Time Part 1 (It’s All Relative)

Episode 98

This episode was originally recorded in early November and was set to be released at the end of December, but here we are at the end of January instead because time is a funny thing, isn't it? The moment you think you have a firm grasp on "now", it slips through your fingers. That's true both in terms of scheduling podcasts during the holidays and also understanding time from a relativistic perspective. Time might feel like it is moving at the same rate for everyone, but Einstein's theories (and later experimentation) prove otherwise. So without a universally agreed upon "now", how can we say anything true about a God who interacts within time? What good is repentance when the past and future are equally real? What about prophecy? Jesus' birth? Are we all destined for deism? Well, let's take some time to understand how relativity works first, and then we'll get to those (and many more) questions. 

Spoiler alert, we're going to talk about this one again in a special episode next time too because it's too much fun! 

 

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More information at https://www.downthewormhole.com/

 

produced by Zack Jackson
music by Zack Jackson and Barton Willis 

 

Transcript 

This transcript was automatically generated by www.otter.ai, and as such contains errors (especially when multiple people are talking). As the AI learns our voices, the transcripts will improve. We hope it is helpful even with the errors.

Zack Jackson 00:05

You are listening to the down the wormhole podcast exploring the strange and fascinating relationship between science and religion. This week our hosts are

 

Kendra Holt-Moore 00:14

Kendra Holt-Moore, assistant professor of religion at Bethany college. And the thing I'm looking forward to in the next year is not being a first time first year Professor anymore, because the first year of teaching is really hard.

 

Rachael Jackson 00:34

Rachael Jackson, Rabbi at Agoudas, Israel congregation Hendersonville, North Carolina. And the thing I am looking forward to in this coming year, is first a nine week sabbatical and the ability to travel because of vaccines.

 

Ian Binns 00:56

Ian Binns Associate Professor of elementary science education at UNC Charlotte, the first thing that popped my mind when thinking about what I'm looking forward to is going to see Rob Bell speak in Dallas, with my good buddy mark. February in February,

 

Zack Jackson 01:14

Zack Jackson UCC pastor in Redding, Pennsylvania, and I am super excited for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which I don't want to, I don't want to say that it's going to happen in a couple of days, because this episode is supposed to launch like three days before it's supposed to launch. Because I don't know, it was originally supposed to launch in 2007. So it's had a couple of delays. But it's going to make the Hubble look like a like a pair of binoculars, it is going to be able to show all kinds of super exciting things from the very beginning of the universe. And I cannot wait to see that. So I mentioned James Webb as well, because I think satellites are super cool, in general. And so I want to I want to start today with a story about a satellite, a very famous satellite, you may have heard of it. Its name was Sputnik. It was the very first human satellite we ever put up there. And back way back in 1957, the Soviets kind of surprised everyone and was like, hey, look, we've got the technology. And we did it. And everyone in the world kind of freaked out because they weren't sure if there was going to be nukes or anything like that, and alien technology or whatever. And because they it had never been done before. They had to prove to people that it actually was happening. And not that they were just making the whole thing up. And so they equipped Sputnik with a radio pulse. So it would go around the earth and be like me, beep, beep, beep, beep, so anyone on Earth could listen in and be like, Oh, look at that. It is up there. It's beeping at me. That's really neat. And so at the at Johns Hopkins, couple days later, October 7 1957, a couple of junior physicists were sitting around at lunch talking. And these two guys, these buddies, William Guyer, and George weissenbach, they were just talking with their friends. And we're really surprised to learn that no one at Johns Hopkins had bothered to listen for it, using their radio technology. Like, honestly, that seems like something that divino fancy scientists people should do. So wife and Bach was working on microwave radiation for his Ph. D. Program at the time. And so he had a decent radio in his office. And so the two of them went upstairs and just start messing around with it, waiting for Sputnik to crossover. And there was Beep, beep, beep, beep. And they had the clarity of mind to be like, hey, this seems like it might be a historical event, we should grab a cassette tape. And we should take this thing, just, you know, so we can show our kids, this is what Sputnik sounded like. And so they did, and they recorded it. And then the next day, they were like, I wonder if we can we can get this a little clearer. And so they they messed with the frequencies and got it so they could hear it really clearly. And one of the things that they noticed was that just like, you know, when you're when you're standing on the side of the street and a car is coming, and it goes and it kind of like the sound goes up and then it goes down. That's called the Doppler effect. That has to do with things that are emitting sound or light that is also moving in relationship to you. And so like if it's moving towards you, the sound waves or the the waves of light, they get compressed, because it's moving towards you. If it's moving away from you, they get spread out. So the sound would sound higher or lower as it's going. Same is true with like radio waves. So the sound coming from the radio waves, if you looked at it from like, the, the wave perspective was kind of doing b, b be, though wouldn't made that sound. And so they were like, Oh, this is really interesting, hey, Johns Hopkins, can we use your supercomputer for a minute, which I say supercomputer, it probably has had the computing power of like a ti 83. Now, it was one of the very first digital computers in the world. And so they used it to do some really complicated math. And were able to calculate Sputnik's orbit, and their look at its location, and where it was going. And were able to predict when and where it would come back, using just the what we call the Doppler shift of the the width of the radio waves. And that was kind of a novel thing to do. When they released their information. The Russians were like, what, come on, guys, we have this one thing, and you had to go and top US that was so rude. I think that's what the Soviet said, I don't speak Russian. So that was fun. And then Sputnik burned out. And that was no more. But then the next May, their boss came to them, and called called them into his office, which is always a good thing and said, Hey, remember that thing you did was Sputnik? Do you think it's possible to do that backwards? Could you do that in reverse? Like, if we had satellites, where we knew where they were, at the time in orbit, sending a pulse down to earth? Would you be able to calculate where the receiver is, if we knew where the satellites were? And they were like, well, I guess the math is kind of the same, it's just backwards. And thus, the transit system was born, the very first satellite navigation system, because the Navy had this problem where they had these nuclear submarines that had the nuke nuclear missiles on them in the Arctic, which is waiting to blow up Russia. But the, they were supposed to be secret. And so they couldn't use the traditional means of navigation because they didn't want to give away their location. And so they kind of were getting lost up there in the Arctic. And so the, the Air Force sent up an array of five satellites orbiting the Arctic, and every couple of hours, it would pass overhead. And then they could get a ping on their location. And they could correct their maps, and they would know where they were. And that was great. And that was wonderful. And then we thought, I wonder what else we can use this technology for? And so the global positioning satellite system started to get dreamed up together, like, what if we took that, and we made a whole array of satellites, up in orbit, all sending pings down to earth, and we could triangulate, given the pings and the locations of a couple of them, and be able to tell where all kinds of things are airplanes. And, and, and, and like troops. And this is the military, they're always thinking about war stuff. And so what they would need to have a real time local navigation system was that the clocks on Earth would need to be synced with the clocks in the satellite. That would be real important if we're going to do real time navigation. So they have these really, really accurate atomic clocks, that one is in on Earth, and one is in orbit. And that was great. Except for one problem. There was this guy, you may have heard of him. He's kind of a big deal name is Albert Einstein. And about 60 years beforehand, he had proposed this crazy thing called general relativity, after his theory of special relativity, which suggested that Isaac Newton's laws, which had worked very well, by the way for the past, like 300 years, which were the laws, which helped them to get the satellites in orbit in the first place, it didn't work so well, when you were talking about the effects of gravity. So in a larger level, Newton's Laws kind of stop working, in particular, his theory of time, and the way that time moves, see a part of relativity stated that one's relationship to gravity affected the passage of time, which was a very counterintuitive thing, and at the time in 70s When this was getting put up, there were still testing. It seemed like it was passing all the tests general relativity was, was passing all of these tests. But they still weren't entirely convinced. And some of the scientists on this GPS project thought that we were going to disprove Einstein. And so we should just put the clocks up there, up there in the satellites, and the other scientists were like, no, if we put the clocks up there as they are, and not adjust them in any way for relativity, then they're going to be out of sync. And so they couldn't agree internally. And these satellites are very expensive. And back in the 70s, it was very, very expensive to send the satellite into space, it's still very expensive, but it was much more back then. And so they had, they kind of did this interesting trick. A sort of cheat, if you will, to appease both sides, and to be able to tell once and for all, if time actually does move differently, the further you get from Earth, in that they sent it up with just normal atomic clock. But they also had a sort of switch, where they could flip that switch, and then there was a little computer inside that would then adjust the time on the clock to then send back the corrected time to Earth. So they sent it up. And they let it be up there for about 20 days going around and discovered that yeah, it shifted the time in orbit past differently than the time on Earth. Seven microseconds per day, which I don't know, a microsecond doesn't seem like a whole lot of time. So seven microseconds per day of drift. But in terms of GPS, that's a drift of 10 kilometers per day, if not corrected. So one day of the satellites being up there, and they're useless. Because time travels, passes differently in orbit than it does on Earth. Yeah,

 

Rachael Jackson 12:14

so incredible. Like, yeah, that's subjective,

 

Zack Jackson 12:17

like you said, not just a fun theory,

 

Ian Binns 12:20

the seven microseconds thing, when you first say that, I'm just gonna like, oh, wow, what did he do? But the ramifications for those of us on the ground? That's just wow, like, I did not know that. That's crazy.

 

Zack Jackson 12:36

Yeah, the, the closer you are, so that, it's because there's less gravity less of Earth's gravity, the farther you get from the center of Earth. And so time, time will pass faster. On in orbit, the closer you get to the gravitational well, the slower time will pass. But because these things are relative to where they're being observed, I always get that backwards as to if you were on the earth, looking at the satellite, versus if you were on the satellite looking at the Earth, actually, relative to the Earth's age, you know, a couple billion years old, Earth's core is actually two and a half years younger than its surface. For what it's worth, you go. So now every single satellite that's in orbit, every single computer every single time, a piece that is up in orbit, and every all of the robots on Mars and the satellites flying out into deep space, all of that has to compensate for the fact that gravity affects time. That time passes differently for different people, for different observers in different places in different gravity wells. Depending on one's mass on one's gravity on one's velocity, time will pass differently. So GPS only works because time is weird. So in a manner of speaking, Albert Einstein is the father of Pokemon GO and so for that we give thanks

 

Kendra Holt-Moore 14:27

what a storyteller you are Zack to be able to craft to craft a narrative that leads to a conclusion.

 

Ian Binns 14:35

And to me, I love it, you know, so that we all roads

 

Zack Jackson 14:38

lead to Pokemon, right? That's but that's a lot to take in. And there's a lot of moving pieces to that and there's a lot of confusing counter intuitive things about how relativity bends space and time and what are the implications of the fact that there is not a solid steady passage of time. Which means there is no preferred present moment that the past and the future in the present are all on a spectrum instead of one, instead of us always being in the present and the past in the future being always somewhere else, the implications of that, and even understanding how that happens and why that happens. And all of that is a lot to unpack. So let's take a 15 second break, and take a breath. And be thankful that we can time 15 seconds unless you're on a spaceship, going half the speed of light, and then this could take a lot more than 50. All right, I want to tell you a quick thought experiment, that I'm adapting from one of Einstein's thought experiments, because I find any time we talk about things happening on trains, and lasers and things like that, in thought experiments to be hard to, to wrap my mind around. So I want to imagine for a second that we have a basketball robot. And basketball bot is an awesome robot, and he's predictable. And the things he does happen very predictably, he's got a hand that reaches out, it's one meter above the ground, it can bounce a basketball in one second. And it's steady and repeatable. You know, bum, bum, bum, bum, he's basketball bot, he's a robot, it's, it's easy to do. So you're watching basketball bot, as he's bouncing the ball in the airport. And, you know, one second, one second, one second, one meter, one meter, one meter, one meter, one meter, one meter, and then you and a basketball bot, because you're going to baggage claim, you walk on to the, to the moving sidewalk. And so you're standing there next to basketball bot, who is still bouncing the basketball because he's programmed to bounce the basketball. And he's still going one meter down, one meter up, one meter down one meter up in one second. And that hasn't changed for you. But the person standing on the side watching this strange basketball bot, bounce a basketball in the airport, on the people walk thing is not seeing the basketball goes straight down and straight up. Because we've added a velocity in another direction. So if that is moving sufficiently fast, while he's bouncing straight up and down, with a person on the side is seeing is really it bouncing in an angle, and then bouncing up in an angle, because of the way that they're seeing. And so in classic physics, that's not a problem, the old heads of physics, they were talking about the same thing, that just means you have now added velocity in a separate direction. And so now there's more speed to be had. Right? Speed is just distance divided by time. So you know, we're just adding a bit more distance if you're moving sideways, as well. So it's speeding up. According to the person on the outside, which is fine. Basketball can go faster, because it can write, there's no limit to the speed of basketballs. So basketball bot is not a problem. He's a great guy, now, laser basketball man, robot guy who is doing the same thing, except instead of bouncing a basketball, he is bouncing a photon, up and down, up and down, one meter up and down, up and down. You're standing next to him, that photon is moving at the speed of light, because that's what they do, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, bouncing off a mirror coming back up to his hand. And that's fine. So then he goes on the people walk, moving sidewalk thing, and a person on the outside now sees if it's moving sufficiently fast, it not going straight up and down, but following the same vector that bounces sideways and up, which means that it would have to have accelerated in one direction. But we know that the speed of light is a constant, and you can't go faster than the speed of light. So how is it then that to the person on the outside, it appears that it has moved faster than the speed of light, magic. Speed is just distance divided by time. And the speed has to be constant. That means that time then has to change. If all the mathematics are going to work out, fine. Then if distance changes, so does time. And so when we're talking about things that obey the speed of light, like a photon that can't go faster than time then starts to get wibbly wobbly. So that's the that's the insight that comes from special relativity is that Newtonian physics works really well, from the perspective of your everyday life. Right? Bouncing a basketball, Newtonian physics works great. But when you break it down to things that either are massive, like planets, or that move incredibly fast, like light, then it starts to break down and relativity takes over. And so we start to extrapolate outward from that, and finding out that time doesn't move the same for everyone, time is dependent on your frame of reference on your velocity on your mass on your, on your gravitational pull. And so for most of us, that's not going to matter. Most of us are going to live our whole lives in roughly the same gravity, well, at roughly the same velocity, we're not going to be traveling near the speed of light, we're not going to have to worry about this. Right? So why even talk about it?

 

Kendra Holt-Moore 21:10

Why even talk about it?

 

Ian Binns 21:13

Because it's really fun. I mean, there's more reasons than that, obviously, but I've always found this stuff just quite fascinating. Blows my brain just

 

Zack Jackson 21:23

gonna end the episode right there. Just no reason to talk about it's not gonna affect us show.

 

Rachael Jackson 21:32

Let's move on with our day.

 

Zack Jackson 21:34

But it does kind of bust the whole way we think about past present future, doesn't it that, that there is this constant flow of time from past to future, that past is gone. It's just a memory. The present is where we live, and the future is what's coming, hasn't happened yet. And like, that way of thinking, permeates all of our religious tradition, the way we think about God, the way we think about God's interaction with humanity is all based in this there was the past, it calls the present. And now the present will influence the future, especially in Christianity, because we are an eschatological religion, which is fancy theological ways of saying we are a religion of the end, we have people who are looking forward to the end to the redemption of all to the sort of an end goal of things being made, right? That only works if there is a progression of time. How do you save something if the end and the beginning and the middle are all the same? How does God interact in time? Do we believe that God is time less? And if God is outside of the flow of time, as we experience it, then which one is God's preferred time God's preferred now? Like there's some beautiful theologies like process theology, which believes with which teaches that God and creation are intrinsically intertwined, and that God is growing and changing and moving with creation. And I love that, and that God doesn't know the future, and God is moving along with us. But it doesn't work. When you realize that there is no preferred present moment, and everything breaks down on the macro level. You don't for example, if you and your friend were in in twin spaceships, and you were hanging out near a black hole, and your buddy got a little bit too close, and then got sucked into the event horizon, from your perspective, you could stay there for the rest of your life and watch them slowly fall into the black hole. They would just be falling and falling and falling forever. But from their perspective, in an instant, they would be instantly spaghettified which is the actual technical term for when you get sucked into a black hole and get pulled down atom by atom into single strand of be of existence spaghettified we get a five spaghettified you can quote me on that. That's, that's the science word. Well, so

 

Ian Binns 24:26

I've always felt like in, you know, when you come to the notion of God, that just seemed limiting to me that we could only think of God as a being that is limited to our notion of time, to the human notion of time, right. Like, I would like to think that there is a God that God is more powerful than that, right? There's not there's not a limiting factor there. If that makes any sense. Yeah. No, like one man literally interpret, you know, the story of great the creation story, or stories and, and Genesis, when they see that, you know, on the first day this happened second day Ebola seventh day God rested. And people like See, look, it happened in one week. I'm kinda like you, like really like you can't you struggle with the notion that it's bigger than that like that God is limited to our personal understanding our own individual understanding of what a week is, and what a day is like that just to me that that kind of puts God into a into a bubble. Right? That's like, the only way I can understand God is by God is in a life like mine. And I would like to think that if God does exist, that God is outside of that mentality, that there's God's not limited in that situation. That's just how I view it.

 

Zack Jackson 26:01

So then how would a being outside of the flow of time interact within the flow of time?

 

Ian Binns 26:07

I don't know. You know, when I die, and if there is a God, and I get a chance to meet God, that may be one of my questions. How do you do that? Can you teach me that trick? I mean, I know. But I just I don't know. Yeah, I feel like that's another good thought experiment.

 

Rachael Jackson 26:28

Man, please. Yeah. One of the ways that we've sort of wrestled with this idea, I shouldn't say we, that I have wrestled with this idea of time, and God. I've heard the idea that is, God is all good, all knowing, all powerful, and all time. That doesn't work for my theology, when I look at the world around me. So it's like, Okay, which of these variables Am I comfortable eliminating? And I was not comfortable with eliminating that God is all good. That that that feels really terrible to think that God is not good. So and I'll spare you all the details of going through that that journey, where I end up for this conversation is that if God is all time, perhaps God is the present, as we know it, that it's, it is in our time, that God is of all times, but we experience time in a linear fashion. And so that's where God exists with us is in our times. And so God has the ability to move through time space continuum. Great. I don't and so I can experience God in this time. And I employ that in one of the prayers that I say where we, we ask for healing. And at the end, I always say, made those in need find healing in a time near to us. I don't if we're praying to God, I want God to know that I don't want this on a god time scale. I would like this on our time scale. So I, I agree with you and that there it seems confining to have God exists in a singular time frame. But I myself do exist in that time frame going back to Zach's point of like, no Newtonian physics, pretty much my life not gonna break out in Newtonian physics, I don't really need to think too much on this. So from a theological standpoint, I say, Okay, God experiences or relativity in a way that I don't. So it's my question then have to wrestle with myself of how do I then have God in my timeline? In my time, so I don't know if that makes any sense. But that's, that's sort of how I answer that question.

 

Kendra Holt-Moore 29:02

So the way that I think about alternative, like, forms of guard, like the kinds of theologies that I think are really compatible with this, you know, revolution in the understanding of time, it I think that mystical theologies become so much more kind of intriguing, and it you know, it's like, it does. Accepting, like, Einsteinian mechanics of time and you know, mystical theologies. It requires an acceptance of, well, I think most of the time it requires an acceptance of a non theistic version of God, or like a non anthropomorphic version of God. And so what I mean when I say those things is, you know, A version of God that that's not like, made in the image of like human beings are human ish versions of God, you know the God with arms and legs and a face. And that's really hard I think for a lot of people to kind of let go of, especially if, if we're talking about like the monotheism 's of like Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I mean, and really like the most of the major world religions that talk about God, there is something that tends to become very like humanoid about God, but that's never like there's always mystical strains of theology in, in religions. And so the, the ones that kind of come to mind that I think are are like some of the first ones that I thought of, and I know if Adam was here, this is probably something that he would bring up too is like Paul Tilex. Image of God as the ground of being. And Tillich kind of uses this phrase ground of being to, to be the stand in for God. And it kind of replaces this very anthropomorphic version of God with a vision of God that is, like a more like a foundation. And it's more like this stable, like, stable yet creative. floor at the bottom of all, all that is. And you know, there's, there's a lot in Tillich in theology and talking just about the ground of being if Adam listens to this and is like, Well, Adam, should have been here

 

Zack Jackson 32:01

wasn't the Paul Tillich society? At one point?

 

Kendra Holt-Moore 32:05

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's true. But you know, that's like, that's your kind of letting go. It's a very, it's a more like, abstract kind of way of thinking about, like, what God is, but I actually, I think my personal favorite, like mystical kind of vision of God actually comes from a mystic named Nicholas of Cusa. And whenever I was, in my master's degree, I took a class called Nicolas of Cuza about this, like mystic theologian, and I remember Reading some of his primary works. And there was a chapter that was all about his, his, like, you know, his, kind of like systematic theology. And but there was a few pages in this one chapter that just had like math in it was like, what is happening? What, why I like circled all the math and wrote in the margins of my textbook, like, Excuse me, like, No, I think I even like wrote out a very dramatic like, no, with multiple exploits, XSplit exclamation, and was just like, This is not what I want to be, like thinking about when I'm trying to like foster a spiritual experience. And, and I have a, you know, a couple years later, after that class, I took a class called science literacy with my doctoral advisor. And in that class, it was like, one of the most fascinating and also difficult classes that I've taken, because it's like a crash course in physics. And like, you know, we talk about special theory of relativity, general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, like all of that, and what are the philosophical and like theological implications of those things. And it was during that class that I had to kind of go back to the theology of Nicholas of Cusa. And look at my margins, in the notes on the pages where there is mass and the universe and God, and then I just like, it made sense to me. I was like, I still, I'm just like, not someone who naturally thinks in a very mathy way, and so I always find that challenging. But there's also like, the only times that I have been able to have been able to, like have an experience of all thinking about math is when I'm thinking about the implication of, like, math on like, I don't know, like, like metaphysics or like the structure of the universe. And so, the point being that Nicolas of Cusa talks about the enfolding and unfolding of, of God or of of the universe, there's, there's this breath metaphor Almost of this enfolding everything kind of collapsing into one unit, one like period, one point. And in that enfolding every, like you and I, and all that is, we are one, it's like a oneness. And then the unfolding is this like, you know, it's the, the exhale or like the other side of the breath it unfolds. And again, we all kind of diverge into particularities and we have our, you know, our specific to kind of tie it back to our conversation wells of gravity, where we exist. But we also keep in folding and unfolding. So there's like this dual experience of like, oneness, and specificity and like divergence. That is just like, I think such a beautiful image of like wholeness, and like, it's like both the duality and oneness that I just think is like such a perfect, like, non theistic kind of theological representation of these like time dynamics that force us to think beyond, you know, Newtonian mechanics. So that's kind of what comes to mind for me.

 

Zack Jackson 36:42

Well, if you're into sacred mathematics, and mysticism, you would love by Sagaris. They were all about that life, almost worshipping numbers and mathematics, thinking of it as this ticket in small doses. You also if you're a pipe factory, and you can't eat beans, that was that was against their religion to

 

Kendra Holt-Moore 37:03

work for me. Yeah.

 

Zack Jackson 37:05

I think he thought that the beans in humans came from the same source. And so it was a bit of cannibalism. Who knows you're that part about

 

Ian Binns 37:16

Sagaris when I was studying that, but

 

Zack Jackson 37:18

you mostly just hear about the whole triangle thing, right? You don't hear about the toggery worship numbers.

 

Ian Binns 37:23

It's been a long time since I took that really cool history science class.

 

Zack Jackson 37:27

So yeah, it's been a couple 1000 years since the Python, Koreans. But we're at

 

Ian Binns 37:34

that times all relative, right?

 

Zack Jackson 37:36

Well, yeah. I mean, how do we think of time typically, we think of it like, like those moving sidewalks at the airport, right? That we're all standing on it. And we're all moving at the same rate, or like a flow of a river, that we're all moving together along the same rate. But we found out that you can kind of move on that river, you can paddle one way or the other, and you can slow down or speed up your position in time in that river. And so it time kind of then acts more like a frozen river with kids ice skating all over it, rather than a group of people on a lazy river in their tubes, all moving at the same speed. So it does, I think this has been my problem to Kandra is that I'm fine with almost all of these weird things in about relativity and time. But it hurts my conception of a real time theistic God like the God that is in the moment with me right now. It makes that harder to stomach harder to conceptualize. You know, if if, if God doesn't have a preferred present moment, then like, Oh, okay. Then.

 

Kendra Holt-Moore 39:03

Yeah, yeah, implications of that are really like they are really far reaching for for Christianity and, and Judaism in Islam, I think in particular. And it's, you know, I think there are also people who maybe, and I don't know if this like kind of resonates with your experience, maybe not Zack, but people who kind of like if you kind of asked them or forced them to explain their theology, they might they might actually say something that sounds more non theistic. But in their day to day lives, they kind of like re impose a theistic like face on there, like non theistic theology, like it's, it's, it's, you know, again, that's not that's, it's almost like Like, I don't know that this is like the appropriate way to frame it but like a second naivete

 

Zack Jackson 40:06

almost of like, yes. What we're doing physics

 

Kendra Holt-Moore 40:09

come to Yeah, like if you're if your theology if it's important to you for the theology and the physics to kind of fit together then maybe that's like what you do. But for like, you know, religious and spiritual community and talking day to day, you still use language that has like familiarity and like personhood, and I don't like this is something that people will argue about, because some people think that's like a disingenuous, and I get that. But I also, I think it's just important for the way that people relate to each other and to other things in the world and to relationships. So I actually find that completely, like understandable and normal.

 

Zack Jackson 40:57

It's like my day to day theology is Newtonian. But my, if I'm thinking about it, my actual theology is Einsteinian. Right? That right? It makes sense in the day to day to have an eminent theistic God. But it makes sense in the quiet moments where I'm thinking, to think about a, a more universal presence than a theistic imminent God. And I think we do that all the time. With our theologies, we've got, we've got different types of theologies that apply to different situations, the theology that you have when you're suffering is different than the theology you have when you're not. And we just, we all do, and that's fine. Like I don't at like funerals and stuff, people always talk about how that person has gone on. And now they're watching over me and blah, blah, blah. But like, there's no part in the New Testament that talks about that, there that the New Testament teaches that you die, you die, and you go on the ground, and your soul, your spirit, all of that is over. And it's done, until the Second Coming, and the resurrection of the dead. And then everyone comes back together, there is no, like waiting up in heaven, and playing a harp and watching you as you live your life. There is none of that in the New Testament, but we all just pretend like it's there. Because it is comforting to us in the moment, even if we don't really believe that so and so was watching us from afar, we like to believe that it's true. You know, I think we do that practically. And it's okay to admit that as a way of contextualizing our theology in the moment.

 

Rachael Jackson 42:27

And it's and it can be used as a coping mechanism. Yeah, theology has coping.

 

Zack Jackson 42:33

So when this episode airs, it's going to be like, I don't know, two weeks from Christmas or so. Which is, I don't know, sort of one of the important parts of of the Christian year. It's like, this moment in Christian theology where just a little, a little bit, a little bit. It's this moment in Christian theology, where it's like, God has been working through people for eons, and moving through the cycles of time, and nations and empires and kings and prophets and priests and individuals. And then, at some point, God says, Alright, kids, you sit down, I'm gonna take care of this for a minute, and comes in and breaks through, and there's this. Countless theologies that have tried to explain how God becomes human. How do we break this barrier between the infinite in the finite this, this this, we call it kenosis, this emptying of divinity in order to become humanity. I mean, there's none of them actually make a whole lot of sense. Logically, there are, which you sort of have to have to get all mystical and non dualistic before anything makes any sense? If you really think about it for too long, in terms of the Incarnation. But it's this breaking through a moment that we celebrate, in which something that is entirely other breaks into time and into history, that which is universal becomes particular, that God has to become a single person in a single time with a single genetic makeup who lives a single life. And there's some, I mean, that's helpful to some extent, to imagine that in our day to day lives, I also wonder then, if we were to draw that outward, if we were to say that time and space are connected, are one in the same. And just like, I believe that San Diego still exists, even though I'm not there. I also believe that three BC exists, even though I'm not there. And so in that way of thinking about time, that the past is not something that is gone, but it's just something that I'm not experienced. In saying that the incarnation the breaking in of God into the world is something that is happening in an infinite present moment in what we would consider 1000s of years ago. And so in all of these places in which God is breaking into time, those are places that are infinitely being broken into time. And you can think then of the final redemption of the world less as something to look forward to, and something that as opposed to something that we're living into something that we're experiencing the ripples of redemption, the way that you would experience gravitational waves of a black hole collisions. But these just musings of ways that I like to try to think about things that I have no real theological grounding, and I'm trying to be careful not to draw those conclusions too far as just rereading a paper I wrote in seminary, I posted it to y'all, it's fine. No one reads, that's 20 pages. And the the, the final conclusion I made was just drawn way too broadly outward, because I got excited about the implications of a God that breaks into time infinitely. And the ripples of redemption that can get flow through time through single redemptive acts, which I don't know if I would draw those points anymore, but they were fun to dwell on back then. So I should say, to wrap things up, we don't actually know why we experienced the flow of time. All of these revelations that come out of relativity are counterintuitive. It doesn't feel like the past and the future are real, it feels like they are ideas. And the present is the only moment we've ever experienced, that's our lived reality. That's the way our brains have formed. And for some reason, the way that we experience the dimension of time, whether that's just a way that our consciousness adapted to be able to function well, or if there is some divine reason that we experience a single moment instead of an entirety of moments. Nobody really has a good explanation. So a lot of this sort of thinking is theoretical, and a lot of it is hard to wrap your head around. And I think it's probably okay to have a an eminent theology that works on the Newtonian level of day to day life, as well as having a sort of what if kind of theology in which you are imagining the implications of something that has implications but are hard to fathom in our everyday life? If that makes sense. Do you think that's okay? Or is that disingenuous? No, I think that's good. If Adam were here, he would argue with me that it would be disingenuous, but again, Adam is not here to defend himself

 

Ian Binns 48:23

that since so vault.

 

Zack Jackson 48:27

So I would just like to end this segment by saying that I am right and Adam is wrong, and there is nothing that he can do or say, to correct me. And if he would like to correct me, he will have to do so in a future episode when he leads. So there

 

Rachael Jackson 48:51

so today's today's day down the wormhole, minute story from the Talmud. This comes from the Babylonian Talmud in Tractate to a neat around page 23. That's in case anyone wants to check my citation or read the entire story. There's a character a person however, you want to understand the people in these texts, whose name is Honi. And there's quite a few stories about him. And so one of the stories that I want to tell you about is the day that Honi slept. And as a tired parent, it just sounds amazing. Story. One day, Connie, the circle maker was traveling along a road and he saw an old man planting a care of tree when he stops and asks him, how long will it take for this Tree to fully bear fruit. And the man replies 70 years. Astonished Honi asks, Do you think you will live another 70 years? There, the man replies calmly. I found care of trees growing when I was born, because my forefathers planted them for me, so I to plant them for my children. Thereupon, Connie sat down to have a meal, and sleep overcame him. As he slept, a rock formation grew around him hiding him from sight, and he slept and he slept. And he slept. He continued to sleep for 70 years. When he woke up, he saw what it look like to be this same man gathering beautiful fruit fully bloomed a fully mature fruit from a Carib tree. Astonished Honi then asks, Are You the man who planted this tree? No. The man replies, I am his grandson. That's when Connie realizes that he has slept for 70 years. Connie goes home and finds that his son has died, but his grandson was still alive. And so he says to the members of his household, I am Honi the circle maker, but they didn't believe him, because it had been 70 years since when he had passed and vise been seen. Since then he left the house and he went to the Beit Midrash the study hall, and he announces, I am Honi the circle maker, but no one believed him and they didn't give him any respect. So Honee an utter despairs, praise for Divine Mercy. And he dies. To this Raava another person of the time says, For this reason people say give me companionship, or give me death. And it is for this reason that we gravitate towards others. That though time might pass we experience it in a linear fashion that it is the people with whom we have connections with it is a way of thinking about the past providing for the future but really living in these moments that make it worthwhile. That is what Honi the circle maker can teach us from his sleep of 70 years.

 

Zack Jackson 52:52

May we all sleep for 70 years.