Does God Know What Time It Is? Part Two

Dr. Craig: Hello! This is William Lane Craig. Credible sociological surveys have revealed an unexpected resurgence of openness and interest among students in the existence of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. More than any other Christian ministry, I believe that Reasonable Faith is strategically positioned to supply the evangelistic and discipleship tools to help further this young generation.

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Kevin Harris: Well, here it is. Your work comes up next, Bill. And as you can guess, she doesn't hold to the A-theory of time. Clip number six.

Alex O’Connor: There are people—the so-called Lorentzian view of spacetime, neo-Lorentzian, I don’t know what Lorentz refers to—who try to reconcile the A-theory of time with the mathematics of special and general relativity, right? They do exist. But you just don't place much plausibility in that. William Lane Craig as an example, right? You write about him. I've spoken to him about this years ago when I spoke to him and asked him about God's relationship to time, and he just said, “Well, God was timeless and then when He created the universe, He entered into time and became temporal.” And I was sort of like, “Huh? What?” And I still haven't quite wrapped my head around it. Maybe that's just me.

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: No. That doesn’t make sense to me either. If God was timeless before creation, then God is in a temporal relation with creation even before creation has existed, and therefore He's temporal. This is an objection that's been raised to Craig, and he hasn't come up with a compelling response in my opinion. But he's an A-theorist—I think it's one of the things that he believes most deeply about the world—and therefore has to come up with a way to explain relativistic physics. So he's devised this neo-Lorentzian interpretation. It's very much his baby. It's Lorentzian in that Lorentz was committed, as physicists in the early 20th century, to the existence of a background structure that functions as an absolute frame of reference against which you can measure the absolute passage of time.

Alex O’Connor: Like an ether.

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: Yes, it was the luminiferous ether, which was famously disproved by the Michelson–Morley experiment. So that's why it's neo-Lorentzianism, because it's saying, well, we like this idea that Lorentz had, but we're not going to commit to the ether. We know that doesn't exist, so we're going to try to find another background structure. But really Craig's arguments are theological in nature. He believes that God must be temporal and that there must be an A-theory of time for theological reasons. And, unfortunately for Craig, the neo-Lorentzian interpretation of special relativity has not really taken off anywhere outside of the philosophy of religion. Scientists have reviewed it and not really taken it seriously.

Kevin Harris: Plenty for you to respond to, but she doesn't think you've addressed that objection she brought up.

Dr. Craig: Yes. She and Alex are both confused about my view. Now, we can cut Alex some slack because he's a layperson, but Emily is a specialist in this area, and if you're going to criticize a philosophical colleague publicly, you need to be sure that you understand his view and that you articulate it properly. My theory of God and time has been articulated and debated by philosophers like Paul Helm, Eric Wielenberg, Ryan Mullins. But Emily is evidently not familiar with that. She thinks my view is that God was timeless before creation, which is a self-contradiction of her own making. My view is that God is timeless sans the universe and temporal from the first moment of creation, and that is a perfectly coherent view. What she does is misstate my view and then attacks this straw man for being self-contradictory.

Moreover, she's mistaken when she thinks that a tensed or A-theory of time requires a Lorentzian theory of relativity. Einstein's original special theory of relativity in his 1905 paper involved three-dimensional objects enduring through time. The four-dimensional block universe perspective was not formulated until 1908 by Hermann Minkowski. I personally have argued that Lorentz's version is more plausible than Einstein's version, but nevertheless both the original Einsteinian relativity theory and Lorentz's version are compatible with a tensed theory or A-theory of time. So it is simply false to think that relativity theory provides evidence in support of the tenseless or B-theory of time.

And then Emily has the audacity to say of neo-Lorentzian relativity that nobody takes it seriously. What am I to say to this? She's simply uninformed. There is a long minority tradition of neo-Lorentzians in the physics community, including such distinguished scientists as H. E. Ives, Geoffrey Builder, Simon J. Prokhovnik, and on the contemporary scene physicists like Franco Selleri and Antonio Valentini. In fact, in light of the experimental results on Bell's theorem, even the great John Bell himself recommended going back to Lorentz. Due to these developments in quantum physics, there has been what one participant in the debate has called a sea change in the attitude of the physics community toward Lorentzian relativity. That sea change was noted already in 1997 by John Kennedy in a presentation at the American Philosophical Association.

In the year 2000, Yuri Balashov, a very prominent philosopher of time, said, and I quote, “The idea of restoring absolute simultaneity no longer has the distinctively pseudoscientific flavor it had until very recently.” That was in the year 2000. Even more recently, in 2020, Brian Pitts notes that as a result of Petr Hořava’s formulation in 2009 of a quantum mechanical theory featuring fundamental relations of absolute simultaneity, the possibility that relativity theory may someday fall in favor of absolute simultaneity is “less extravagant after 2009 than one might have thought.” Indeed, Pitts says non-relativistic theories have seen “an explosion of attention since 2009” in fundamental physics. The references to these works can be found in Volume 2A of my Systematic Philosophical Theology on page 311. So Emily is just out of touch with the current scientific work.

But even more fundamentally, the reason that physicists until recently generally rejected neo-Lorentzian relativity was not scientific. Rather, it was the vestige of the old verificationism that dominated philosophy of science and philosophy of time during the mid-20th century, a point of view that is today indefensible. So once we shed the strictures of verificationism, there is no reason left—scientific or philosophical—for rejecting Lorentz’s interpretation of relativity theory.

Kevin Harris: Just for fun, let's check out one more clip on why she's not persuaded by the argument from fine-tuning. Clip number seven.

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: I found it the most persuasive argument for theism when I first came into contact with it. But then I thought more about it and looked at the evidence that we might be living in a multiverse. And that seems to strip away all of the probabilistic weight to the fine-tuning argument. If we are living in a multiverse—if it's an infinite multiverse—then everything that can happen does happen in either distant bubbles of universe domains or expanding-contracting universes for all of time, or however the universe is configured. Then, of course, there would be a universe that's conducive to life, and that's why we happen to be in it, because everything that can happen does happen.

Kevin Harris: Look through the podcast archives. We've talked about that, Bill. The multiverse eliminates fine-tuning as an effective argument. Your response?

Dr. Craig: I think this is really weak. In the first place, there is no evidence that a multiverse exists. But in the second place, even if there were a multiverse, it would not answer the fine-tuning argument because it gives rise to the famous Boltzmann Brain problem. Namely, it cannot explain why we observe a universe involving real spatiotemporal objects rather than just an illusory world. The latter type of universe is far more probable in a multiverse and therefore ought to be observed by us. So if we are random members of a multiverse, we ought to believe that everything we experience around us is illusory. Our bodies, our friends, the stars, the planets—everything is just an illusion of our mind. No sane person believes such a thing. So if you believe that we are respectable, ordinary observers, you ought to reject the multiverse hypothesis as an explanation of the fine-tuning.

Kevin Harris: In conclusion, Bill, Dr. Emily Qureshi-Hurst seems to be a bright thinker despite the multiple corrections you've had to offer. This book that she has coming out in a few weeks is already stirring up a buzz on social media. So, any recommendations to her? Any additional thoughts?

Dr. Craig: I'm pleased to say that it appears I may be having a dialogue with her in Oxford next spring. I also understand that she's currently expecting, and so congratulations are in order to Emily. But when I think about that, it does worry me about one thing. It worries me to think that her child might someday grow up to become a wretched B-theorist. And that would really be a shame.^[1]