Hardly anyone knows about the block universe idea from modern
physics. In the block universe, the past, present and future are
equally real. So the future is already ``out there" and the past
never went away. And we are moving through the block universe in a
way that is similar to being moved through the Haunted Mansion ride.
Or, it is as if the world is a HUGE video and we're watching it.
It's a video that has been made in advance and what we're going to
see in the future is already out there. This is easy to understand,
but it is also hard to accept because virtually everyone believes in
presentism because they were raised to believe in presentism. Below
is a collection of quotes and links to sources that support the
block universe idea. You can find many, many, more throughout
youtube and the internet. Most of these physicists and philosophers
do not take the next step and use the idea as a proof for God or
proof for a human soul, however, some do. Doing so, is, of course,
politically incorrect, only materialism is allowed.
The block universe idea originated in 1908 with Hermann Minkowski,
one of Einstein's teachers who, looked at what Einstein did with
special relativity and realized the consequences. For a bit of
history regarding how the block universe idea originated, see, for
instance:
Space and Time Minkowski's Papers on Relativity.
There would no longer be space and time, instead there would be
four-dimensional
spacetime, three dimensions of space and one
of time fused together. In physics, the time dimension is almost
exactly like a space dimension, but there is a subtle difference.
In philosophy, the block universe concept is called
eternalism and it can be traced back to the Greek
philosopher, Parmenides of Elea. In philosophy, it is also the
B-theory of time.
The block universe idea is much different than the understanding of
the universe almost everyone has. In philosophy, the alternative to
eternalism is called presentism, or the A-theory of
time. In presentism, only the present exists, the past is gone
and the future is not out there yet. With presentism, you have a
Big Bang that creates particles and they go flying through space.
In presentism, there are three dimensions of space and something
called time.
I've discovered that when you present people with the block universe
idea they often reject it in favor of the Big Bang idea. The Big
Bang idea is enormously popular with people because everyone else
believes it. An awful lot of what we believe, we believe because
lots of other people believe it too. The Big Bang idea came from
general relativity. But general relativity and special relativity
both support the block universe idea. With the conventional
(presentist) interpretation of the Big Bang, a whole lot of
particles formed in the Big Bang and they are moving around. And
the Big Bang is long gone. In the block universe, everything across
all of space AND TIME appeared and everything is frozen in place -
forever. Nothing is moving around. Instead, our consciousness is
moving through the block universe and this gives us the appearance
that things are moving around. The Big Bang is still back there at
the beginning of our time. It has been fairly easy for people to accept
the Big Bang because it fits in nicely with the 19th century idea
that there are all these particles flying around, the past is gone,
only the present exists and the future is not ``out there" yet. The
block universe has been more difficult for people to accept because
it radically alters our understanding of the universe. But both
ideas came from the same scientific theory, they both came from
relativity.
In modern physics there is also the subject of quantum
mechanics. Quantum mechanics deals with the movement of
atomic-size and sub-atomic size particles. They behave very
strangely, but physicists have the equations that describe how they
behave. In quantum mechanics, there is the term,
superdeterminism, that I believe is equivalent to, or almost
equivalent to, the block universe, although I've seen at least one
person say they are different. In physics, the block universe can
also appear as the blockworld. You mainly find the term
blockworld used in the context of the relational blockworld
interpretation of quantum mechanics. This interpretation of quantum
mechanics starts with the block universe idea.
>
Early on in his book, on pages 26 and 27, he writes about how, when he
first encountered the idea, he could not accept it. In the quote, below
Petkov talks about it as Minkowski's view of the world:
Let me assure you that I am perfectly aware of how difficult it is
to accept and especially to adopt Minkowski's totally
counter-intuitive view of the world. When I first realized its huge
implications for virtually all areas of our life ... my reaction was
perhaps similar to the reaction of a lot of you - the world could
not be that idiotic ... . However, instead of throwing out all my
books on relativity and hoping that my refusal to accept that view
would make it wrong, I chose to follow the path of the scientific
method. As like anyone else in the scientific field, I also
recognize the experimental evidence as the ultimate judge and the
only authority in science, I started to analyze the experiments
which confirmed the relativistic effects with the firm intention to
disprove Minkowski's view (i.e., the spacetime view of the world).
But the analysis did not produce the results I was sure they would
produce. Quite the opposite - it turned out that those experiments
would be impossible if Minkowski's view were wrong, i.e., if the
world were three-dimensional. After repeating those analyses,
finally I asked myself - If the world is indeed a four-dimensional
block ('frozen') universe, what should I do? Deny Minkowski's view
(which is proved by the experimental evidence) simply because I do
not like it?
Besides his explanation of the block universe, he agrees with me on
a number of important issues. First up is the existence of a
Creator. Petkov says this on page 129:
The presentist view of the world pictures it as an evolving universe
which, according to science, does not need a creator. On the
spacetime view, however, the world is a block universe - the entire
history of the world is given at once (as a whole - en bloc)
since all moments of time exist as the ``points" of the fourth
dimension of the world (exactly as all points of any of the three
spatial dimensions exist at once). It may not be seen immediately,
but a block universe implies that it was created.
Petkov goes on to explain why the block universe must have a Creator and
the reasoning is obvious: the universe is just too complicated for it to
have happened by chance. Here is what he had to say:
To see the challenge more clearly, consider the life of a single
person, e.g. a very creative and productive movie script writer.
Her entire life, with the smallest and even insignificant details,
is given at once in the block universe. I doubt that anyone would
be able to argue seriously that the 'script' of her life - her
four-dimensional worldtube containing all events in her life
(coordinated with the events of other people's lives), including the
elaborated ideas of her fantastic movie scripts - occurred
spontaneously. First, nothing can occur or happen in a block
universe since time is entirely given there. Second, it looks
utterly inexplicable how the enormous complexity captured even in a
single person's worldtube can come into existence spontaneously. I
think just one element of the movie script writer's life is
sufficient to rule out the idea that her entire life occurred
spontaneously - the very existence of intentions in her actions
(although not all intentions are realized) revealed at later events
of her worldtube. That is, how can a worldtube occur spontaneously
given the fact that each part of the worldtube (corresponding to a
given moment of time) contains intentions about its parts
corresponding to later moments? It appears logical to assume that
the gigantic 'world script' (the entire history of the universe)
must be created.
So, yes, Petkov is saying the world must have a Creator. The block
universe is the ultimate in Intelligent Design, yet people have yet to
notice that. Then he went on to say this:
Perhaps taking seriously this assumption fully reveals what a
challenge the spacetime view of the world is. I think it is
sufficient to mention only two questions - who created it and how
can the block universe be created given the fact that all moments of
time are given at once. It is true that formally, a block universe
can be created in a second time. As the existing experimental
evidence does not provide even the slightest hint of another time, I
prefer to stop here.
In my analysis of Genesis chapter 1, I show how the text could be
interpreted to mean that each ``day" of creation took place in a second
dimension of time. I asked Petkov in an email where the idea that the
block universe could have been created along a second dimension of time
came from. This is what he said:
The idea that a block universe can be created in a second time came
about more than ten years ago in some of the classes on the
foundations of spacetime physics - students always asked whether
there is a way out of the fatalism of a block universe.
By fatalism, he means that there is no free will. You can't change
your fate any more than a character in a book of fiction can change
their fate. Because the entire block universe (with the future) has
been fixed in advance, Petkov and others have concluded that we have
no free will. Instead, we are simply passive observers of what is
going on in the world. I have to disagree with this. Consciousness
is from our soul and while the block universe of matter is fixed, it
does not mean that our soul is not free. Of course, in order for
God to build the block universe with free will, God would have to
know what we were deciding out there in the future. Of course,
basic Christian thinking is that God does know everything, including
what we will be thinking and deciding (have decided) in the future.
A. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (Routledge,
London 2001) p. 152:
It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a
four-dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution
of a three-dimensional existence.
A. S. Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General
Relativity Theory (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1920), p. 51:
In a perfectly determinate scheme the past and future may be
regarded as lying mapped out - as much available to present
exploration as the distant parts of space. Events do not happen;
they are just there, and we come across them
H. Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (Princeton
University Press, Princeton 2009) p. 116:
The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the
gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of
my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting
image in space which continuously changes in time.
H. Weyl, Mind and Nature: Selected Writings on Philosophy,
Mathematics and Physics (Princeton University Press, Princeton 2009)
p. 135:
The objective world merely exists, it does not happen; as a whole
it has no history. Only before the eye of the consciousness climbing
up in the world line of my body, a section of this world ``comes
to life" and moves past it as a spatial image engaged in temporal
transformation.
R. Geroch, General relativity from A to B (University of Chicago, Chicago 1978) pp. 20-21:
There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves
therein; nothing happens; nothing changes [. . . ] one does not
think of particles as `moving through' space-time, or as `following
along' their world-lines. Rather, particles are just `in'
space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at
once, the complete life history of the particle.
There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves
therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. In particular, one does
not think of particles as moving through space-time, or as following
along their world-lines. Rather, particles are just in space-time,
once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once, the
complete life history of the particle.
9
In that paper, the authors go on to say this:
When Geroch says that ``there is no dynamics within space-time
itself," he is not denying that the mosaic of the blockworld
possesses patterns that can be described with dynamical laws. Nor is
he denying the predictive and explanatory value of such laws.
Rather, given the reality of all events in a blockworld, dynamics
are not ``event factories" that bring heretofore non-existent events
(such as measurement outcomes) into being. Dynamical laws are not
brute unexplained explainers that ``produce" events. Geroch is
advocating for what philosophers call Humeanism about laws. Namely,
the claim is that dynamical laws are descriptions of regularities
and not the brute explanation for such regularities. His point is
that in a blockworld, Humeanism about laws is an obvious position to
take because everything is just ``there" from a ``God's eye"
(Archimedean) point of view. That is, all events past, present and
future are equally ``real" in a blockworld.
10
When you think about the ``laws" of physics as just being regularities,
i.e., patterns that repeat over and over, you realize that God can
simply create a miracle by just not following the regular pattern.
Physicist Brian Greene has a well-known book,
The Fabric of the
Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality, that has a
section on the block universe concept, and PBS also did a video on
the subject with him:
The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time . The
video may not be available outside the US. There is also a copy of
that video on youtube at the moment:
The Fabric of
the Cosmos The Illusion of Time.
Greene, doesn't use the term block universe, instead he compares the
block universe to a loaf of bread:
...then reality encompasses all the events in spacetime. The
total loaf exists. Just as we envision all of space as
really being out there, as
really existing, we should
envision all of time as
really being out there, as
really existing too. Past, present, and future certainly
appear to be distinct entities. But, as Einstein once said
``For we convinced physicists the distinction between past, present,
and future is only an illusion however persistent."
1
Greene continues on and says this:
In this way of thinking, events, regardless of when they happen from
any particular perspective, just
are. They all exist. They
eternally occupy their point in spacetime. There is no flow. If
you were having a great time at the stroke of midnight on New Year's
Eve, 1999, you still are, since that is just one immutable location
in spacetime. It is tough to accept this description, since our
world view so forcefully distinguishes between past, present, and
future. But if we stare intently at this familiar temporal scheme
and confront it with the cold, hard facts of modern physics, its
only place of refuge seems to lie within the human mind.
2
And of course, the reason it looks like things are moving around is
because our consciousness is moving through the block universe. And
Greene thinks so too. In the following where he says ``our conscious
experience seems to sweep through the slices", he could just as well
have said ``as our consciousness moves through the block universe":
Undeniably, our conscious experience seems to sweep through the
slices. It is as though our minds provide the projector light
referred to earlier, so that moments of time come to life when they
are illuminated by the power of consciousness.
3
Of course, I would say that it is our soul that is moving through the
block universe. So we have proof for a human soul. This projector
light idea is also referred to as the moving spotlight theory.
Also in Greene's book, there is this helpful, if mind-boggling
example, that shows that the past, present and future are all out
there at once. Greene takes the case of a being named Chewie, in a
galaxy far, far away, in fact 10 billion light years away. If
Chewie is not moving relative to the Earth, Chewie will see what is
happening ``now" on the Earth, although it will take 10 billion years
for the light to reach him. But if Chewie is moving away from the
Earth at 10 miles per hour (Greene says he has a big stride) Chewie
will see what happened 150 years ago. If Chewie is moving toward
the Earth at 10 miles per hour he will see what will happen 150
years in the future. Notice that if Chewie first moves toward the Earth
and then moves away from the Earth, Chewie will see our future and then
see our past. For people on Earth, that's in the ``wrong" order!
Greene's example shows how the future is already ``out there", it
all depends on where you are and how you are moving.
For another example of the future already being ``out there", there
is the Andromeda Paradox from physicist Roger Penrose. In the
Andromeda Paradox,which isn't really a paradox at all, the Andromedans in
their galaxy 2.5 million light years away are debating whether or
not to send an invasion force to Earth. A person walking toward the
Andromeda galaxy will find out that the Andromedans have decided to
invade while a person at rest won't know that yet. Here is a nice
video on the idea:
The Andromeda Paradox (Does the future already exist?)
Next, there is a physicist in the UK, Edgar Andrews, who has written a
very nice, very entertaining, down-to-earth book called Who Made
God?: Searching for a Theory of Everything. In chapter 8 he
says this:
This implies, of course, the intriguing concept that all time still
exists. In the three dimensions of space, I can travel from
London to Manchester and onwards to Glasgow. In terms of my
experience, once I reach Manchester, London lies in the past
and Glasgow in the future. But this doesn't mean that London has
stopped existing or that Glasgow is still a green-field site. So
with time. The fact that we are confined to 'now' and can visit
neither yesterday nor tomorrow, doesn't mean that yesterday has
ceased to exist or tomorrow doesn't yet exist. It is, in fact, one
of the inevitable conclusions of relativity theory that the
whole of space-time must have a real and continuing existence
- regardless of our perception of time as being divided into past,
present and future. If you doubt my word, physicist Brian Greene
sets out detailed arguments to prove this and concludes: 'Just as
we envision all of space as
really existing, we should also
envision all of time as
really being out there, as
really existing, too' (his italics). The biblical idea that
God surveys all time is therefore predictive of what has only
recently become apparent to science.
4
I would say, however, that this result has been apparent to science
for around 100 years, so it is not really recent. But, of course, it
has only recently started to get the attention that it deserves.
Then there is a paper by physicists J. Brian Pitts and W. C. Schieve.
Recall that to say that the universe is a block universe is to say that
the whole universe, past, present and future simply exists, it simply
is. Or you can say that the whole universe is superdetermined.
So here is what the authors have to say about superdeterminism:
One also knows that the experiments violating the Bell inequalities
are compatible with the orthodox relativity if one is prepared to
embrace ``superdeterminism" ... .
However, this view's demanding philosophical underpinnings, such as
its denial of (libertarian) free will and evident need for an
all-determining Agent to correlate the initial conditions of the
world, might limit its appeal ...
7
That ``all-determining Agent" would be God, and as they say, this view
``might limit its appeal". :-) They also say:
On the other hand, the 3 major monotheistic traditions all have
(or had) strands that affirm theological determinism: Pharisaic
Judaism [55], Reformed/Calvinist Christianity, and Islam. That
there might be a natural affinity here is suggested by the language
(e.g., ([47]) about events being ``already 'written in a book'." The
resemblance to Psalm 139:16 (NASB) cannot be accidental:
2
Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Thy book they were all written,
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.
8
For a discussion of the block universe and time and space generally by
philosophers, see the book
Time and Space
12
by Barry Dainton. Here is an interesting quote about the creation of
a block universe:
Imagine that I am a God-like being who has decided to design and
then create a logically consistent universe with laws of nature
similar to those that obtain in our universe...Since the universe
will be of the block-variety I will have to create it as a whole:
the beginning, middle and end will come into being together
13
There is a strange thing going on in physics and astronomy. There
are people who know perfectly well that the universe is a block
universe. Yet they still talk about the Big Bang as the origin of
the universe, when the block universe with the past, present and
future had to show up at once. It's clear they don't like to think
about the true origin of the universe.
In the first 11:39 minutes of
Existential physics: answering life's biggest questions - with
Sabine Hossenfelder
the physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, in a talk given at The Royal
Institution, makes it clear that given what we know now, the past is
still there. She is less confident about the future already being
"out there" because of quantum mechanics. She never makes it clear
why. I'm going to guess she doesn't make it clear because if you
think about the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment it looks like
the outcome is random. But, as in the Andromeda Paradox, someone
moving relative to the cat will see the future fate of the cat
before the person sitting next to the experiment.
Here is another scientist who backs the block universe concept. It
comes from the book, Hidden in Plain Sight 1 by Andrew
Thomas. I picked it up for 99 cents as an ebook at Amazon. Chapter 5
is entitled ``The Block Universe". Here's a little quote:
...first it has to be stressed that accepting the reality of the
block universe is not an option. To disregard the implications of
the block universe is not only to ignore the conclusions of special
relativity, it is to ignore basic logic.
14
In the book he also mentions how he:
first became aware of the full, extraordinary implications of the
block universe model in 2006 when I read a superb
Scientific
American article by Paul Davies entitled
That Mysterious Flow. I suspect that for a lot people - not
just me - the article was a revelation.
15
In a little kindle ebook called
The Time Illusion by
astrophysicist John Gribbin, near location 379, Gribbin says:
The Universe does not change, but it exists, as a fixed block of
spacetime that contains all the things that have ever happened, and
all the things that ever will happen. The flow of time is an
illusion.
There is another mind-boggling subject in modern physics called
quantum mechanics. It appears to be even more crazy than special
relativity and physicists have come up with many different ways to
interpret what is going on. There has been no agreement on which
interpretation is right. A very recent interpretation is called the
relational blockworld interpretation of quantum mechanics
(RBW). It is radical in that it starts with the block universe concept.
A description of this interpretation can be found in some rather
advanced physics papers. These papers do, however, include
``islands" of fairly plain English that ordinary science-minded
people can understand.
31.
11
Thus, in the dynamical universe, the initial conditions plus the
dynamical laws explain everything else going exclusively forward in
time. In cosmology, for example, the initial conditions reside in
the Big Bang and the dynamical law is supplied by general
relativity. Accordingly, the present state of the universe is
explained exclusively by its past. This book offers a completely new
paradigm (called Relational Blockworld), whereby the past, present
and future co-determine each other via ``adynamical global
constraints," such as the least action principle. Accordingly, the
future is just as important for explaining the present as is the
past. Most of the book is devoted to showing how Relational
Blockworld resolves many of the current conundrums of both
theoretical physics and foundations of physics, including the
mystery of time as experienced and how that experience relates to
the block universe.
Or, in other words, to find out why things are happening now the way
they are, you can't just look at the past and present, you also have
to look at the future.
One of the physicists behind the relational blockworld
interpretation of quantum mechanics is Mark Stuckey and at Oxford
University Press they have this little page,
Ascending
to the god's-eye view of reality where he urges physicists to
adopt the block universe view. (It's there to promote the book,
mentioned above, that he co-authored.)
Stuckey also has some information on the blockworld interpretation
of quantum mechanics in a five part series on the subject starting
with this page:
Blockworld and Its Foundational Implications: Time Dilation and
Length Contraction
It is less painful than the original relational blockworld
interpretation of quantum mechanics papers but still is basically
for physics literate people. But, once again, you will find
``islands" of fairly plain English.
Here is an interesting article, from BBC Science Focus,
The Incredible Truth About Time by Robert Matthews. In it,
Matthews wrote the following, including where he quotes a physicist, Lee Smolin:
In the mid-1960s, the American theorist John Wheeler and his
collaborator Bryce DeWitt decided to see what insights might emerge
from applying the most successful theory in all science - quantum
theory - to the cosmos. Most often applied to the sub-atomic world,
quantum theory can - in principle at least - be applied to
everything, even the large-scale workings of the Universe.
Wheeler and DeWitt succeeded in producing a nightmarishly complex
equation that, according to quantum theory, captures the true nature
of the Universe. But the equation spawned a shocking insight. Of all
the quantities it contained, one that everyone expected it to
include had simply vanished: 't' for time. ``According to the
Wheeler-DeWitt equation, the quantum state of the Universe is just
frozen," says Smolin. ``The quantum Universe is a Universe without
change. It just simply is."
In science, we find paradigm shifts. These are major changes about
what we believe about the world. One paradigm shift was the idea
that the Earth went around the sun. The ``old guard" believed the
Earth was the center of the universe and the sun moved around the
Earth. In time, the facts prevailed and we got a new idea about how
the sun and the Earth are related. Then it wasn't too long ago that
everyone thought that the continents were frozen in place, they did
not move. In time, the facts prevailed and people now recognize
that land masses on Earth have been moving around throughout the
history of the Earth. When a new paradigm is proposed, at first, the
establishment ``old guard" resists. They think they understand
something pretty well and they could never be wrong because they are
so smart and so knowledgeable (this is pride). In the end, the
facts prevail. The ``old guard" dies off. The new paradigm takes
its place, the old one is discarded. People then regard the new
paradigm as obviously true. Someone said, ``Physics advances one
funeral at a time". So it is not surprising that there are
physicists who don't like the block universe idea. So, below, I
have a collection of articles by the critics. In the following
collection of articles, notice they are desperate to cling to the
old view of presentism. This is an implicit acknowledgment that the
block universe is the leading model of the world.
As far as I can tell, physicist Lee Smolin is a leading critic,
maybe the leading critic. I saw a
video,
A
New Theory of Time - Lee Smolin,
where he said he is committed to philosophical ``naturalism". This
means he is only willing to accept the existence of the physical
world. No spiritual world. That is his starting point, so it is no
surprise that he does not like the block universe idea. Instead,
he is trying to fix the situation by putting together a new theory
of time. From the Robert Matthews article, mentioned above,
The Incredible Truth About Time,
Matthews wrote:
Smolin is under no illusions about what he's taking on. ``The
scientific case for time being an illusion is formidable," he says.
Note that word, FORMIDABLE. This means he knows that the block
universe has strong experimental evidence to support it.
Farther on in the article, Matthews says this about physicist Julian
Barbour's approach:
Unlike Smolin, Barbour insists the Wheeler-DeWitt equation's
implication for time cannot be dismissed. He argues that the
Universe is really a vast, static array of 'nows', like frames on
some cosmic movie-reel. At any given moment, or 'now', time does not
need to be factored in to explanations of how the Universe works.
The sense of time passing comes from our minds processing each of
these frames - or 'time capsules', as Barbour calls them. Time
itself, however, doesn't exist.
Finally, towards the end of the article, Matthews says this about
Smolin's argument:
Smolin is thus suggesting that our very existence may be evidence
for cosmic evolution. And since evolution can only happen over time,
that in turn suggests time is real. It's an astonishing line of
argument for the reality of time - and one that doesn't convince
everyone. ``I find these ideas very speculative - to say the least,"
says theorist Prof Claus Kiefer of the University of Cologne in
Germany. He doubts even the starting point for Smolin's argument for
the reality of time: ``There is no evidence whatsoever that new
universes are born inside black holes."
Here is a report on a conference sponsored by an organization that
Smolin belongs to, the Perimeter Institute:
A Debate Over the Physics of Time
Several alternative models of time were presented but here is a nice
little quote from the article:
In the face of these competing models, many thinkers seem to have
stopped worrying and learned to love (or at least tolerate) the
block universe.
In a block universe you need a Creator to make the whole thing from
beginning to end, just like you need to create a whole book or a
whole movie from the beginning to the end. You're just forced to
have a Creator that comes up with the ``laws" of physics for the
universe, as well as intelligent designs, like life. So, our block
universe is an excellent proof for an extremely big and powerful
Creator. If you don't like the idea that the universe has a
Creator, remember the block universe idea comes from relativity and
every time relativity has been tested, tested for over 100 years, it
has given the right answer. And it all comes from something
extremely simple: the speed of light is the same for everyone no
matter how they're moving. Then, to get rid of the idea of the block
universe, you'll have to find cases where relativity gives the wrong
answer. And you'll need a theory that works for these new cases and
still gives the right answers for all the cases where relativity has
already produced the right answers. AND a new theory would have to
show that the block universe idea is wrong. That's a heck of a
challenge. Of course, while the block universe must have a Creator,
it doesn't show that the Creator has to be the God of the Bible.
If you choose to believe that the Creator is not the God of the
Bible you still have to wonder why a Creator created this world.
Then there is how believing in the block universe will affect
society as a whole. When people come around to believe in the block
universe it will have a huge effect on human behavior, for the
better. Knowing, the world is like a huge play, or they're in a
kind of huge movie studio, with a script written by God, it will
make people think more carefully about the world they are in and
think about how they should behave. They'll realize God is in
control and he has a role for everyone. Everyone has a purpose.
The world is not meaningless. On the other hand, presentism brings
out the worst in people because they think they can do anything they
want, make any kind of a world that they want. They just think
about themselves and their own plans. While living in a world that
believes in presentism is painful, this has not been a bad thing.
We need to learn about good and evil and this is best done if people
believe in presentism.
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Brian Greene,
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