Is measuring time an affront to God?
Prerequisites: None.
Originally written: September 2021.
Confidence Level: Probably wrong, but interesting to think about.
There is an interesting phrase in the Book of Mormon:
time only is measured unto man.
– Alma 40:8
This is usually interpreted to mean that God is somehow outside time. The relationship God has with what we consider to be time is completely different from our relationship with time. He is not bound within time the same way that we are.
If you read it closely, that’s not actually what it says. It doesn’t say that time only exists for man. It says that time is only measured by man.
Just because something is unmeasurable doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. For example, artistic quality. We can agree that the painting, sculptures, music, or stories produced by a master are better than those produced by a (normal) child. Artistic quality exists, even though we can’t measure it.
There are some things that were considered to be unmeasurable, until someone measured them in a convincing enough way. The classic example of this is temperature. The experience of temperature is highly subjective: it also depends on other factors like humidity and wind speed, it varies from person to person, and it is influenced by the temperatures you have recently experienced. I have written more about this in my book review of The History of the Thermometer and Its Use in Meteorology by W. E. Knowles Middleton (1966).
Mechanical clocks were invented in western Europe in the 1200s. We could imagine a debate between the inventors of the clock, who describe the usefulness of measuring time, and the clergy, who consider the device to be an affront to God. This debate never happened: the clergy in medieval Europe were the people most interested in measuring time. If you want to celebrate mass and holidays at the right times (e.g. midnight mass on Christmas Eve), you need to be able to measure time. And, of course, the medieval Church did not read the Book of Mormon.
What Alma 40 actually says is that God sees time as unmeasrable. Man, in our hubris, decided to take this free gift of God and carve it into ever finer slices so we can declare our mastery over it.
Speaking of God’s relationship with time. Did you ever come across this paper out of BYU?
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2028&context=byusq
They point out that if you assume that God exists at a higher dimension that it matches up really well with some of God’s statements and behavior in the scriptures.
I had not read that before, so thank you for sharing !
We can separate this argument into two parts:
(1) Our 3+1 dimensional spacetime is embedded in some larger space. God can move in this larger space.
(2) The larger space is similar to our space, but with more dimensions. (i.e. It is a manifold.)
The first claim seems much more likely to be true than the second. There are a lot of different spaces that could have our spacetime embedded in it which are very different, like function spaces, for example. And God’s experience may be even more different than the weirdest spaces mathematicians have come up with.