Sarah, what an amazing, inspiring, beautiful, informative, well written and perfect essay. (( had more adjectives, but you get the point). Is this in your book (or some version of it). I mean I knew quite a bit, but learned a whole lot more. And I love the part about love. I think that love (a purely metaphysical thing,) may very likely be a lot more than that. Is gravity a form of love? How about electromagnetism? And once we have life, its all about love. Thank you for this, and God bless.
Sarah, this was a superb piece — not just as a historical survey, but as a window into how deeply human the scientific enterprise really is. You captured something most people never see: the long, winding, often reluctant journey from Aristotle’s eternal cosmos to a universe with a beginning, and how every step forward forced scientists to confront not just data, but worldview.
I appreciated how clearly you showed the pattern: whenever the evidence pointed toward a beginning, the resistance wasn’t scientific so much as philosophical. Einstein’s static universe, Hoyle’s steady-state model with its magical C‑field, Maddox’s “philosophically unacceptable” Big Bang — each one was less about physics and more about protecting a cosmos that didn’t require God. And yet the universe kept refusing to cooperate.
Your treatment of the multiverse was refreshingly honest. The way you traced its rise — from Everett’s quantum interpretation to inflationary bubbles to string theory’s landscape — made the point without polemics: these models weren’t just attempts to explain fine‑tuning; they were attempts to escape the implications of a beginning. And the BGV theorem landing like a hammer was a highlight. Vilenkin’s line about cosmologists “no longer hiding” is one of those moments where mathematics quietly closes a door.
What struck me most, though, was your return to Aristotle. The irony is profound: the father of the eternal universe still couldn’t escape the need for a Prime Mover, and even grounded cosmic motion in love. As you noted, Christianity inverts the direction — not the heavens loving God into motion, but God creating out of love — yet the resonance is unmistakable. It’s remarkable how often honest reasoning leads even pagan philosophers to the edges of biblical truth.
Your conclusion was beautiful. The scientific story doesn’t end in an infinite regress or a metaphysical fog. It ends in a Person — the Logos who created, sustains, and invites. The long search for a beginning ultimately leads to an end of striving, and to the One who gives rest.
Thank you Sarah for this excellent summary and your own conclusion that rationally encapsulates and incorporates the raw essentials of metaphysics, physics, cosmology and creationism into a unified theory.
Great work on this. I appreciate you touching on common objections like Multiverse theory, that ultimately either “kick the can down the road” or run into logical problems like infinite regress. We often leave these objections out when discussing the issue.
When we really think through this, the only logically coherent explanation to this problem is an unmoved mover.
I believe it’s why we are now seeing some really smart people invoking “brute fact” theories. They understand we can’t get away from these cosmological challenges, but God is not allowed, so brute fact of the gaps is invoked.
Sarah, I really enjoyed this one. My favorite passage was the one beginning "Science is human and messy" — the idea that science is shot through with philosophy, religion, and personal preference, and yet still works, because God made a discoverable universe that invites us to follow the evidence no matter where we started from.
So, in that spirit of disclosure, my personal foibles: I'm a Christian software engineer. I fundamentally believe God is both the Creator and the Sustainer of the universe, and after nearly five decades of trying to get computers to do what I want (not always easy 😊), I literally cannot contemplate a universe that isn't digital. Digital time, digital distance, digital energy — everything. My question is never just "what equation describes it?" but "how does it actually work, under the covers?" A mathematical equation is a model of the thing; it's not the thing.
Which is why your Aristotle section delighted me. Look at his definition of time: the *number* of motion with respect to before and after. A number. A count. Twenty-three centuries before anyone had a clock cycle to count, Aristotle defined time the way a software engineer would: time is change, tallied. In the digital-universe model I've bent your ear about before, that is exactly what time is — a tick counter. No change, no next frame, no time.
And his deeper principle — everything that moves is moved by something — is one every programmer knows in their bones: source code doesn't run itself. Write down the complete laws of physics and what you have is pure potentiality — a program listing, sitting there, doing nothing. Something outside the program must compute each frame from the last, or there is no next frame. Not a frozen universe — no universe. "Actuality without potentiality" is a perfect description of a runtime: the thing that executes everything and is executed by nothing. So Aristotle was even righter than he knew. The Prime Mover isn't needed once, at the beginning — He's needed at every tick. Creation writes the code. Sustaining runs it. "In him all things hold together" turns out to be a precise technical statement.
Digital time also hands your beginning argument a gift. You aimed Hilbert's Hotel at the multiverse — but if time is a count, the same absurdity walks straight over to the past itself. A definite integer of ticks stands between the beginning and this morning. Either that counter started at 1, or the universe has finished counting through an actually infinite sequence — an infinite loop that has already terminated. And notice this closes Sean Carroll's escape hatch, at least for a digital universe: a tick counter doesn't get fuzzy at t = 0. It either starts, or it doesn't exist.
Now, I can hear a physicist objecting: if the universe runs on discrete time intervals, what becomes of Relativity? A universal tick sounds suspiciously like a preferred frame. The answer, it turns out, is that Relativity fits rather well — if you start with the right model. Begin with one outrageous rule: at the very bottom, everything in the universe moves at exactly one speed, all the time — the only variable is direction. Then time dilation stops being a postulate and becomes bookkeeping: whatever a particle spends on going somewhere, it cannot spend on changing. A clock in motion doesn't mysteriously slow down; it simply has less of its motion budget left over for ticking. Einstein's equations tell us what happens. The right digital model shows how — under the covers. But that's a longer conversation, and I've trespassed on your comment section long enough 😊.
As for love being the engine of the cosmos — I think you inverted Aristotle exactly right, and here is the engineer's version of your inversion. Nothing compels the Programmer to compute the next frame. That the universe gets one anyway — every tick, for 13.8 billion years — isn't necessity. The heavens don't revolve out of love for God. They revolve because of His.
Agreed — and it goes further than I expected when I started pulling on the thread. The usual assumption is that discrete time should wreck Relativity. In this model it's the opposite: special relativity falls out of that one-speed rule I mentioned, and general relativity needs only a single further ingredient — no equivalence principle required, just one more thing the fabric is allowed to do. Time dilation, E = mc², the inverse square law, event horizons — all of them stop being postulates and become bookkeeping.
And it's less heretical than it sounds — there's a corner of GR I stumbled into that you might enjoy: in Painlevé-Gullstrand coordinates, a black hole comes out looking like ordinary flat space flowing inward, faster than light inside the horizon. Some relativists call it the river model. Let's just say I take the river rather more literally than most, and I have a story about why it flows.
But the details are the fun part, and I've learned my lesson about giving away the whole plot in a comment section 😊. They're going in the write-up.
I work as a metrologist, and I see the hand of God all throughout my work. The traceability of the SI units of measurement ultimately rests on natural physical constants. To me, that is more than just science—it is a glimpse of the order and precision of God’s creation. Nothing less than the science of God.
Thank you for this detailed account of what I knew only in rough outline. If I understand correctly, the BGV theorem proves that the only alternative to God the creator is a much dreaded infinite regress.
In a sense, yes. The universe has a cause, and if that cause isn't a Final Cause, then there's a cause of the cause, and a cause of the cause of the cause, and so on.
Okay, so I haven’t read Aristotle, so maybe this is a silly question - but why does he make the leap that, “the Prime Mover causes movement as a final cause—the result of an object desiring or loving the Prime Mover?” Why love? Why not something more impersonal, rational, “scientific” like energy or power or pure bland “attraction?” How did Aristotle get to love as the primary force behind the universe? Thank you for this well-researched summary of how scientists have thought through the origins of the universe!
That's a great question. Aristotle reasoned that if something moved due to an impersonal force, like gravity, then that would require the Mover to move, to change, and that would be inconsistent with the Prime Mover's pure Actuality.
Hi Sarah, this was a very informative and very edifying piece. You may or may not remember me from way back in the old Vox Populi days, from VD's comments as The Deuce and later in the Facebook group as Ian Bibby.
Fwiw, I think the idea of an infinite past was always a nonsensical, unintelligible idea. I've always been puzzled that Aristotle assumed it to be the case, since he already had a Unmoved Mover who is the root cause of every other cause at every single moment, yet who is unchanging hence outside of time, so he could've just assign that first moment to the Unmoved Mover at the beginning of the temporal chain without requiring a cause inside time to start it.
When we look at the future, most of us recognize that it will continue on forever. There will never be a very last moment in time. Yet, at the same time, there will never be a moment in time that is infinitely many years (or days or minutes or any other duration) in the future from the present moment when I am writing this. When I have been in heaven and/or the New Earth for 10 to the power of a quadrillion years, I will still not be able to rightly look back and say that this moment is infinitely far back in the past.
Whatever exactly we are referring to when we talk about time, it's a feature of time as we know it that no future moment can get separated by an infinite duration of time from a past moment through the passage of time.
Yet to say that the universe is infinitely old is to assert that exactly that has happened: that there are moments that occurred infinity years ago in the past, that somehow the present moment got separated from past moments by an infinite duration through the passage of time - a relation that can't occur through the passage of what we call time.
What this means is, assertions of an eternally old universe are actually a change of subject. If you assert it to be the case, you are no longer even talking about the same thing we call "time." You are implicitly using words like "old" and "past" and "time" to mean things fundamentally different than the sorts of temporal relationships between moments and the passage of change that we are normally referring to when we employ those ideas. An infinite past just isn't an intelligible concept if it's supposed to be talking about what we know as time.
First, I want to thank you for the fantastic history of recent cosmology. I didn’t realize so much happened very recently and not a hundred years ago
Second, I want to thank you on the relevance of infinity for the atheist. I had come to the same conclusion by looking at reasons one was an atheist on the internet. Infinity seemed necessary for any coherent comment about atheism though it begged the question of why there is existence in the first place.
After reading this essay, I have some observations:
Science is relegated to this universe and is essentially an analysis of the four laws plus matter and energy. So it is very extensive and the same time limited. It will never explain its origins. I have written about this on my Substack-
Infinity has implications - pick your theory about how an atheist gets around the Big Bang and is somehow hypothesizes there was something before. Once you get to something before, the sky’s the limit. But it has implications and one of them is that every possible state must have happened before and not only happened before but an infinite number of times.
The atheist fails to understand what infinite means and thus fails to understand the implications. So Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrences must be true. Did you know I wrote this comment an infinite number of times in the past.
Another implication is AI and that there must be an infinite number of unlimited intelligences in the past all of which couldn’t figure out how to survive the ending of their particular universe. Read Asimov’s short story,The Last Question.
Also the intelligent design folks are obsessed with the origin of life and Evolution of species. They are portrayed as religious and superstitious nut jobs but it still doesn’t explain the illogic of natural selection which cannot explain the origin of proteins.
Anyway, thank you for your history. And that the basis of the universe is love. That’s the second time in two days I’ve seen this concept.
As someone with a PhD in a scientific discipline, I appreciate the way you “pull back the curtain” and show the human messiness of science.
Question: Some of my scientifically minded friends sometimes mention the “Big Crunch”/oscillating universe as a way to accommodate the Big Bang in an eternal universe. Is such a theory still considered plausible scientifically? Or have astronomical measurements of the acceleration of cosmic expansion effectively ruled it out?
Arguments like "what if there's a universe that doesn't have space-time, though" is the reason Bertrand Russell came up with his teapot analogy. "You can't prove it isn't true," is not a good argument, never has been, and never will be. (Further, as described in depth in my other comment, I think a universe with no analog to space-time can, in fact, be logically eliminated from consideration.)
Suppose there are two Rube-Goldberg machines that a ball drops into, and each ball follows its independent meandering path. In order for the two balls to bounce off of each other, there must be a *reference frame* that orients the logical/physical sequence of ball A to the logical/physical sequence of ball B so that A and B can have a logical/physical effect on *each other.* Such a reference frame will necessarily be something like space-time -- it orients two once independent logical chains so that they can influence each other at some interactive step (where the chains "meet" in the reference frame) along their ways.
That is, I don't think there is reason to believe there can be non-space-time universes, with one exception: A single logical chain that determines/chooses to create (cause/will to exist) a reference frame where multiple logical chains can interact.
In plainer language, a Mind could be expected to make a reference frame like space-time if It wanted to additionally make many minds with their own reasoning and have those reasonings interact with each other.
In even plainer language, if I login to World of Warcraft on Monday night and my friend logs in on Tuesday night, we cannot play *together.* We have to both login at the same *time* and to the same server (*space*).
There is no multi-mind (or multi-logical/physical-chain) universe that supports interaction without a reference frame of some kind (which would be an equivalent to space-time). That's what space-time really is: a reference frame necessary for the interactions among a multiplicity of physical (logical) sequences.
Enjoyed the article, Sarah. But I have a question that always puzzles me and to turn Einstein's comments around, these physicists are great physicists, but poor mathematicians.
If the universe always existed as the atheist philosopher suggests, how do we ever reach today? Since forever in reverse is just infinite negative time, we would never reach today because we would be an infinite time in the future.
I mean I know the answer is their worldview allows them to ignore this distasteful mathematical truth, but it never seems to be brought up. Am I missing something? (We Christians have the perfect answer which is God is outside space and time).
Sarah, what an amazing, inspiring, beautiful, informative, well written and perfect essay. (( had more adjectives, but you get the point). Is this in your book (or some version of it). I mean I knew quite a bit, but learned a whole lot more. And I love the part about love. I think that love (a purely metaphysical thing,) may very likely be a lot more than that. Is gravity a form of love? How about electromagnetism? And once we have life, its all about love. Thank you for this, and God bless.
Thank you for the very kind words. This isn't in my book--it was inspired by the first part of the movie, The Story of Everything.
Sarah, this was a superb piece — not just as a historical survey, but as a window into how deeply human the scientific enterprise really is. You captured something most people never see: the long, winding, often reluctant journey from Aristotle’s eternal cosmos to a universe with a beginning, and how every step forward forced scientists to confront not just data, but worldview.
I appreciated how clearly you showed the pattern: whenever the evidence pointed toward a beginning, the resistance wasn’t scientific so much as philosophical. Einstein’s static universe, Hoyle’s steady-state model with its magical C‑field, Maddox’s “philosophically unacceptable” Big Bang — each one was less about physics and more about protecting a cosmos that didn’t require God. And yet the universe kept refusing to cooperate.
Your treatment of the multiverse was refreshingly honest. The way you traced its rise — from Everett’s quantum interpretation to inflationary bubbles to string theory’s landscape — made the point without polemics: these models weren’t just attempts to explain fine‑tuning; they were attempts to escape the implications of a beginning. And the BGV theorem landing like a hammer was a highlight. Vilenkin’s line about cosmologists “no longer hiding” is one of those moments where mathematics quietly closes a door.
What struck me most, though, was your return to Aristotle. The irony is profound: the father of the eternal universe still couldn’t escape the need for a Prime Mover, and even grounded cosmic motion in love. As you noted, Christianity inverts the direction — not the heavens loving God into motion, but God creating out of love — yet the resonance is unmistakable. It’s remarkable how often honest reasoning leads even pagan philosophers to the edges of biblical truth.
Your conclusion was beautiful. The scientific story doesn’t end in an infinite regress or a metaphysical fog. It ends in a Person — the Logos who created, sustains, and invites. The long search for a beginning ultimately leads to an end of striving, and to the One who gives rest.
A rich, clear, deeply satisfying read.
Thank you Sarah for this excellent summary and your own conclusion that rationally encapsulates and incorporates the raw essentials of metaphysics, physics, cosmology and creationism into a unified theory.
Great work on this. I appreciate you touching on common objections like Multiverse theory, that ultimately either “kick the can down the road” or run into logical problems like infinite regress. We often leave these objections out when discussing the issue.
When we really think through this, the only logically coherent explanation to this problem is an unmoved mover.
I believe it’s why we are now seeing some really smart people invoking “brute fact” theories. They understand we can’t get away from these cosmological challenges, but God is not allowed, so brute fact of the gaps is invoked.
Sarah, I really enjoyed this one. My favorite passage was the one beginning "Science is human and messy" — the idea that science is shot through with philosophy, religion, and personal preference, and yet still works, because God made a discoverable universe that invites us to follow the evidence no matter where we started from.
So, in that spirit of disclosure, my personal foibles: I'm a Christian software engineer. I fundamentally believe God is both the Creator and the Sustainer of the universe, and after nearly five decades of trying to get computers to do what I want (not always easy 😊), I literally cannot contemplate a universe that isn't digital. Digital time, digital distance, digital energy — everything. My question is never just "what equation describes it?" but "how does it actually work, under the covers?" A mathematical equation is a model of the thing; it's not the thing.
Which is why your Aristotle section delighted me. Look at his definition of time: the *number* of motion with respect to before and after. A number. A count. Twenty-three centuries before anyone had a clock cycle to count, Aristotle defined time the way a software engineer would: time is change, tallied. In the digital-universe model I've bent your ear about before, that is exactly what time is — a tick counter. No change, no next frame, no time.
And his deeper principle — everything that moves is moved by something — is one every programmer knows in their bones: source code doesn't run itself. Write down the complete laws of physics and what you have is pure potentiality — a program listing, sitting there, doing nothing. Something outside the program must compute each frame from the last, or there is no next frame. Not a frozen universe — no universe. "Actuality without potentiality" is a perfect description of a runtime: the thing that executes everything and is executed by nothing. So Aristotle was even righter than he knew. The Prime Mover isn't needed once, at the beginning — He's needed at every tick. Creation writes the code. Sustaining runs it. "In him all things hold together" turns out to be a precise technical statement.
Digital time also hands your beginning argument a gift. You aimed Hilbert's Hotel at the multiverse — but if time is a count, the same absurdity walks straight over to the past itself. A definite integer of ticks stands between the beginning and this morning. Either that counter started at 1, or the universe has finished counting through an actually infinite sequence — an infinite loop that has already terminated. And notice this closes Sean Carroll's escape hatch, at least for a digital universe: a tick counter doesn't get fuzzy at t = 0. It either starts, or it doesn't exist.
Now, I can hear a physicist objecting: if the universe runs on discrete time intervals, what becomes of Relativity? A universal tick sounds suspiciously like a preferred frame. The answer, it turns out, is that Relativity fits rather well — if you start with the right model. Begin with one outrageous rule: at the very bottom, everything in the universe moves at exactly one speed, all the time — the only variable is direction. Then time dilation stops being a postulate and becomes bookkeeping: whatever a particle spends on going somewhere, it cannot spend on changing. A clock in motion doesn't mysteriously slow down; it simply has less of its motion budget left over for ticking. Einstein's equations tell us what happens. The right digital model shows how — under the covers. But that's a longer conversation, and I've trespassed on your comment section long enough 😊.
As for love being the engine of the cosmos — I think you inverted Aristotle exactly right, and here is the engineer's version of your inversion. Nothing compels the Programmer to compute the next frame. That the universe gets one anyway — every tick, for 13.8 billion years — isn't necessity. The heavens don't revolve out of love for God. They revolve because of His.
Thanks for writing these.
— Michael
"Digital" time fits very well with a quantum view of the universe.
Agreed — and it goes further than I expected when I started pulling on the thread. The usual assumption is that discrete time should wreck Relativity. In this model it's the opposite: special relativity falls out of that one-speed rule I mentioned, and general relativity needs only a single further ingredient — no equivalence principle required, just one more thing the fabric is allowed to do. Time dilation, E = mc², the inverse square law, event horizons — all of them stop being postulates and become bookkeeping.
And it's less heretical than it sounds — there's a corner of GR I stumbled into that you might enjoy: in Painlevé-Gullstrand coordinates, a black hole comes out looking like ordinary flat space flowing inward, faster than light inside the horizon. Some relativists call it the river model. Let's just say I take the river rather more literally than most, and I have a story about why it flows.
But the details are the fun part, and I've learned my lesson about giving away the whole plot in a comment section 😊. They're going in the write-up.
I work as a metrologist, and I see the hand of God all throughout my work. The traceability of the SI units of measurement ultimately rests on natural physical constants. To me, that is more than just science—it is a glimpse of the order and precision of God’s creation. Nothing less than the science of God.
Thank you for this detailed account of what I knew only in rough outline. If I understand correctly, the BGV theorem proves that the only alternative to God the creator is a much dreaded infinite regress.
In a sense, yes. The universe has a cause, and if that cause isn't a Final Cause, then there's a cause of the cause, and a cause of the cause of the cause, and so on.
Thank you, Sarah. Very well done indeed!
I love your work and your writing!
Okay, so I haven’t read Aristotle, so maybe this is a silly question - but why does he make the leap that, “the Prime Mover causes movement as a final cause—the result of an object desiring or loving the Prime Mover?” Why love? Why not something more impersonal, rational, “scientific” like energy or power or pure bland “attraction?” How did Aristotle get to love as the primary force behind the universe? Thank you for this well-researched summary of how scientists have thought through the origins of the universe!
That's a great question. Aristotle reasoned that if something moved due to an impersonal force, like gravity, then that would require the Mover to move, to change, and that would be inconsistent with the Prime Mover's pure Actuality.
Hi Sarah, this was a very informative and very edifying piece. You may or may not remember me from way back in the old Vox Populi days, from VD's comments as The Deuce and later in the Facebook group as Ian Bibby.
Fwiw, I think the idea of an infinite past was always a nonsensical, unintelligible idea. I've always been puzzled that Aristotle assumed it to be the case, since he already had a Unmoved Mover who is the root cause of every other cause at every single moment, yet who is unchanging hence outside of time, so he could've just assign that first moment to the Unmoved Mover at the beginning of the temporal chain without requiring a cause inside time to start it.
When we look at the future, most of us recognize that it will continue on forever. There will never be a very last moment in time. Yet, at the same time, there will never be a moment in time that is infinitely many years (or days or minutes or any other duration) in the future from the present moment when I am writing this. When I have been in heaven and/or the New Earth for 10 to the power of a quadrillion years, I will still not be able to rightly look back and say that this moment is infinitely far back in the past.
Whatever exactly we are referring to when we talk about time, it's a feature of time as we know it that no future moment can get separated by an infinite duration of time from a past moment through the passage of time.
Yet to say that the universe is infinitely old is to assert that exactly that has happened: that there are moments that occurred infinity years ago in the past, that somehow the present moment got separated from past moments by an infinite duration through the passage of time - a relation that can't occur through the passage of what we call time.
What this means is, assertions of an eternally old universe are actually a change of subject. If you assert it to be the case, you are no longer even talking about the same thing we call "time." You are implicitly using words like "old" and "past" and "time" to mean things fundamentally different than the sorts of temporal relationships between moments and the passage of change that we are normally referring to when we employ those ideas. An infinite past just isn't an intelligible concept if it's supposed to be talking about what we know as time.
First, I want to thank you for the fantastic history of recent cosmology. I didn’t realize so much happened very recently and not a hundred years ago
Second, I want to thank you on the relevance of infinity for the atheist. I had come to the same conclusion by looking at reasons one was an atheist on the internet. Infinity seemed necessary for any coherent comment about atheism though it begged the question of why there is existence in the first place.
After reading this essay, I have some observations:
Science is relegated to this universe and is essentially an analysis of the four laws plus matter and energy. So it is very extensive and the same time limited. It will never explain its origins. I have written about this on my Substack-
https://jrcsmc.substack.com/p/science
Infinity has implications - pick your theory about how an atheist gets around the Big Bang and is somehow hypothesizes there was something before. Once you get to something before, the sky’s the limit. But it has implications and one of them is that every possible state must have happened before and not only happened before but an infinite number of times.
The atheist fails to understand what infinite means and thus fails to understand the implications. So Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrences must be true. Did you know I wrote this comment an infinite number of times in the past.
Another implication is AI and that there must be an infinite number of unlimited intelligences in the past all of which couldn’t figure out how to survive the ending of their particular universe. Read Asimov’s short story,The Last Question.
Also the intelligent design folks are obsessed with the origin of life and Evolution of species. They are portrayed as religious and superstitious nut jobs but it still doesn’t explain the illogic of natural selection which cannot explain the origin of proteins.
Anyway, thank you for your history. And that the basis of the universe is love. That’s the second time in two days I’ve seen this concept.
As someone with a PhD in a scientific discipline, I appreciate the way you “pull back the curtain” and show the human messiness of science.
Question: Some of my scientifically minded friends sometimes mention the “Big Crunch”/oscillating universe as a way to accommodate the Big Bang in an eternal universe. Is such a theory still considered plausible scientifically? Or have astronomical measurements of the acceleration of cosmic expansion effectively ruled it out?
Arguments like "what if there's a universe that doesn't have space-time, though" is the reason Bertrand Russell came up with his teapot analogy. "You can't prove it isn't true," is not a good argument, never has been, and never will be. (Further, as described in depth in my other comment, I think a universe with no analog to space-time can, in fact, be logically eliminated from consideration.)
Suppose there are two Rube-Goldberg machines that a ball drops into, and each ball follows its independent meandering path. In order for the two balls to bounce off of each other, there must be a *reference frame* that orients the logical/physical sequence of ball A to the logical/physical sequence of ball B so that A and B can have a logical/physical effect on *each other.* Such a reference frame will necessarily be something like space-time -- it orients two once independent logical chains so that they can influence each other at some interactive step (where the chains "meet" in the reference frame) along their ways.
That is, I don't think there is reason to believe there can be non-space-time universes, with one exception: A single logical chain that determines/chooses to create (cause/will to exist) a reference frame where multiple logical chains can interact.
In plainer language, a Mind could be expected to make a reference frame like space-time if It wanted to additionally make many minds with their own reasoning and have those reasonings interact with each other.
In even plainer language, if I login to World of Warcraft on Monday night and my friend logs in on Tuesday night, we cannot play *together.* We have to both login at the same *time* and to the same server (*space*).
There is no multi-mind (or multi-logical/physical-chain) universe that supports interaction without a reference frame of some kind (which would be an equivalent to space-time). That's what space-time really is: a reference frame necessary for the interactions among a multiplicity of physical (logical) sequences.
Interesting stuff to think about.
Enjoyed the article, Sarah. But I have a question that always puzzles me and to turn Einstein's comments around, these physicists are great physicists, but poor mathematicians.
If the universe always existed as the atheist philosopher suggests, how do we ever reach today? Since forever in reverse is just infinite negative time, we would never reach today because we would be an infinite time in the future.
I mean I know the answer is their worldview allows them to ignore this distasteful mathematical truth, but it never seems to be brought up. Am I missing something? (We Christians have the perfect answer which is God is outside space and time).
Glenn Wood
That is the absurdity of infinities.