Time: A Two-Fold Mystery?

"Time is the One Essential Mystery." —Jorg Luis Borges

Time as a Duality

Despite oppressively hot summers, messy winters, and a frenetic lifestyle, Washington, D.C. has its moments. At least it has for me. It was a soothing spring morning some years ago. I had just missed the Metro; it would be a five or ten minute wait for the next train. I put aside the reading material with which I usually reinforce myself, and simply sat.

Letting myself drift to this and that, I happened to look down at my watch with its second hand spastically jerking ahead in one second increments. Somehow it reminded me of a Caribbean break dancer. But at the same time as this precise ticking was going on, I became aware of my presence within the enfolding presence of the budding trees surrounding the station. My living moment, as I felt it, was different. It was smoothly, gently, indistinguishably succeeded by the next moment, and the next. I could only diffusely record a given moment, then in the gliding procession of succeeding moments it drifted into the past.

This dual experience of objectively observing the measured precision of a timepiece and subjectively sensing the living moments with no clear markers to separate them, capsulizes one of the apparent paradoxes characterizing contemplation about time. It serves as a doorway, opening to awareness of the essential mystery of time.

Aspects of this dual view of time in one form or another have occupied the thought of philosophers, scientists, and religious scholars for centuries. It has profoundly challenged these thinkers, generating a resultant accumulation of a massive body of literature on the subject. Relatively recent work addressing this challenge involving an essentially two-pronged approach to the study of time are not hard to find. For example, some authors (e.g., Park 80, Denbigh 81) clearly support the separation of the time of human consciousness and subjective experience from that of physical theory and objective measurement. Undoubtedly investigation of the validity of this position, so rich in dimension and subtlety, will continue for years to come.

Science and Religion

However, the fundamental subjective-objective, or the intimately related intuitive-rational, dichotomy comes into play on an even larger and more inclusive stage than that concerned strictly with time. For example, in one way or another, it has been a central ingredient in the discourse of philosophers since the time of the Greeks. In particular it is obviously at the very heart of the dialogue between science and religion that has been going on with varying intensity for centuries. It is certainly in the comparative consideration of these two areas of human culture that the objective-subjective polarity comes into sharpest focus and reaches its richest development. This being the case, a joint science-religion approach to the problem of time and its apparent duality suggests itself as a fruitful general area in which to search for an inviting path of inquiry.

To lay the groundwork for this general approach, it will be helpful to outline very briefly selected aspects of the historical background of the science-religion interchange in order to better appreciate the subsequent discussion of their relation in modern times. This discussion in turn will provide a useful basis for ultimately justifying the more specific physics-modern religions inquiry adopted in this book.

Let us start with the discovery of Copernicus that the Earth is not at the center of the universe. In these early years the science and religion dialogue sometimes had life-threatening consequences. The story of Galileo's conflicts with the church is well-known. After great tribulation and moral wrenching, he managed at least to emerge from the fray with all of his organs in tact. However, Giordano Bruno was not so lucky. He eagerly embraced Copernicus' discovery and further postulated that the universe is a life-impregnated cosmos, a totally unified and animated system with other inhabited worlds. This was among the views for which he was burned at the stake in 1600.

Bruno lived just a little too early, because his death launched the century of what could be termed the "First Scientific Revolution," highlighted by the monumental work of Kepler and Newton in understanding the force of gravity. This period in turn served as a grounding for the 18th Century Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) which was characterized by a wealth of rational and humanitarian thought as well as further scientific discovery.

Meanwhile Western religion was being racked with internal problems starting with the schisms of the Reformation inspired by Martin Luther and John Calvin. However, internal reform was also developing within the Catholic Church itself, the seeds of which were planted as early as the time of St. Catherine of Sienna in the 14th Century. This reform more fully developed with the founding of the Jesuits by St. Ignatius of Loyola and with the work of other saints, including St. Theresa of Avila. The Jesuits were especially effective in eliminating corruption, improving church administration, and insisting on educational standards for the clergy. It was undoubtedly this latter program which helped originally to bring the Church into closer contact with the world of science and ultimately had some effect on the theology of the Church, although resistance to science continued in the Church into the 19th Century.

The Church was especially challenged in the latter half of the 19th Century with what could be termed the "Second Scientific Revolution." Darwin's study of evolution profoundly altered our idea of who we are. Freud and Marx produced blueprints for the fields of psychology and politics, which were undoubtedly among the early justifications for ultimately calling them sciences. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism in a theory of elegant beauty and symmetry.

However, the final and climactic phase of this revolution came at the beginning of this century when the relativity and quantum theories burst onto the scene. These two pillars of modern physical thought matured in a short span of 30 years with an incredibly productive intellectual interchange involving, for example, the now-classic argument between Einstein and Bohr over the completeness of quantum theory. Bohr won, and his interpretation of quantum theory is still considered today to be...