Restoration cosmology is a series of upheavals that realign all of existence in a beautiful and consistent way that really makes everything make sense again. Some of the paradigm shifts might seem odd or unnecessary in isolation, but when you see the logical results of how it all comes together, you start to see something very beautiful.
We were not created out of nothing. The heavens are not full of separate species of beings. We are God’s genos or offspring, as Paul puts it,[1] and angels are just humans in different stages of development. God is an embodied, actual being with a body as “tangible as man’s” and resides on a globe somewhere.[2] We see so much that wrests the cosmos away from the abstractions of the Greek philosophers and restores the biblical, personal Father God of the Bible. But in an effort to literalize God, have we tried too hard to thrust our time upon Him?
We think if God actually has a body and lives in an actual place, and all spirit is matter, He’s not outside of space, so why would He be outside of our time? And maybe we try too hard to distinguish our view from the traditional Christian idea of an immaterial God existing outside of time and space in an eternal now, that we reject even the parts of that picture that may overlap with the restored gospel. We should form our beliefs based on what has been revealed and not as a reaction to what centuries of creeds have developed.
Joseph Smith taught, “If we start right, it is easy to go right all the time.”[3] So let’s start right by digging into what the scriptures actually say. But I can’t promise it’s gonna be easy to go right all the time this time while talking about time, because I do want to dig into some of the counterintuitive implications of modern theoretical physics and show how they line up strikingly well with the restored gospel, then go on further with some interesting speculation about what this would mean, at least as a metaphor, for understanding a few gospel topics. And I say metaphor because every scientific theory is still a work in progress, and God has not yet revealed all things. We are struggling in the dim light of what science has been able to discover, while also feeling with the firm yet clumsy touch of our hands the gospel truths that have been revealed. These are two incomplete avenues to examine the same subject, but it is remarkable to see how some of these points align and what that could mean for our understanding.
The gospel was restored 75 years before Einstein published his theory of special relativity, and in that gap, Latter-day Saints tried to reconcile a God who exists in our same universe with a very incomplete view of that universe, particularly regarding time. And though it has now been 120 years since the publication of that theory, far too many miss its relevance—and the relevance of other developments in theoretical physics—to the subject of time and how it relates to God, and how these strange truths that science is revealing shed light on how an all-powerful being could exist in the universe.
Restored scripture teaches:
“Thus saith the Lord your God, even Jesus Christ, the Great I Am, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the same which looked upon the wide expanse of eternity, and all the seraphic hosts of heaven, before the world was made; The same which knoweth all things, for all things are present before mine eyes;”[4]
“And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come;”[5]
“…all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men.”[6]
“…past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.”[7]
The tension I want to focus on here is that we have scripture describing a God unbound by time but housed within a theology that emphasizes the literal closeness and realness of God. A God that is embodied and resides on a globe and acts in history must also exist in our timeline—right?
One resolution to this tension is varying forms of accepting the implications of these scriptures without necessarily explaining the mystery, which is an honest way to look at it and lands much closer to the truth. But others try to work around the scriptures by playing semantics, saying, ’Well, the future does not exist yet, and so God can still “know all things,” but He doesn’t have to know things that don’t exist (i.e., the future). Or postulating that because God knows the current state perfectly, He’s able to predict the future with absolute certainty or at least know all the possible outcomes from any initial state. I will get into the problems with these interpretations later, but at their core the problem is they are attempting to reconcile eternal truths that were unexplained with scientific knowledge that was incomplete. Now that we have a more advanced view of reality illuminated through advancements in science, let’s rethink how we should look at time and God in this new light.
I am not claiming to be the only person that’s noticed this stuff. I came to these realizations by reading the scriptures and science books, then went and found people who were saying similar things. I’m going to present this the way I see it. There’s a lot of overlap with other people, but I have some hopefully unique or at least interesting insights that help resolve some of the conflicts, thought-provoking implications, and some really fun speculations that you might wanna stay tuned for…
In our daily lives we may think that time is the universal constant. That there is some universal clock ticking away, measuring out every moment, and that time is the ultimate measure to which all things are measured, from the beat of a butterfly’s wings to the rotation of the galaxy. But the counterintuitive truth that Einstein and the restored gospel teach us is light, and not time, is the universal constant.
“…that he might be in all and through all things, the light of truth;
Which truth shineth. This is the light of Christ. As also he is in the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made.
As also he is in the moon, and is the light of the moon, and the power thereof by which it was made;
As also the light of the stars, and the power thereof by which they were made;
And the earth also, and the power thereof, even the earth upon which you stand.
And the light which shineth, which giveth you light, is through him who enlighteneth your eyes, which is the same light that quickeneth your understandings;
Which light proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space—
The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God who sitteth upon his throne, who is in the bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things.”[8]
“If light speed is absolute, then time itself cannot be. We must abandon our faith in perfect simultaneity: the assumption that two events can be said to happen at the same time. Multiple observers experience their own present moments. “Time cannot be absolutely defined,” said Einstein—it can be defined, but not absolutely—“and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity.”[9]
I don’t want to get into the details of why special relativity is true. Study the topic on your own; here are a few good resources.[10] I barely understand it myself and I’m not going to try to explain it beyond what is necessary for the purposes of the broader points I’m trying to make. But suffice it to say that up until the realization that Einstein is describing above, it was assumed that time was a constant and immutable thing. We are so soaked with time that we don’t notice that the water we are swimming in is not the reality outside our fishbowl. Modern theoretical physics has dispelled this illusion and shown that it is light and not time that is the universal constant—the law by which all things are governed.
The counterintuitive idea that time is relative and light is the constant, in this context, tastes true. Time is temporal; the word temporal means relating to time, worldly or secular matters rather than spiritual ones. Light, both the light that enlightens your eyes and that light that quickens your understanding, is the power of God, the law by which all things are governed.
“Many of the most respected and established physicists espouse the following:
• The equations of physics contain no evidence for a flow of time. The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future.
• Therefore—do we have a syllogism?—
• Time is not real.”[11]
The concept that we want to glean from this is that, at the level of fundamental physics, past, present, and future are not distinguished in the way we ordinarily experience them. We’re obviously experiencing something. We clearly remember the past, act in the present, and cannot remember nor control the future. We recognize the sequence, but what scientists have discovered is that there is no fundamental reason that it necessarily has to be that way. Many of the fundamental equations of physics work as well in either temporal direction (or in a loop), and the idea of the present is relative based on an observer—not a universal reality. The past, the present, and the future are all the same thing. We shouldn’t favor one over the other or think that one is fundamentally different than the other. This is not the way that we experience life at all. And it is totally counterintuitive. But if you’ve studied enough theoretical physics, you will get used to accepting new counterintuitive paradigms. Unless, of course, you react as my wife does when I start talking about quantum mechanics and scream in frustration, “Stop talking! I have no idea what you’re talking about!”
Let’s look at the scriptures above about God and time in this new scientific light. If we take seriously what relativity tells us—that there is no universal, privileged present—and follow that toward a block-time view in which past, present, and future are equally real, then a God who has the past, present, and future continually before Him can still exist in our actual universe without violating the laws of reality. In fact, the way in which He is described in scripture now matches more closely the truth discovered in science.
What once seemed like an awkward tension between a seemingly timeless God and a real being with a tangible body who exists in an actual location now reveals itself as strikingly compatible with at least one serious picture of the fundamental reality of our universe. This understanding explains how God can exist outside our temporal sequence while still being an active agent in our universe without violating the laws of the universe, because His state of being is the fundamental reality of the universe and what we’re experiencing is something less than or emergent from other factors that we will be exploring.
God then knows things as they were and as they are and as they are to come because He can see and act throughout all of time in a similar way that we can see and act in the present. The way I view it is closest to what is called block time: everything already exists—past, present, and future. I’m not committed to whether the block itself might in some sense still be evolving, but as far as we would ever understand the past, present, and future, it already exists. And God sees all of it at once. Others[12] take a view that the past and present are there, but the future is continually unfolding. I think this view is trying to hold on to pre-special-relativity thinking to avoid the next counterintuitive jump, wading in the uncomfortable waters of modern physics unwilling to go all the way under. But once you take the plunge into the new paradigm, the pieces fall further into place.
The main objection that I’ve heard to the block-time interpretation is that if God already perfectly knows the future, then that would violate our agency in some way. Because if our future actions already exist, where is our choice in that? And we can’t have a formation of time that violates agency because agency is central to our existence.
But dive in! Embrace the new paradigm completely, there is no such thing as the present nor the past nor the future. The future is no different than the past, nor the past the future, nor any of these different than the present. If God watches somebody in what we experience as the present commit a sin, it is no different than if He sees it in the future.
The future can be thought of as open to change, so why should the past be fundamentally different? There is nothing special about the future. These designations do not exist to God; they are temporal constructions that are part of our mortal condition because we humans do have an arrow of time and a limited present in which we can act. But to God and theoretical physics, past, present, and future aren’t meaningful distinctions. So why continue to favor the future as some special case? As if God seeing us doing something in the future is magically different than if He sees us doing something in the present. If you’re asking these questions about agency, you’re still not understanding the paradigm shift. Stop timidly wading around in the water with your arms tucked up under your chin, and dive in!
Joseph Smith did not have the advantage of modern physics, but he still understood this concept: “I believe that God foreknew everything, but did not foreordain everything.”[13] So if knowing something is going to happen isn’t the same as making it happen, then it is also true that God being able to view everything at once does not mean that He’s making everything happen. Joseph Smith talks about foreknowledge and foreordination because he thinks in a sequence of time, and that’s the way God talks to us. He speaks “unto [us] that [we] may naturally understand,”[14] but to God there is no beginning nor past nor end nor future; it is all one day. This all means God seeing the future does not and cannot violate agency anymore than Him seeing the present or past—“all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men.”[15]
What about the witness of our own experience? Why then do I remember the past and not the future? Why do I have this illusion of the present as being the only place where I can act, and why can’t I act to change the past or travel to the future? Well, that’s because you can’t. You are not God (unless God is reading this, and if so… please know that I am a huge fan. I love Yosemite… And I hope my childlike struggle to grasp even the smallest portion of the mysteries of godliness gives you a good laugh).
All of this “superfluous learnedness” about time[16] applies to the real universe. The real universe in which God resides, not the “sphere in which God has placed” us to act for ourselves.[17] In this temporal experience “there are certain bounds also and conditions,”[18] and time as we experience it is one of them. If that is true, that would mean that whatever is creating the arrow of time has not existed forever, it could come to an end, and it has something to do with what makes us different from God in connection with our mortal experience here on earth.
And so I’m sure you’re all thinking: ENTROPY!
“In a diagram of the four-dimensional space-time continuum, let’s say that P is a “world-point” lying between two other world-points, A and B. “We draw a ‘time-like’ world-line through P,” suggested Einstein; “does it make any sense to provide the world-line with an arrow, and to assert that B is before P, A after P?” Only when thermodynamics enters the picture, he concluded—but he also said that any transfer of information involves thermodynamics. Communication and memory are entropic processes. “If it is possible to send (to telegraph) a signal from B to A, but not from A to B, then the one-sided (asymmetrical) character of time is secured, i.e. there exists no free choice for the direction of the arrow. What is essential in this is the fact that the sending of a signal is, in the sense of thermodynamics, an irreversible process, a process which is connected with the growth of entropy.”
In the beginning, therefore, the universe must have had low entropy. Very low entropy. It must have been in a highly ordered state, which is also an extremely improbable state. This is a cosmic mystery. Ever since, entropy has grown. “That is the way toward the future,” said Feynman, years later, when he was a famous man assembling his knowledge of physics into textbook form. That is the origin of all irreversibility, that is what makes the processes of growth and decay, that makes us remember the past and not the future, remember the things which are closer to that moment in history of the universe when the order was higher than now, and why we are not able to remember things where the disorder is higher than now, which we call the future.”[19]
What we have here is scientific grounds for the arrow of time—that is, mortal temporal sequence as we experience it. This does not negate everything we talked about before about arrow of time not existing. What was meant is the flow of time doesn’t exist as an independent fundamental fact; it is emergent out of everything moving towards a state of higher disorder. Entropy is basically disorder and the tendency to move towards higher disorder. The universe at some point was in a state of very high order (or low entropy), and since then it fell and has continued to slide into higher and higher states of disorder (or higher entropy). And this increase in disorder is what causes us to experience past, present, and future as different. We move along the slide into states of less order, and we are unable to wade upstream back to periods of higher order.
Like the GIF of the glass coming back together below. We instinctively recognize that it is in reverse because we know that you can drop a glass and it can explode into shards, but you cannot throw shards together and make it reform a glass. Entropy within a system, for us, ultimately only moves in one direction, and that is the arrow of time.
Again, if this is confusing or you don’t believe it, study the topic of entropy and the arrow of time more. Read the resources I recommended or something else. I’m just going over some of the basic conclusions and just what’s barely necessary. If we just accept the idea here presented that of arrow of time is not a fundamental reality of the universe, but it is the increase in entropy that creates the flow of time that we experience, how does that coincide with the restored truths of the gospel?
If a being is not experiencing increased entropy, they are either progressing in order or staying the same. And in this state they can exist forever, whereas all of us who are under the effects of entropy are eventually going to die. (Cuz FYI, increasing in entropy is going to eventually kill you.)
“And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end.”[20]
A being that can remain forever and have no end is not a being that is experiencing increased entropy. It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily all-powerful; it just means that they are not slowly dying like the rest of us.
Think of that broken-glass GIF. Take a person, stand him in a field, and speed up time. They will fall to the ground, biodegrade, and crumble into dust. It’s slowly happening to all of us. “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”[21] That is entropy. That is the arrow of time.
If these scientific and religious principles really belong together in this way, think about what that would mean to say that God experiences time in the way that we experience time. That would mean that He is increasing in entropy, slowly dying, fallen. That clearly is not the case. We then should not project our temporal timeline onto God any more than we would project our fallen natures.
It’s important to clarify that none of this is meant to mean that God does not experience time or have time, nor am I trying to say that He is timeless in the creedal sense—to the extent that position makes any sense. Obviously, the scriptures speak of God’s time and God’s reckoning of time.[2][22] The point I’m trying to make is that God experiences time differently than us and that He is not restricted to our same temporal flow of time.
The fact that many of the fundamental equations of physics can work just as well in either direction is not an indication that time doesn’t exist on a fundamental level; it’s an indication that this strict one-way movement of time is not necessarily fundamental to the universe. And nothing in theoretical physics by itself would lead to the conclusions that I’m coming to about God and time. I am trying to synthesize the two together, taking for granted that God exists and that the scriptures, although not attempting to be physics textbooks, express—or are trying to express in a way that we can understand—truth about God, which repeatedly includes indications that His time is not our time.
Now, I’m not even sure what it would mean to say that God is timeless. It is an abstraction to the point that it loses any sort of logical realness. A being with a physical body still has to move and act, and in what sense can the laws of physics operate without some sort of sense of time? An object can’t be said or described as moving or acting without some input that is, or would equate to, what we would call time.
It would be very foolish to try to speculate as to what sort of flow of time God has. But I am a fool, so let’s speculate. Perhaps in His glorified state, the system in which He dwells is moving toward states of lower entropy, which might correspond to its own arrow of time. This flow of time would still create sequence; there would still be a before and after, but things would be moving toward higher levels of order rather than lower levels of order. And there’s no reason to think that it always has to be one way; perhaps when needed, the arrow of time could point the other direction as well. And there’s no reason to think that just because entropy might be causing our flow of time that entropy is always necessary to give a direction.
It is interesting that general relativity also admits mathematical solutions containing closed timelike curves—what you might loosely call time loops. Doctor Strange depicted this as being caught in the same moment again and again, reliving it again and again. Of course, that conception was interrupted by the fact that he remembered the previous times being in that time loop, whereas in a perfectly closed physical loop, if the entire system—including your brain and memory—returned to precisely the same physical state, you wouldn’t accumulate memories of having been there before. Memory is itself a physical process tied to the thermodynamic arrow of time.
I definitely don’t think God is in that sort of time loop, but it would be interesting if time loops have something to do with it in some sort of way that we don’t understand. And perhaps God is hinting at something analogous to that throughout the scriptures when He talks about repeating circular patterns or his course being “one eternal round.”[23] I don’t think these passages are teaching a literal time loop, but the scriptures are full of examples of God describing His works in circular or repeating terms. We are told that “the first shall be last, and that the last shall be first in all things whatsoever I have created,” followed by the explanation that “unto myself my works have no end, neither beginning.”[24] And in the parable of the twelve servants and kingdoms, the Lord visits them in order, “beginning at the first, and so on unto the last, and from the last unto the first, and from the first unto the last.”[25]
The best visual analogy is not just a loop but maybe an upward-moving spiral, and maybe that’s a better analogy to try to understand the flow of God’s time. And I’m not gonna try to fit that into some mathematical equation that I don’t understand anyway, but suffice it to say, it makes sense—as far as I can make sense of any of this—that God experiences time, but it is very different from how we experience time. And that it is important to distinguish and understand where our boundaries are not His boundaries, even if we don’t understand exactly how it works.
It would be naïve to think that just because I’ve pointed out some interesting similarities between modern theoretical physics and the restored gospel that now we have arrived at the ultimate truth. Science is still progressing, and God has only revealed a small portion of His light and truth. With these types of deeper issues, in science as much as religion, the answers we have are analogies to help explain as much as we understand so far. This is how I’ve come to understand it (as far as I can explain it). Now I would like to share a few gospel insights that help illustrate how this view helps shape the way I look at parts of the gospel.
First let’s talk about the infinite Atonement. Calling the Atonement of Jesus Christ infinite could just indicate the magnitude of what He went through for us or how many are covered by it. Which is a perfectly accurate understanding. But think about when Christ performed the great redeeming Atonement, taking upon Himself the sins and suffering and wrongs of the world, paying the price for us so that we can be cleansed and return to live with God the Father and His Christ for all eternity. Where was He? When was He? He came down to earth, stepping into our timeline; in some ways affected by it, in other ways remaining above it. From His mother He had the ability to die; from His Father, the power over death. The important point is that the act of the Atonement itself was infinite and eternal, not temporal. It did not happen as other events do.
We have little trouble thinking of the Atonement as something active in our lives because it happened in the past and its effects flow forward into the future—our present. This is the arrow of time we’re used to. But how then did the infinite Atonement of Jesus Christ save and strengthen those who lived before this event in AD 33?
We know that at least some of the wicked who died before Christ came were locked up in prison waiting for the advent of the Savior and the liberation He would bring.[26] But what about the righteous? How did Adam repent in the name of Jesus Christ and receive forgiveness?[27] How could Jarom “look forward unto the Messiah, and believe in him to come as though he already was”?[28] How did we all, while still in the preexistence, overcome the Devil by the blood of the Lamb?[29] Was there some grace credit card that we were piling mountains of debt on that had to be paid off when Christ came to suffer for us on earth about 2,000 years ago?
No, the Atonement of Jesus Christ is infinite and eternal.[30] The infinite Atonement of Jesus Christ did not only take place 2,000 years ago; Christ came to earth 2,000 years ago to perform this infinite and eternal act. But the act itself took place in eternity and is the means by which our temporal state, both as an entire earth and as individuals, can be brought back into eternity. We should think of the Atonement as something that happened in the past, present, and future—not in one point of mortal time.
Christ’s Atonement was fully active and implemented and completed from the foundation of the world because it didn’t happen in our mortal timeline. It reconciled our fallen world to God. It took something that was fallen and temporal and gave it the potential to become eternal again. Don’t think about the infinite Atonement of Jesus Christ as something that happened in the past. Think of it as an eternally present event that we can receive power from in our lives today as much as if we were kneeling with Him in the garden or standing next to Him hanging on the cross or embracing the risen Lord with Mary at the tomb.
Let us shift a little bit and talk about the Atonement from a different perspective. I’ll start with this quote from C. S. Lewis that was quoted in general conference by Elder Renlund:
“[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. … The Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.’”[31]
This can almost sound like just a beautiful platitude. Or it can be thought about like our suffering on earth, once in heaven, from our new eternal vantage point, will be reinterpreted as a good thing because we saw the progress it provided. Which is a perfectly good interpretation for most situations.
But what about those who experienced gratuitous suffering? Suffering far above and beyond that which helps mold and shape a person. There have been horrible things that have happened on earth and that will continue to happen. Amulek asked Alma, while being forced to witness women and children being burnt alive:
“How can we witness this awful scene? Therefore let us stretch forth our hands, and exercise the power of God which is in us, and save them from the flames. But Alma said unto him: The Spirit constraineth me that I must not stretch forth mine hand; for behold the Lord receiveth them up unto himself, in glory; and he doth suffer that they may do this thing, or that the people may do this thing unto them, according to the hardness of their hearts, that the judgments which he shall exercise upon them in his wrath may be just; and the blood of the innocent shall stand as a witness against them, yea, and cry mightily against them at the last day.”[32]
Alma’s two reasons explaining why God allows this suffering are because those who are suffering are received into heaven with glory, and God allows people to exercise their agency even when those choices cause horrible harm to others because agency is that important. Agency meaning the freedom to choose and the accountability for those actions. This issue can be very difficult to understand. I wrote a whole discourse in poetic form on the problem of evil here,[33] but suffice it to say these things are obviously allowed to happen, and it’s hard to say that these gratuitous acts of suffering are building character or doing good for the people on whom they are inflicted.
Back to the C. S. Lewis quote. Can this quote be only referring to the suffering that ultimately helps shape us even when uncomfortable at the time? What about these individuals who were burnt to death? Maybe their sacrifice built something; obviously martyrdom can be quite noble. But let’s just step out of all that nuance for a minute and think what this quote could actually mean if it is more literal than it may first appear.
Think of any gratuitous human suffering for which one might ask, “Why didn’t God stop that from happening?” Now step out of your temporal thinking and ask yourself: if God didn’t stop it at the present time it was happening, does that leave Him powerless to “stop” it at some time in the future? Now, of course, these designations of past, present, and future only apply to us mortals, but we still have to think this way in order to even have a conversation. But if all things past, present, and future are continually before the Lord, who’s to say that after the wicked have been judged at the last day, and the kingdom is presented spotless to the Father,[34] that part of this process of working backwards in time and turning agony into a glory doesn’t include some (from our perspective retroactive) undoing of the actual harm? Making it in some sense as if it never actually happened, in a way that the truly blessed occupants of heaven can truly say all of our existence has always been a perfect heaven.
Now obviously I have no idea what I’m talking about—this is highly speculative. And this thought process can get into a Marvel superhero time-travel, collect-the-Infinity-Stones kind of mental quagmire really quickly. But the implications of this C. S. Lewis quote that Elder Renlund used, and I very speculatively developed, while hard to explain, don’t have to get weird. There is something too beautiful for words that seems to taste true even if we can’t see how it possibly could be or even begin to comprehend how that would work. But understanding more about the realities of the universe that God has full access to, can give us a useful metaphor to maybe approach something that approximates the beginning of an understanding.
In my before-mentioned poetic discourse on the problem of evil, I added the following few lines after hearing this Elder Renlund talk. One of the things I like about poetic form is that you can obscure what you don’t know in flowery rhetoric and in that way express something true, without having to explain why.
“Blinded by time, you wonder how this suffering can be made up for in a future state,
You want the perfection of eternity now despite the consequences, you cannot wait.
You imagine a god that forces mankind into a state opposite his nature to bring relief.
But I change human nature, then work back through time to make glory of past grief.”[33]
The next implication has to do with entropy. If increasing in entropy causes the arrow of time, how or in what way could you stop or reverse that arrow?
“dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”[21]
Let’s picture the complete boomerang visualization of the scripture. You have dust; that dust defies entropy and forms a human body. Then it grows old, dies, crumbles, and returns to the dust. On the upswing there is a decrease in entropy; on the downswing, an increase in entropy.
What is this decrease in entropy? If the universe is moving towards increased entropy, how is it decreasing to form a man out of the dust?
Let’s step back. It isn’t necessary to think that God creates through the visualization that I’m giving for this point to be true. I’m simplifying it. Oversimplifying it. We are all formed from the dust of the earth. The point isn’t that you could actually watch a cloud of dust swirling into a whirlwind and then becoming a body; the idea is that the molecules that were once in a state of lower order organized and moved into a state of higher order, lower entropy. This is something that we see all the time. Plant a seed; watch it grow. If you’re impatient, watch a sped-up video of a plant growing. Dust becomes a complex and organized living plant.
What is life if not the temporary suspension of entropy? When scientists try to define what life is, it’s often not a definition as much as it is a list of characteristics. It’s something that can reproduce; it’s something that can provide food, metabolize… That’s not a definition; that’s just a list of characteristics. But what is life on a more fundamental level? Life is that which evades, or seems to evade, the increase in entropy described by the second law of thermodynamics, and grows from a state of less order to more order. “the organism feeds upon negative entropy.”[35]
Of course, only for a limited period of time before it returns to the dust, and the organism adds net entropy to a system because it produces more entropy externally than it decreases entropy internally. But looking at life from this perspective creates a more fundamental way of understanding it. Life is a pocket of negative entropy. You drop a glass cup; it explodes into shards. You drop a seed; it grows into a plant. There lies the fundamental difference between inanimate objects and living organisms. (Please don’t misinterpret this analogy to mean that you can drop a living organism off a cliff.)
If the Fall brought death into the world, know also that we are not totally subject to all that that Fall would have entailed. God in some way cushioned the brunt of the Fall’s effects in such a way that He prolonged our life to give us sufficient time to be able to repent before we die.[36] The Fall brought death, but God slowed down that death to create a period of life, a probationary period to give us time to repent.
It’s almost like (and don’t take this too literally) we still have a piece of Eden within us. Even though the entire earth as a system is trending towards higher entropy, we as living beings, together with the rest of the living order, are vessels of negative or at least stable entropy. God did not send us out of the garden empty-handed; He gave us something special from the garden—the gift of life—so that we can exist in this fallen world for a time to give us a space to learn and to grow and to repent.
That’s an interesting way of looking at entropy and the Fall and life. But I also want to look at and speculate for a moment about what this could mean in terms of the process of creation. Just like we had that visualization of a person standing in a field: speed up time, they drop to the ground, crumble into dust. Now imagine that for the entire earth. What does science say is going to happen to the Earth eventually? The oceans will evaporate and leak into space, it’s going to turn into a big dead rock. The sun is gonna implode and/or/then explode at some point—it’s an ugly picture. But just imagine that if you had that sped up in a quick GIF, what would that look like? It would look a lot like the broken glass that shatters. You have this highly ordered green and blue world that we have now that slowly degrades into a void, dead rock.
Now imagine the creation. How did the earth start? It was void and without form. On that material God imposed order until it was a beautifully good creative work. Entropy was in reverse through the entire process. Speed up the creation process and watch it like a GIF. What do you see? You see the same process that we are now on where the Earth is slowly dying, but with creation it is in reverse; creation is entropy moving in the opposite direction. Reverse entropy would create an arrow of time that would just be moving in the opposite direction. Someone in that area of time wouldn’t be able to distinguish what direction they’re moving. Things would otherwise seem normal; it’s just that they would be moving towards order rather than disorder.
Think about this and look at the way the Book of Abraham describes the process the council of the Gods implemented when creating the Earth. Throughout Abraham chapter 4 the Gods command something to happen and “and it was so as they ordered.” It even says, “the Gods watched those things which they had ordered until they obeyed.” Repeatedly they “prepared the earth to bring forth” animals and plants. “And the Gods saw that they would be obeyed, and that their plan was good.” It’s interesting that they prepared the Earth and then the Earth brought forth these things. It was like the light and intelligence that was poured into the Earth reversed entropy and order, structure, and life came up out of the dust of a void and formless globe. And it’s only when it was time to create man and woman in their own image that they went down to do the work themselves.[37]
So perhaps when it was said that Adam, after the creation, was still experiencing “the Lord’s time”[22], that implied a lot more than just the rotational speed of various heavenly bodies.
What does this all mean? I do not know. But it is very interesting to think about life and creation in the context of entropy. And if entropy is chaos or disorder, what effect would the light of Christ have on that disorder? It would bring order to it. So what makes something alive? By what power is something made? The light of truth…
“…that he might be in all and through all things, the light of truth;
Which truth shineth. This is the light of Christ. As also he is in the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made.
As also he is in the moon, and is the light of the moon, and the power thereof by which it was made;
As also the light of the stars, and the power thereof by which they were made;
And the earth also, and the power thereof, even the earth upon which you stand.
And the light which shineth, which giveth you light, is through him who enlighteneth your eyes, which is the same light that quickeneth your understandings;
Which light proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space—
The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God who sitteth upon his throne, who is in the bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things.”[8]
My last implication of this way of viewing God and time is simply that it is important to have our faith in God based on the idea that He knows all things. And the truth is that any conception of God and time that limits His ability to perfectly know the future are the philosophies of men trying to work around the scripture.
You don’t have to believe all my metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. I’m just trying to have fun speculating on how some truths in science seem to line up well with the gospel. But remember what the doctrine is. Here’s a concise paragraph from the Church’s Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual:
“Doctrine and Covenants 38:2. The Lord knows all things
The Lord knows all things (see 2 Nephi 2:24; 9:20). He knows “the end from the beginning” (Abraham 2:8), and He can see and comprehend all things in the past, present, and future (see D&C 88:41; 130:7). Because He knows all things, we can exercise faith in Him. The Lectures on Faith, a collection of lessons that were published with the sanction and approval of the Prophet Joseph Smith, contains an explanation of the relationship between God’s perfect knowledge and our ability to exercise complete faith in Him: “Without the knowledge of all things God would not be able to save any portion of his creatures; for it is by reason of the knowledge which he has of all things, from the beginning to the end, that enables him to give that understanding to his creatures by which they are made partakers of eternal life; and if it were not for the idea existing in the minds of men that God had all knowledge it would be impossible for them to exercise faith in him” (Lectures on Faith [1985], 51–52).”[38]
The text I thought was most relevant to this point is this quoted passage from the Lectures on Faith. But just to preempt people who are trying to wiggle out of this doctrine by saying the Lectures on Faith wasn’t written by Joseph Smith, blah blah blah… It was never canonized, blah blah blah… I’m giving it to you from the Church’s current curriculum, which is also very fitting because the Lectures on Faith is kinda just the Church’s first attempt at putting together a curriculum.
This doctrine does not describe a being who is merely good at making predictions. God is not just Laplace’s Demon, a theoretical thought experiment involving a being that knows the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe and thus obtains omniscience. “For such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”[39] This concept might have seemed plausible in the early 19th century when Laplace theorized it, but this sort of linear determinism has been shattered by chaos theory. And even if you are predisposed to project our timeline onto God and make Him a super smart guesser rather than a truly omniscient being, remember that projecting our timeline onto God carries with it the entropy that gives us our arrow of time and the slide towards disorder, plus the death and decay that comes with it.
This doctrine doesn’t read naturally in a way that would lead someone to the open-future model of time. I feel like reading the scriptures and doctrine that God knows all things past, present, and future, then trying to shoehorn that into our temporal timeline by saying, “Well, the future doesn’t exist yet, so God can know all things and not know the future because the future doesn’t exist, so it’s not part of all things,” is both ignoring the fact that scripture just stated that He knows the future and doing this in order to try to fit the restored truths of the gospel into 100+ year-old scientific ideas. I hope that we’ve actually made progress in understanding the universe through science over the past century, and those discoveries have supported these core doctrines of the Church, so why are some still trying to fit this round eternal block into the four corners of an earthly square?
At least according to Google Gemini, the so-called eternal-now model is the most common among Latter-day Saints. I think that most Latter-day Saints just take the scriptures at their word and don’t try to explain it. It seems from my personal experience—and this could just be an availability heuristic and I could be way off—it seems that the people who most often subscribe to either the perfect-prediction model or the open-future model are those who are too concerned with distinguishing our beliefs from the classic creedal concept of an immaterial God sitting outside of time and space. And I get it, that is not what the restored gospel teaches. But it feels like we needed these advancements in theoretical physics to be able to have the mental tools to process what the restored gospel was always teaching.
The two classes of error mentioned above are attempts to reconcile the gospel with incomplete and inaccurate science. Which makes it even more ironic that the scientific ideas they’re trying to shoehorn God into are outdated and abandoned, and the new and hopefully more correct view of science coincides so beautifully with the restored gospel. But the problem is that modern theoretical physics is confusing and counterintuitive, but it’s also probably a lot more true. And it definitely makes a lot more sense to me even if I don’t understand everything.
So if you’re a person who took the doctrines on God’s perfect knowledge as fact even if it seemed counterintuitive, you took it on faith. I wanted to express and demonstrate that the restored gospel may not have coincided well with the science of the early 19th century, but it sure fits a lot better now.
In closing, if you don’t believe everything that I am speculating, don’t worry I don’t believe everything I’m speculating either. I’m not gonna try to tickle anyone’s ear to get them to believe anything. This was a fun exercise to put down in writing the thoughts and impressions I’ve had while studying the scriptures and science, and hopefully it provides some useful tools to understand the mysteries of the Kingdom a little bit better. But at the very least, hopefully it was entertaining, and it must’ve been if you read all the way to the end.
Notes
- Acts 17:28–29.
- Doctrine and Covenants 93:29; Doctrine and Covenants 129:1–3; Doctrine and Covenants 130:4–8, 22; Doctrine and Covenants 131:7.
- Joseph Smith, “King Follett Discourse,” April 7, 1844; see Stan Larson, “The King Follett Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text,” BYU Studies 18, no. 2 (1978): 193–208.
- Doctrine and Covenants 38:1–2; emphasis added.
- Doctrine and Covenants 93:24; emphasis added.
- Alma 40:8; emphasis added.
- Doctrine and Covenants 130:7; emphasis added.
- Doctrine and Covenants 88:6–13.
- James Gleick, Time Travel, p. 78.
- James Gleick, Time Travel; Sean Carroll, Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time, The Great Courses; Richard Wolfson, Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution, The Great Courses.
- James Gleick, Time Travel, pp. 231–232; emphasis added.
- J. Ward Moody, “Time in Scripture and Science: A Conciliatory Key?,” in Converging Paths to Truth, ed. Michael D. Rhodes and J. Ward Moody (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011), 101–122, https://rsc.byu.edu/converging-paths-truth/time-scripture-science-conciliatory-key.
- Terryl Givens, Wrestling the Angel, p. 100.
- Doctrine and Covenants 29:33.
- Alma 40:8.
- James Gleick, Time Travel, p. 84.
- Doctrine and Covenants 93:30.
- Doctrine and Covenants 88:38.
- James Gleick, Time Travel, pp. 118–119; emphasis added.
- 2 Nephi 2:22; emphasis added.
- Genesis 3:19.
- Abraham 5:13.
- Doctrine and Covenants 3:2.
- Doctrine and Covenants 29:30–33.
- Doctrine and Covenants 88:51–61, especially v. 59.
- 1 Peter 3:19; Moses 7:39.
- Moses 6:52–53.
- Jarom 1:11.
- Revelation 12:11.
- Alma 34:14.
- Dale G. Renlund, “Family History and Temple Work: Sealing and Healing,” quoting C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce: A Dream (2001), 69.
- Alma 14:10–11; emphasis added.
- Les Cookson, “Prayer of Epicurus,” https://grace-for-grace.com/2026/09/23/prayer-of-epicurus/
- Doctrine and Covenants 76:107.
- James Gleick, The Information, pp. 282–283.
- 2 Nephi 2:21.
- Abraham 4:7, 9–12, 18, 20–27.
- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual, chapter 15, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/doctrine-and-covenants-student-manual-2017/chapter-15-doctrine-and-covenants-37-38-41
- Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1902), 4.
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