you can go to my collection of quotes and references on the block universe: Science Points to the Block Universe.

There are more analogies to help understand the block Universe result. First of all, consider an amusement park ride such as the haunted mansion ride at Disneyworld. The whole ride was built in advance. When you start out at the beginning of the ride, everything you are going to see in the future is already out there. It has all been prepared for you. Then when you are halfway through the ride, the part you have already seen is still there, just like the past of our real world is still there. The future that you're going to see is still there ahead of you. And when you finish the whole ride, the whole past of the ride is still there and it is the same as when you started your ride.

Then there is the analogy of reading a book. First, the author has to prepare the entire book in advance and when all the details have been taken care of, the book is finished and then it is published. When a reader picks up the book and starts reading chapter 1, the whole future is out there ahead of the reader. As you move through the book, going page by page, the page you are reading now is the present, the pages you have read are in the past and the pages you haven't read yet are still there in the future.

Then, for the final analogy, there is virtual reality, as in the film, The Matrix. In virtual reality, a computer feeds impulses into your brain and picks up what your brain outputs. In virtual reality, the computer prepares a world that looks as real as the real world. Now in this situation you need to constantly feed frame after frame of visual information into the brain. The difference is that in our real world, you don't just have one 2D image after another (that appears to be 3D). You have one "3D image" after another and it will be your consciousness that moves through the universe of "3D images". And, as far as we can tell, in our world, those "3D images" really are out there.

The alternative to eternalism is called presentism. If presentism was true, then when you are on the beach in Puerto Rico looking at the palm tree, the palm tree is a 3D object with leaves that move around over time. Presentism includes the idea that there are particles moving around through space as they are acted on by forces. This is the 19th century vision of the world.

The creation of a block universe is interesting. It gets created all at once, as philosopher Barry Dainton says in this quote:

So everything that is ever going to happen or is ever going to exist will show up in this block universe. That's everything across all of space AND TIME! That's going to be every particle, every star, every galaxy and every planet that will ever exist for the entire lifetime of this block universe. There will be a "3D image" for every moment of time.

With presentism, you can claim that the universe evolves as particles move around. And of course, many people like to think that with particles moving around, living cells can form by chance and then evolve by chance. But our block universe is nothing like that. In our block universe we've got lots of living things and those living things are extremely complicated. And they all showed up at once! People often ask the cute question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?". The answer is that all the chickens and all the eggs across all of time all showed up all at once. It was not just chickens, of course, the same applies to every living thing. They all appeared at once. There just wasn't any time available to evolve any living things. It was just "poof" and then they were all there. So now, naturally, evolution by chance (and with it, atheism) has been killed in a single stroke. There must have been a Creator to make these intelligent designs. Of course, if you're trapped in time like we are, but you could observe the history of the whole Earth by rapidly moving through our dimension of time, you may or may not find Darwinian-style evolutionary changes occurring. Whether or not you find Darwinian-style evolution in the block universe is no longer relevant to the creation issue. Everything you see appeared at once. That is where the real act of creation took place.

All of this leaves atheists with a difficult situation. They can be modern, rational and scientific and accept the results from 20th century science (rather than 19th century science) and concede that there is a Creator. Or they can stonewall it and hope that something will come along to discredit the block universe. This is extremely unlikely. The science has been around for over 100 years and every time special relativity and general relativity have been tested they have worked perfectly. Or they can assume some highly advanced aliens have come up with a simulation and are feeding that simulation into our brains that are sitting in vats somewhere.

It was hard for people to accept the idea that the Earth was not flat. It was hard for people to accept the idea that Earth was not at the center of the universe and that the Earth went around the sun instead of the sun went around the Earth. It was hard to accept that the continents moved. The block universe idea is the worst of all of them. It will be very hard to get used to, especially in this day and age. In this day and age people have accepted the 19th century view of the world that things are happening at random and that through science, education and political action it is possible to improve the world by human efforts alone. This is the politically correct position. Instead, modern science makes it clear that there is a Creator and the Creator has a plan for this world and that plan is already out there in the future.

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