The Future Is What You Make It: A New Theory of Time
From physics to Marty Mcfly, with a bit of God in between.
I recently discovered a podcast called Theories of Everything, hosted by Curt Jaimungal. I enjoyed an interview he had with Avshalom Elitzur, a physicist and philosopher, on a “new theory of time”. It touched on several things that I find fascinating.
I'm not a physicist of course, but I think they both do a great job of making it all understandable. Basically, the idea is that the future does not exist—it writes itself into existence moment by moment. It doesn’t exist ontologically. It isn’t fixed somehow in some unseen realm.
The reason why this is controversial is it clashes with common concepts of time philosophically and from a physics standpoint. When Einstein's friend, Michele Besso passed away in 1955, Einstein wrote a letter to his family in which he said, "Now he has departed this strange world ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." This gives some clue as to how Einstein, and many other physicists, understand time: as some sort of illusion. The interview above goes into detail on this.
Einstein’s meaning behind calling himself a "believing physicist" was that he did believe in a kind-of higher intelligence—an underlying order and harmony of the universe. His concept of God was in line with the philosopher Spinoza—a god that does not interact with the world personally but is a kind-of natural order of the universe. Time as an illusion is a common perspective shared by physicists and philosophers alike—whether they're physicists working in quantum mechanics or relativity.
Of course, time is one of those things where the two disciplines of philosophy and physics intertwine. It's also one of those things where theology and apologetics also intertwine, as above you can see that time somehow leads Einstein to speculate on God. Where it comes in theologically is specifically on the problem of evil.
However, if Elitzur is right and the future does not exist, I think it brings some fresh solutions to the philosophical/theological problem of evil. Those solutions are often shared by a branch of Christian theology called ‘open theism’, which many say is a heresy but I don’t believe it is because it has more to do with how you look at time philosophically than “what the Bible says” about spacetime (very little!).
The problem of evil
I don’t want to spend too much time on the theological side, but I do want to lay it out as it’ll speak into a philosophy of time that I think is very healthy and leads to tremendously interesting questions for the future.
The problem of evil for God is one that relates to time because the argument goes that if God is all good, and all knowing, and all powerful, he is then also responsible for evil in the world. If he knows what evil will happen and has the power to stop it, but he doesn't, he is either not truly all powerful, or all knowing, or good. Or, perhaps he is not personal (Spinoza)—or perhaps he does not even exist at all.
It's a real problem for the theist, of course, but also one for the materialist as the materialist offers no solution to the problem of evil other than, “that’s just the way it is.” The materialist has something of a deterministic worldview in that we are in many ways subject to evolution and biology, whether we like it or not.
Anyway, a common, simplistic answer to this is that perhaps if God is good by definition, then it doesn't really matter because our perspective of evil/good is not very reliable anyway. God may have a good plan behind what we see as "evil", the trouble is our limited perspective.
This answer isn't an answer all theists give, but some do. It seems logical but yet not very satisfying because it doesn’t really prove anything. Indeed, it can’t really prove that premise that “God is good” because it assumes that what is good can’t really even be known by us.
So we move on. The other common answer is that foreknowledge does not equal causation. Just because God knows what you will do tomorrow, it doesn't mean he was the cause of it. And it would be a violation of free will if an all-powerful God intervened to stop you, outside of perhaps trying to influence you to make a different choice, because if he stops you (being all powerful) then it’s not as if your choice was truly free.
This answer is perhaps much more philosophically satisfying, yet I don’t think it answers the accusation fully. Foreknowledge doesn’t equal causation, but not acting on foreknowledge does equal some form of culpability.
A non-existent future = there is nothing to know
An emerging answer however lies in the philosophical question around time. Traditionally, attributes such as omniscience and omnipotence have been philosophical terms attributed to God. Mainly, Plato and the Greek philosophers defined these terms and they got imported into theology. This means that the traditional definitions are open to be challenged.
If the future does not exist, God does not know with absolute certainty what choices anyone is going to make. He can know infinite possibilities, but he does not know with certainty because the moment of choice is not an actuality until it happens. This conforms to how we actually experience time and choice.
This idea does not soften omniscience because God can only know what is, in fact, knowable. He cannot know logical absurdities (like a square circle). If it's true that the future does not actually exist but is constantly being written into being, then there is nothing for God to actually know except possibilities.
The future is what you make it
In the video above, Elitzur explains his experiment in detail, and it's fascinating. One of the aspects I found really interesting is how he thinks of Schrödinger's Cat—the famous thought experiment that says if you seal a cat in a box with a device that could potentially kill it, you won’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box. So, until you open the box and observe the cat, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive.
Elitzur’s answer to this is that the answer is unknowable because the future does not happen, until you open the box, which is when the future actualizes. It's really an interesting thought as it relates to choice—choices are real, they are not illusionary. Every choice we make does, in fact, make a real change to the total outcome. (There are not ‘multiverses’ where our choices may have been different.)
Elitzur’s theory is that if (as we know) space is consistently expanding, so is time. Spacetime is expanding. This is a clue that tells us that the future is constantly being created. If correct, he also claims that it could give physicists a direction to solve the seeming discrepancy between quantum mechanics and relativity, which sounds exciting, even if I don't understand it all!
One thought I have here is that everything in creation is about multiplication— reproduction. When he explains his experiment about how particles create the future, I thought much of it sounded like reproduction. Particles reproduce, expanding spacetime, and this creates a future. Each ‘reproduction’ however has a variable, which could explain relativity as not every particle is exactly the same. I think this would explain a lot, but that’s just a random thought I had!
This is interesting for me as it goes back to understanding a core meaning of life: that of multiplying all we have learned, all that we have, for future generations.
Not that I'm a physicist by any means, but I honestly think these concepts are worth exploring because, if true, they would change a great deal in philosophy—and certainly solve a lot of philosophical problems related to choice, free will, and how we relate to our world.
It certainly does for me. I think of the Back to the Future series, where Marty Mcfly’s girlfriend Jennifer Parker once again tries to grapple with the concept of time travel and Doc answers, wisely, that the future is wide open.
"Your future is whatever you make it."
And that is one of the beauties, and mysteries, of living!