It is the imagination which links man to God
We are imprisoned in space and time and there appears to be no obvious way of escaping from them. Indeed if, like Richard Dawkins and other neanderthals, you do not believe in a non-material world, there is no escape at all. You, as an individual, have no more significance, no more meaningful past, present or future than a piece of rock or a puff of dust. Nobody else is significant either, and nothing matters. When we die, darkness closes in and we go out like the light on a switched-off television set, dwindling and then vanishing utterly, for ever.
But what does it mean ‘When we die’? What is death? How do you define it? It can be defined medically and legally. But not philosophically. I’m not even sure it can be defined theologically and it certainly cannot be defined scientifically. Personally, I do not believe in death. A better term would be ‘clocking off’, because at that point we leave time. For everyone, as Shakespeare put it, ‘time must have a stop’. Unfortunately we are so conditioned by time-consciousness, so imprisoned in it mentally as well as physically, that we cannot think except in time terms, and this leads us to absurdities such as ‘eternity’, ‘for ever and ever’ and ‘perpetual’.
The possible explanations of life-timespace-and-everything-else can be grouped under four heads, and only one in the end makes sense. First, there is simple materialism. This, as I say, provides a bleak and totally unattractive picture of what it is all about; notably by eliminating the moral content of life altogether. If it came to be generally accepted, which is highly unlikely, then the future of the human race would indeed be nasty, brutish and short. However, it cannot be accepted by intelligent people who trouble to work out its implications, not least because it doesn’t solve the time problem. It is possible to work out how life on earth will end, and how our own portion of the universe will end or even how the universe as a whole will end. But then the inevitable question arises: what happens afterwards? To this there is no possible answer, so as an explanation of existence the materialist theory is hopelessly incomplete.
To put the problem the other way round is equally baffling. How did the universe begin? If Fred Hoyle and others had been able to substantiate the ‘steady state’ theory, at least materialism would have provided a scenario, albeit an unsatisfactory one. But it has been elbowed aside by the Big Bang, and it is hoped in the near future to verify the Big Bang by observations going back to universal origins. The Bang may be a neat explanation of how the universe came into being, but it immediately raises the question: who or what detonated the Bang? And what was there before the Bang? There are no present answers to these questions, and it is hard to see how there ever can be, so long as you rule out God. And if you identify God as the detonator of the Big Bang, materialism inevitably collapses.
The materialists are not much better off if you produce the repetition argument of scientists such as Roger Penrose. He argues that under the principles of entropy as laid down in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the universe will gradually wind down until it contracts radically, thus making a further Big Bang possible. This process is, as it were, a variation of steady state theory, since it implies that Big Bangs, though at immensely distant intervals of time, are a permanent, repetitive feature of existence. But this approach introduces no fundamental new element of explanation. It still leaves unanswered the question: how did the first Big Bang happen? Moreover, this theory can only be demonstrated mathematically. It can no more be confirmed by observation than the story of the Old and New Testaments, since each Big Bang wipes out all the evidence of the previous one. It is notable, indeed, that all the materialist theories of the universe, except the single Big Bang itself, tend to run on well beyond the point at which any conceivable process of verification can take place. Their sole ‘proof’ is mathematical manipulation. Well: the ancient Greeks could do that, couldn’t they? This weakness applies not just to string theory and its variations — now abandoned by most people — but to all the materialist explanations of the last 50 years.
Similar weaknesses appear in JudeaoChristian theory so long as it remains trapped in the time prison. In his writings on ethics, Wittgenstein asks: ‘How does it happen that every fact of experience can be brought into a relationship with what is shown by a clock?’ But, like Jesting Pilate, he does not stay for an answer. Neither scientific materialism nor Judeao-Christian metaphysics seems to be able to dispense with time. It is a crutch which enables them to hobble along for a bit until it collapses under the weight of unanswered questions. Once you have space you need time, to allow things to happen. So the uni verse had to be created in time. But if God acted in time, He is its prisoner like the rest of us. It is not enough to say: God created the universe. Why did He do so when He did why not sooner, or later? And why end it at a particular point and embark on ‘eternity’? So Augustine could not answer this problem of time but at least he saw that it existed. Most theologians refuse to tackle it.
The only explanation which makes sense, it seems to me, is that time, and all that it embraces, including the universe, is a projection of God’s imagination. Having created time, He does not exist in it, is not its prisoner. So the question of when he does things cannot arise. His actions cannot be ‘shown by a clock’. Indeed, strictly speaking, they are not actions at all. The only ‘fact’ is the imaginative deity and this fact is spiritual not material, existing outside space and time and therefore not definable by any words we can use. We have to accept that everything happens simultaneously in God’s imaginative projection. We are created, we are tested and, as a result, accepted or rejected. If accepted, we become part of the one, sole and divine fact. Of course this ‘event’ takes place only in God’s concept — perhaps ‘fancy’ would be a better word and when it does we become part of God and therefore cease to have any independent existence, even conceptually. We then become free of time and free to roam the infinite corridors of God’s cerebrations.
I like to think of earthly life as ‘revels’, as in The Tempest, which have a function but are ultimately non-material, or rather their material appearance is ‘ended’. And the ProsperoGod goes on:
These our actors As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare had a God-like ability to pene trate to the heart of things which seem to us intractable. After pondering painfully over space, time and the universe, I have a reassuring feeling that the solutions are more likely to be found by poets than by scientists. For it is imagination which forms the bridge between humanity and God.
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