by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright May 2008
This is an essay about the relation of a creator to his/her/its creation. It is about how difficult it is for a creation to know anything meaningful about his/her/its creator. (For the rest of the essay, “his" will take the place of "his/her/its".)
This question came to mind as I thought more about the characteristics a creator must have if they are going to live within the bounds of real-world physics as we know it today.
The question being addressed in this essay is: What relation will a creator have to his creations if he has to live within the bounds of the real-world physics we experience in our day-to-day living?
First, some basic physics about the difference between creator and creation. If a god created this universe we live in and can move freely through it in space and time, then this god is a 4D, 2T being: He lives in four dimensions of space and two dimensions of time.
We, his creation, mankind and the universe we live in, are a 3D, 1T creation. The dimensions I’m talking about here are the basic ones: height, width, depth, and time, not the string theory dimensions; those dimensions are a totally different topic. (String theory is a modern theory in particle physics that attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity and find a common explanation for all the observed forces of nature. In string theory, subatomic particles are thought to be shaped like tiny loops of string, rather than distinct points, that move very fast in many different and diverse ways, creating as many as 26 “dimensions”.)
A creator of this universe must exist in the three basic linear dimensions, plus an extra one – some dimension we creations cannot experience. We can conceptualize this added dimension, and do so when we talk about objects such as a tesseract, but we don’t experience this dimension directly. (In geometry, a tesseract is a four dimensional representation of a cube, constructed by combining cubes much as a cube is constructed by combining squares. For more information and some interesting pictures, see http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract.) This extra dimension lets him move around freely in our space without making changes when he doesn’t want to. Likewise, if a creator is going to see our past, present, and future with equal ease, he must have an additional time dimension to be moving through. This lets him see our universe’s timeline as something like a piece of salami -- something not changing -- and lets him move from place to place freely in time and tweak different times and events as he desires. With these two added dimensions, he can become supernatural in the sense of being able to move anywhere and anywhen and see all things and make changes -– omnipotent and omnipresent.
And beyond being mighty convenient, the creator must exist in these additional dimensions. This is one of the odd fallouts of the work of Kurt Gödel, Austrian mathematician of the 1930’s. His Incompleteness Theorems rule out a creator living entirely within a universe he creates.
Godel’s First Incompleteness Theorem was published in 1931 and proved mathematically and logically that a “Theory of Everything” is impossible –- that it is impossible to prove everything. In simple terms, Godel says that “anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle –- something you have to assume but cannot prove.” (From http://www/cosmicfingerprints.com/incompleteness/ which relates this theorem to the existence of God.) This means that if we draw a circle around creation –- all matter, space, energy, and time –- then it cannot explain itself and must rely on something outside itself whose existence must be assumed and cannot be proven. (For a full explanation and the formal language of the theorems, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems.)
So, if the creator can’t live inside his own universe, what is he going to be like? What is his relation to his creations going to be like?
Warning: What follows is not going to be a description of a loving, fatherly-like entity. What I will be pointing out is that while such an entity fits nicely with human emotional thinking, it’s a difficult match with real-world physics. What follows is describing the kind of creator that real-world physics allows. Such an entity is quite different, so please bear with me on this.
This business of difference in dimensionality is not a “Ho-hum, so what? God still loves me" issue. It's big. It makes a big difference. It means that what God is thinking when he says something is quite different from what humans are thinking when they hear what he is saying.
To see how big a difference this makes, let’s look at an earthly analogy of a creator with different dimensions than his creation. Let’s look at ... Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse cartoons.
Walt Disney was a 3D, 1T being who created a 2D, 1T universe which contains a being called Mickey Mouse. Notice that how Mickey exists and how Walt Disney exists are different. They have different properties and one of those differences in properties is how they think. 2D Mickey does not think in the same sense that 3D Walt does. Likewise a 4D creator is not going to think in the same way a 3D creation does.
Keeping this enormous gulf in properties in mind, let’s explore how these two relate to each other.
First off, did Walt Disney love and care for Mickey Mouse? He most certainly did!
Second, did Walt Disney care if Mickey Mouse went to church and praised Walt Disney as his creator? Not in the least. If he did care, he would have drawn cartoons with Mickey Mouse doing that.
Notice that Walt Disney could easily have done this, but he would have considered it meaningless.
Notice also that this level of control means that Mickey Mouse has no free will. Mickey Mouse is not going to surprise Walt Disney in that way.
Mickey will surprise Walt Disney in how Walt feels about the way a cartoon turns out, but he's not going to surprise him with any spontaneous action in the cartoon.
Third, how does Walt Disney communicate with Mickey Mouse? Well ... he draws a cartoon, that's how he communicates. If he discourses with Mickey, he does it by drawing himself in a cartoon talking with Mickey.
Is Walt really in the cartoon? No.
Are Mickey's actions affected by what the cartoon Walt says? No, only the real world 3D Walt affects Mickey's actions.
Conversely, how does Mickey communicate with Walt? Well ... Walt thinks about him, and Walt draws a cartoon where Mickey is talking. Mickey never says anything to Walt that Walt doesn't draw him saying.
Fourth, if Walt tells Mickey, “I'm going to bring you into my 3D world”, what does he mean? Does he mean that the soul of the cartoon is going to move out of the cartoon? No, he means that he's going to have an actor put on a Mickey Mouse costume, and perform a 3D caricature of the 2D cartoon character. This action is very real to Walt, but utterly meaningless to the cartoon Mickey.
Did cartoon Mickey's 2D existence prepare him for being a 3D costume? Walt Disney would say, “Oh yes! If I hadn't drawn the cartoon and learned from that, I wouldn't have known how to create the costume, and the actor wouldn't have known how to act while wearing it."
The point being, in the Creator's eyes there is a distinct linkage, but the creation does not experience a thing!!! Mickey Mouse cartoons are not changed one wit by the 3D Mickey costume; the soul of Mickey does not move from one to the other.
It is likely that man's relation to his creating god is similar to this Walt Disney/Mickey Mouse relation. That means that what God plans for man and what man thinks God is planning for man bear almost no relation to each other. It means that preparing to go to an afterlife will have quite a different meaning for the creator than it does for the creation.
It means that the soul that is part of our 3D body may not have any noticeable connection to the perfected body that the creator makes from the inspiration our mortal experience has given him. This is particularly true if the perfected body is 4D, not 3D.
Notice that this god I'm describing is a loving and caring god. He loves and cares, just as Walt Disney loved and cared about Mickey Mouse. If our creating god does his loving and caring in his 4D, 2T universe, we 3D, 1T creations of his mind will likely not feel a thing of it.
I offer this story of Mickey and Walt as an alternative description of a loving, caring creator god to that offered by standard Christianity. This god loves and cares, but the gulf created by existing in different dimensions is so great that what the creator means by loving and caring and what the creation means by loving and caring have almost no relation to each other.